CULTS

I don't like this song very much. It's catchy; it's sticking in my head. But this kind of shimmery pop doesn't work as a soundtrack to any life experiences I'd enjoy having, and as a lifelong wearer of headphones, that's the primary way I judge music's worth. But I've always been fascinated by Jonestown; I've read a couple of books about Jim Jones, and have considered writing a novel with a Jones-like character at its center. So the video fascinates me, too. It's got a seriously creepy, haunting power, and/but the fact that a major label (Sony) released it says something—about the amorality of corporations or the history-destroying power of irony, I'm not sure which. (Hundreds of people killed in a coerced mass suicide—what an awesome backdrop for our video!) Could Slayer or Cannibal Corpse have gotten away with exploiting tragedy in this way? I don't think so. But when you're a conventionally pretty white girl (and/or white boy) making indie pop, there are no aesthetic or moral boundaries, I guess. Must be nice.
Anyway, here's the video.

Go Outside, by Cults from Boing Boing on Vimeo.

PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

This Poptimist column by Tom Ewing is interesting and worth a read. I've never had the specific retail experience he describes—when I worked in a bookstore, it was a massive Barnes & Noble, the biggest one in the state at that time (might still be), and the music was piped-in classical or gentle jazz. I remember a particular classical piece always made me think of Daffy Duck ice-skating, and I would step a little more smoothly through the rows of shelves when it was playing.

I know I've definitely been guilty of the kind of "straw listener" projection Ewing discusses, though. There are certain types of indie rock that always form unpleasant mental images of the type of person who'd listen to it, and I've definitely avoided any kind of serious investigation of jam-band music precisely because I know who makes up its primary audience, having formerly shared an office with Relix magazine.

I listen to a lot of metal, obviously. And this is something that's bothered me about it for quite a while. The majority of metal that strives to be "shocking" does it in such a blinkered, ridiculous way that it frankly annoys me, and makes me feel pandered to as a listener. It's all about pitting oneself against an imaginary square. Sure, someone's grandmother might conceivably be offended if she heard what Cannibal Corpse frontman George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher was growling about, or saw a Marilyn Manson video. But under what circumstances would that ever happen? Cultural atomization is such that most of us never encounter any art we haven't chosen to engage with, unless billboards and advertising count. Sure, the occasional store will have music playing, but unless you're walking around consumed by white-hot hatred for will.i.am, you're probably gonna be just fine.

So why is it so important that bands express opinions that would only create a negative response in people who will never hear them? It's risk-free. The occasions when it turns out not to be—if a singer shouts something anti-Republican at a concert and portions of the audience boo, for example—are so rare as to be legitimately newsworthy.

Bands should strive to engage their listeners' biases. Instead of mouthing rote anti-Christian clichés, simultaneously pretending that a) some Christian somewhere is gonna hear it and either be shocked or weaned of their faith and b) conceding the terms of the debate by granting religion legitimacy in the first place, death metal bands should take a "won't dignify that with a response" approach and talk about...shit, I don't know, anything. With the vocals the way they are, death metal songs could be about bricklaying. Soccer. Dog training. To paraphrase Steve Albini, lyrics are a necessity, so have some. But stop thinking there's controversy to be mongered. There isn't.

THIS WEEK IN CLEVELAND

Fatalist Attraction
Entombed lead a new wave of old-school Swedish metal

Ask your average music fan to name the most important and influential group to ever come out of Sweden and the answer will be Abba. Ask a metalhead the same question, and he'll tell you about Entombed. Daniel Ekeroth — author of the obsessive, passionate, and personal genre history Swedish Death Metal — says, "The Scandinavian metal scene would never have exploded without them. They changed everything. They were way ahead of any other Swedish band around 1990, with better songs, better sound, and above all, they were much better musicians than the rest."

That about covers it. The band formed in 1987 as Nihilist, blending Discharge's raging punk with Motörhead's speed-crazed metal with a side of distinctive distorted guitar tone. Rejecting the crisp, martial discipline of U.S. death-metal bands like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse, they pioneered a looser, more groove-oriented sound known as "death 'n' roll." After splitting with bassist Johnny Hedlund, who soon formed Unleashed, they changed their name to Entombed and released 1990's Left Hand Path.

