HILLBILLY GOTH

So I saw this video at The Awl, posted as part of some absurd non-story about the writer's inability to understand his own attraction to violence; he writes, apparently in total seriousness, that "watching my five-year-old son shoot imaginary bullets out of a cardboard paper-towel tube or a wooden flute with flowers painted on it or, when there's nothing else available, his fingers, reminds me of when I did the same at the same age, and of the futility of my parents' refusal to buy me toy guns, and of my refusal to buy them for him." It's like nothing in the world ever happened until it happened to this dipshit. Anyway, here's the video. Thoughts to follow.



Yelawolf is a guy whose name I've been hearing for a few weeks now, always spoken/typed by a small clutch of folks whose self-appointed purpose in life is to know the month's buzzworthy rapper and insist that he (it's always he) is the most important thing to happen to "the game" since...I don't know. I don't give a shit. I'm not gonna listen to Gucci Mane, I'm not gonna listen to Lil B, it took me a year or so to download Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III (I think that was the one—it was a two-CD "mixtape") after everyone started blogging (and even writing articles in print publications, for money) that it was the greatest hip-hop event of the decade. I know these names because the websites I visit make these names unavoidable. I don't care, but I know, just like I know the names of all three Kardashian sisters.

Moving on. Yelawolf. He's not a particularly deft rapper, at least not based on this song. The chorus is unimpressive—when he chants "Don't make me go pop the trunk on you" it actually diminishes the momentum and suspense he's built up during the verse. Each verse rises to a crescendo, and then the chorus kind of staggers to a halt, forcing the song to basically start all over again. Imagine someone running up a ramp holding a bucket. You're thinking when he gets to the top of that ramp, he's gonna throw whatever's in that bucket and it's gonna fly everywhere. But when he gets to the top of the ramp, he swings the bucket and it's full of a thick, soggy substance—congealing oatmeal, say, or tapioca pudding—and instead of flying out it just kind of slops onto the ground.

What's interesting to me about Yelawolf is that like Eminem, he's got a lot of (maybe subconscious) Goth in him. Listen to the piano in this song. OK, it's not Goth per se, it's more like a Nine Inch Nails ballad—"Hurt" or "The Day The World Went Away" or any of a half dozen others. This song doesn't match up with its video; the visuals remind me of the opening credits to Justified, which featured a kind of hip-hop/bluegrass blend that was a) much more interesting than "Pop the Trunk" and b) worked perfectly with the images on screen.

TOM PETTY, THE MASSES AND ME

I went to Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night to see Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, with Buddy Guy opening up; if you want to read my more formal review of the show, which was excellent, it's over here.

I've seen a bunch of concerts at Madison Square Garden over the years—Dio, Radiohead (twice), Coldplay, Iron Maiden (also twice), Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Nine Inch Nails, AC/DC, Bob Seger, Metallica, Mötley Crüe...a surprising number of shows in all, considering how ambivalent I am about the whole arena experience.

Some of the music I listen to is really popular; I have a shit-ton of classic rock in my iPod, along with a bunch of classic hip-hop, loads of big-name metal bands, et cetera, et cetera. Some of it's not popular at all. This has never really concerned me—I don't spend much time thinking about whether other people like the stuff I like. (This is very different from thinking about why I don't like stuff lots of other people do like, which I do all the time.) When I write a review, for example, there's an element of the utilitarian "consumer guide" to it, but I'm not really trying to convince other people that they should buy the album in question, even if I write that way sometimes. I'm just saying that I think it's good, and trying to explain why in some kind of coherent way while avoiding masturbatory theoretical bullshit.

Because of my lack of interest in music's relative popularity, the atmosphere of a massive arena show, with thousands of people screaming and singing along, doesn't really have much effect on me one way or the other. I don't care that all these people standing around me like Iron Maiden as much as I do; I just care that Iron Maiden is one of the best live acts in music, that they put on a fantastic, well-paced, consistently entertaining show. Sometimes, though, it can provide an element of surprise that's fun.