The album created a sensation throughout the worldwide metal community almost as soon as it was released. Its raw power and ferocious intensity were most apparent in Lars-Göran Petrov's gravelly, roaring vocals. Instead of the guttural grunts and blood-gargling sounds of other death-metal singers, Petrov came at the listener like an enraged bear. And behind him, the band straight-up rocked, attracting listeners from across the global underground, a fan base that remains united to this day. As the frontman points out, "If we play festivals around Europe, there are punks and death-metal people, everyone just headbanging to it. It's good to connect those different people to each other."

Last month marked the 20th anniversary of Left Hand Path, but unlike Slayer and Megadeth — who are co-headlining a tour and playing their 1990 releases, Seasons in the Abyss and Rust in Peace, front-to-back — Entombed aren't planning any elaborate celebrations. "It actually just passed by us somehow," laughs Petrov.

They'd rather look forward. Though peers like Grave and Dismember quickly emulated their style — creating the impression that, like AC/DC or the Ramones, every album is more or less the same — Entombed tweaked their sound quite a bit over the years. Uprising (from 2000) threw some bluesy riffs and rock grooves into the sonic stew, 2001's Morning Star was sweeping and epic, and 2003's Inferno had a punky edge and a deliberately rough mix. The group has also covered songs by a wide range of bands (Venom, Kiss, Hüsker Dü, Alice Cooper, Stiff Little Fingers, and Bob Dylan, to name a few) that can be heard on 2002's two-CD Sons of Satan Praise the Lord.

The common denominator is a loose, live feel that Petrov says is a main goal. "We try to do it as good as we can, but you have to have that live feeling," he says. "If you record something in one take and it sounds good and it doesn't have to be perfect, then we just leave it that way. There's nothing wrong with being perfectionist, but it loses the spontaneity."

The only misstep Entombed ever made is 1998's Same Difference. At the suggestion of their new record company, they steered into an alternative-rock direction, with Petrov adopting a clean singing voice, and guitarists Alex Hellid and Uffe Cederlund cutting way back on their distortion. "We had a record label that wanted to try new things, and we're always open to new stuff," he says. "But I think it was too much astray from what we wanted. I wasn't too comfortable recording that."

Entombed haven't released an album since 2007's Serpent Saints — The Ten Amendments. The band isn't even seriously planning one at the moment, but Petrov says it's got some new songs. "We just gotta put them together," he says. "We don't want to rush and just put out an album because we have to. It's just a matter of sitting down, putting [the songs] together, and recording it. We go once or twice a week to rehearse, but we mostly rehearse old songs. But once we have time, we will sit down and concentrate on the new songs."

These days, there are young bands explicitly modeling themselves on Entombed's pioneering Scandinavian death-metal sound — like California's Fatalist, who even use the same font Entombed uses for their logo. Petrov knows about the youngsters, and it makes him laugh. "It is exactly the logo," he says. "I think it's great. Somebody's taking over — they're following in our footsteps. We have some bands here in Sweden that are holding the flag for old school. It's the new wave of Swedish old school."

LIVING IN THE BUBBLE

Like many people, I am on Bob Lefsetz’s email list. I get one or two emails a day from him. Most of them are rants about the shitty state of the music business. Which is fine, if unsurprising and redundant. Like Howard Beale says in Network, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” Still, it’s fun to read Lefsetz’s splenetic spluttering. Sometimes he gets righteous about things like ticket prices and bullshit “VIP packages” that really are worth complaining about.

But his worldview is skewed and myopic, so much so that it makes even his valid points hard to support sometimes. I'll explain.

I’m guessing Bob Lefsetz is about sixty years old. And for that reason above all others, his worldview is obsolete and irrelevant. He suffers from the delusion that all Americans his age suffer from: that the way he’s always known it to be is the way it should be and the way it could continue to be, in perpetuity, if people could just be brought around to his way of thinking. But in fact, the music industry as people Bob Lefsetz’s age knew it is such a massive historical anomaly that to see it as anything else is farcical.

Let me break it down: Recording technology has existed for less than 150 years. Cylinders were introduced in about 1880, and by 1910 records had taken over. Tape recording was popularized in the 1940s. Various other inventions like the transistor radio, 33 1/3 and 45 rpm records and home stereos to play them on, etc., etc., caused popular music to go through a boom cycle. But this was also related to the economic and demographic changes that arose in the wake of World War II. The children of returning soldiers—you know, the Baby Boomers—had indulgent parents who gave them allowances to buy shit, and eventually they got jobs and bought more shit, and consequently they exerted a disproportionate influence over popular culture. And because this was the only world they’d ever known, they figured it was the way things were supposed to be, and the way things always would be. When they became record industry executives, they continued to believe that things would always be the way they’d been.