At the Tom Petty show, for example, I was surprised to see people singing along with such fervor to slow songs like "Free Fallin'" and "Learning to Fly." I like "Free Fallin'" a lot, that first verse is an absolute killer, but I'm a much bigger fan of some of Petty's earlier, meaner songs. He's got a real talent for creating evocative, minimalist images. Think of the first two lines of the song he opened the set with, "Listen to Her Heart": "You think you're gonna take her away/With your money and your cocaine." You know exactly who that guy is. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would have devoted a whole song to painting that asshole's portrait; Petty conjures him and dismisses him in two lines.

I like that side of Tom Petty more than the jangly balladry that inspires girls to sing along and hug their boyfriends at his concerts. And/but watching that audience reaction made me think mine was a minority opinion. It reminded me that Tom Petty hasn't been that snarling guy for quite a few years now (though he still transforms into him from time to time, like on "It's Good to Be King" or "I Should Have Known It"). And that you can probably sell more albums and concert tickets by making girls hug their guys than by making guys pump their fists and snarl.

But here's my point: I think I could have enjoyed that concert just as much had none of those people been there. They weren't an important part of my aesthetic experience. And I'm wondering whether I'm alone on this one, whether the feeling of being surrounded by fellow Tom Petty fans enhances the experience for other people in some major way. And I'm trying to figure out when I started feeling this way, because it wasn't always the case. I used to like mingling with crowds, especially when that meant getting into a sweaty moshpit. Now I'm old(er), and my legs hurt if I stand up for two hours at a show, so I'm much more likely to go to something big enough (in an arena, say) that there's a seat there for me to flop back down into when things get boring (and every show gets boring at some point). A thing like the Summer Slaughter Tour, which features eleven or twelve death metal bands in a row, many of which I like a lot, but is held in a tiny sweatbox of a club with no seats and starts at three in the afternoon? You can forget about that bullshit.

Still, pure physical discomfort isn't what makes me so unconcerned with being part of a crowd. It's something larger, something I can't put my finger on yet, and/but it's something that's making me re-evaluate rock music as a whole. Because for a lot of people, the idea of rock (and pop) as communal experience carries a lot of weight. Someone whose preference is for solitary listening seems to be in some way "doing it wrong," or having an "incomplete" understanding/experience of the music. I'm not convinced. In fact, I think rock music may be best experienced in focused solitude. Because it's not part of a total package—it's not just the sonic component of an evening that depends on beer, lust and air thick with sweat to be complete. The music is enough all on its own, for me anyway.

OBLIGATORY M.I.A. POST

I don't like M.I.A. very much at all. I think she's stupid (and I'm not just talking about her entitled-art-student interview persona; her lyrics are forehead-slappingly clumsy, something none of her apologists, from Robert Christgau on down, has managed to explain away or defend convincingly), I can't stand her fashion sense or visual style, and though this has no bearing on her art, I shake my head in bafflement when people call her beautiful or sexy. (In media culture, once you become famous, you get declared sexy by default, I think.)

I bought each of her first two albums, right when the hype surrounding each had built to a sustained scream. They were available very cheaply at Target; otherwise, I might not have bothered at all, especially not the second time. Arular was primitive and intermittently fun; Kala was less primitive, much more calculated (experiments had calcified into a style), and less fun. But I bought them and listened to them because I felt obligated to do so. Many writers I knew personally, and even more of the writers I read (and considered my peers/competitors), could talk of anything else. I let my intellectual inferiority complex get the better of my taste (at least, where Kala was concerned, since I'd already heard Arular and should have known better).

(This was basically a repeat of what happened to me with Dizzee Rascal, by the way; I listened to a bunch of people whose taste didn't overlap with mine at all, really, but who were getting their opinions printed in places I wanted to someday see mine. I bought both the first and second albums, and liked one or two songs, but was the guy a genius? Not unless that word has been so devalued as to be like the ribbons everyone in a kindergarten soccer game gets for trying. I learned my lesson more quickly with dubstep, because I'd enjoyed various albums on the then-Brooklyn-based label WordSound Recordings years earlier and was able to file dubstep under "similar to WordSound, but not as good, and I'm over that anyway.")