But the only reason things ever were like that—the only reason records ever sold in the “golden age”—was because the technology to freely duplicate them didn’t exist yet. If file sharing technology had been around in 1964, those same Baby Boomers would have downloaded the living fuck out of the Beatles’ albums. And the Rolling Stones’ albums. And every other canonical, classic rock artist who folks like Bob Lefsetz hold up as paradigmatic and worthy of emulation.

This is an idea that is literally unimaginable to Bob Lefsetz. Because he doesn't just believe technology has changed the market, he believes people have changed. This week, he wrote:

This business will not be vital again until there's a stable of stars, hopefully a plethora that people follow and want to see…Everybody else lives and dies on the hit single. If Christina Aguilera had fans, she'd be able to sell tickets without airplay. But she needs hits to get bodies into seats. In the old days, bands could tour without hits whatsoever. But that was back when music drove the culture, when you knew the players like sports team members, when you had to go to the show, when you were addicted to the radio.

Pretty much everything in that paragraph is wrong. First, the business will never be “vital” again. The monopoly on the means of distribution has been broken, and it cannot be rebuilt. There are no hit singles because the record industry doesn’t manufacture singles anymore. And Christina Aguilera? She’s a part of the old-school, obsolete, Lefsetzian worldview and business model. She was built by a machine designed to create pop stars, no different than a movie star of the 1930s created and maintained by a finely tuned publicity machine. It is literally impossible for an artist like Christina Aguilera to have fans that will manifest the kind of devotion that Phish, or Cannibal Corpse, can conjure up, because Aguilera has spent her entire career deliberately keeping fans at arm’s length. She speaks through carefully sculpted quotes in US Weekly or heavily edited interviews for MTV and VH1, not through Twitter or a blog. Bands that do that, bands that seem to have arisen from the same muck as their fans, are the bands Lefsetz says could tour without hits…but only “in the old days.” When he thinks about bands touring without radio support, he’s probably thinking of Grand Funk Railroad. He has no idea that it’s going on all around him.

Oh, and that whole thing about knowing the bandmembers like members of sports teams? Bullshit. Sure, people knew John, Paul, George, and Ringo. They knew Mick and Keith and Charlie. But who knew all the names of Ted Nugent's backing band when he was packing arenas? Who knew the names of the members of the Silver Bullet Band when Bob Seger was huge? Nobody.

Later he writes:

The radio. And then MTV. They centralized focus. They delivered a platform for star-building. Someone left of center could get exposure and make it. Like Culture Club. MTV broke Boy George big, radio followed. But FM radio built Hendrix and Cream, the music was so exciting you listened every night. Because everyone was different, everyone was testing limits, everybody wasn't the same. And if you don't think everybody's the same today, try listening to Top Forty radio.

This is the problem in a nutshell. Lefsetz still believes in a Top Forty. He still believes in top-down culture, in societal unification through pop music. He rants and raves that everyone around now is a “niche” act. That’s the worst thing you can be in Lefsetz-land—a “niche” act. He can’t imagine a universe in which people don’t care, don't think it's important, whether or not their neighbor is listening to the same albums, watching the same TV shows, reading the same books that they’re reading. He probably read Bowling Alone and nodded through his tears. And because of this belief system, which he's too old to shake loose, he has no idea how obsessed people younger than him are with music. The 17-year-old girl who wrote the letter to Alternative Press that I reprinted two posts ago? She doesn't exist in Bob Lefsetz's universe, because she's not buying records and he's never gonna go to Warped Tour and see her and all her screaming friends. Hell, we're talking about a guy here who didn't even write about Malcolm McLaren's death. I bet he'd never heard of the guy.

The idea of a monoculture was always bullshit anyway. Back in the hallowed Sixties and early Seventies, when Lefsetz’s cultural preconceptions were being cast in stone, there was one music magazine of any consequence—Rolling Stone. Maybe Creem. Anything Rolling Stone didn’t cover didn’t get covered. Now, people get their information directly from bands—at least if the bands are smart, they do.

The record industry was a bubble. It took a long time to burst, because it was entirely technology-dependent. But now it's burst, and all the ancillary industries around it—like music journalism—are deflating too. The only thing that's not going away is music itself.

POLE POSITION

Behemoth aren't just your everyday, run-of-the-mill death-metal band
[From the Cleveland Scene]

A lot of death metal is interchangeable — and that's coming from a fan of the genre. But there's no mistaking Behemoth. The Polish trio spent the last dozen years, roughly since 1999's Satanica and 2000's Thelema.6, trying to engulf the world in the sonic equivalent of a firestorm. Drummer Zbigniew Robert Prominski, a.k.a. "Inferno," plays some of the most powerful blast beats in death metal, hammering at the snare like he's firing a chain gun, as the double kick drums knock holes into your skull. Meanwhile, singer-guitarist Adam "Nergal" Darski fires off ferocious guitar riffs that trade the typical death-metal rhythmic grinding for a more anthemic, relentlessly destructive sound — he's going for overwhelming power from first note to last, and often comes closer to Psalm 69-era Ministry than, say, Cannibal Corpse.

But Darksi's vocals really get your attention. He avoids the typical extreme-metal guttural croak/bark, instead ranting and roaring like a blast furnace. It's such a distinctive, almost inhuman sound that the obvious question is what kind of effects pedal does he use to achieve it?

"What you can hear is pretty much my voice," he says. "Sometimes I just double it or triple it. That's how you get the impression that there's a few people screaming."

Darski believes there are a lot of misconceptions about Behemoth. One of the major ones is that the group made a major stylistic shift in 2000, abandoning the black metal of its first three albums in favor of a more death-metal sound. "Our style has been evolving throughout the years; every record is different," he asserts with some accuracy. "I wouldn't really say that after Thelema.6 we changed. If you listen to each one of our nine albums, each one is different. It's constant evolution."

This constant evolution is particularly surprising given that the current lineup — with Inferno on drums and Tomasz "Orion" Wróblewski on bass — has been together since 2003 (Inferno's actually been drumming for Behemoth since 1997).

"Because we've written so much music, it's more and more difficult to come up with something that's gonna be Behemoth style at the same time that it's fresh and challenging," says Darski. "We can't just get in a rehearsal room and throw ideas at each other and the song comes out. It's a much longer and more painful process."

For this reason, he has decided it's important to make each Behemoth album a statement. This means abandoning a longstanding practice of releasing EPs of B-sides, live tracks and cover songs between albums. One of these five- or six-track releases has followed every Behemoth disc since Thelema.6, and the range of covers Behemoth has essayed over the years is surprising, to say the least. They've offered their own roaring take on other extreme metal bands' work (Morbid Angel's "Day of Suffering," Mayhem's "Carnage," Venom's "Welcome to Hell"), but they've also released versions of David Bowie's "Hello Spaceboy," Nine Inch Nails' "Wish" and the Ramones' "I'm Not Jesus." But no more.

"There's gonna be no more small releases; it just makes no sense," says Darksi. "I want people to wait for another album. I want them to anticipate — to be really, really hungry for the next Behemoth opus. I don't want to distract their hunger with a small release. We will release a DVD, but that's a different story. There will be no musical release from Behemoth this year or in 2011."

Two years should be just about long enough to absorb the band's most recent album. Evangelion came out in August and topped many metal critics' year-end lists. It's not as florid or ambitious as 2004's Demigod, which featured synths simulating an orchestra and a male choir, but it contains some of the most powerful songs the band has ever written. "Alas, the Lord Is Upon Me" finds Darski combining the black-metal spirit of the band's early days with the ultra-aggressive blasting of their more recent work, while the doom-haunted "Ov Fire and the Void" is possibly the slowest song in their discography. Meanwhile, the album's epic closing track, "Lucifer," uses a poem by Polish poet Tadeusz Miciski as its lyrics.

That's a surprising gesture on Darski's part. He's tended to ignore his homeland's culture, preferring to write songs employing imagery from various ancient lands, including Babylon (Nergal, his stage name, was a Babylonian deity) and other Middle Eastern countries. But as he makes very clear, it's always metaphorical.

"We're not Nile, we're not Absu, we're not Melechesh," he says, citing other extreme metal bands who make the ancient desert tribes their primary subject matter. "We write about our lives, our perspectives, our point of view. We just wrap it up in this Biblical ancient stuff."

Part of that desire to look outside may be rooted in Behemoth's relative obscurity in Poland — which is ironic since Darski is engaged to Dorota "Doda" Rabczewska, one of Poland's biggest female pop stars.

"She's big, she's a star," he says. "We're just an extreme-metal band who happen to be recognized by a larger audience. But our music is anti-mainstream, basically. You can sell a certain amount of records, and this is it. We've sold 15,000 records in Poland, and I don't really think it's going to be easy to surpass those numbers. We can't do much better than that. But we'll see — maybe I'm wrong."