So anyway, M.I.A.'s new album /\/\/\Y/\ came out yesterday, and the big news is that Pitchfork, which had been pretty relentlessly championing her since her emergence, even letting her take over their Twitter account for a day not long ago, panned the record. Hard.

Now that I've actually heard the record, I don't agree. Indeed, I think it's her best album to date. Of course, that's saying very, very little, because as I said at the outset, I think she's stupid and I don't like her first two albums at all. But this one has some pleasing qualities. Its noisiest tracks crib from industrial; there's a sampled air-gun (you know, the kind you'd use in a garage, to change tires) on "Steppin Up" that reminds me of the Revolting Cocks' "Stainless Steel Providers," and the drum assault that opens "Born Free," before the Suicide sample kicks in, is a straight steal from the beginning of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. Some of the quieter, softer tracks remind me of Primal Scream's "Higher Than the Sun."

I don't know how many times I'm gonna wind up listening to /\/\/\Y/\. But if that number is higher than three, it'll be a new record.

BANDS ARE NOT JUKEBOXES

Today at my MSN metal blog, I condemn the practice of bands (e.g. Slayer, Megadeth, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Nine Inch Nails, Eyehategod, Unsane) playing entire albums live. It's fucking boring, and it's demeaning to the bands (who are reduced to being living jukeboxes) and the audience (who are rewarded for mindless nostalgia). Putting together a great set is an art form unto itself—balancing old and new, setting a pace that starts strong, offers a slight slowdown in the middle so the audience can relax/catch its breath, then bringing the energy level back up for a thunderous conclusion and a kick-ass, explosive encore. It might seem similar, but that's really a totally different thing from sequencing an album (or a CD), especially an album from 20 years ago, when albums actually had sides that demanded mini-sequencing of their own. Frankly, I'd be more impressed by seeing The Rock-afire Explosion playing a whole album by a band. Anyway, there's more if you want more.

INTERVIEW: BLAKE JUDD (NACHTMYSTIUM)

[Cross-posted at my MSN Music metal blog.]

Chicago-based metal band Nachtmystium's fifth full-length studio album, Addicts: Black Meddle Part II, comes out tomorrow. It's a sequel of sorts to 2008's Assassins: Black Meddle Part I, which was a somewhat controversial entry in the band's discography. Nachtmystium started out as a pretty orthodox black metal group, thrashing and bashing away in a high-pitched, high-speed assault on the listener. But each album was a little more ambitious than the one before, and starting with 2006's Instinct: Decay, a strong element of psychedelia seeped into the music. This was even more prominent on Assassins, which frequently sounded like an overt homage to Pink Floyd (note the subtitle). It also featured guest saxophone from Yakuza's Bruce Lamont. About the only link between it and early Nachtmystium was frontman and group leader Blake Judd's hoarse, rasping vocals. (The lack of artistic continuity isn't just about the songwriting, either—the rate of member turnover in Nachtmystium is absurd, with literally dozens of musicians having passed through the ranks in the group's decade-long existence.)

Addicts is another change for Judd and crew, as it abandons the psychedelia of Assassins in favor of...Gothic rock and industrial. There's still some black metal in the sound, most notably on "High On Hate," but the biggest influences here, as Judd will freely admit, are bands like Killing Joke, Nine Inch Nails and Sisters of Mercy. The disc is swathed in analog synths, dubby basslines and even a few electro-disco beats. I called Judd at his home in Chicago to talk about Addicts, as well as Monument to Time End, the recently released second album by his side project Twilight. That band was originally a sort of black metal all-star group, featuring Judd, N. Imperial of Krieg, Wrest of Leviathan, Malefic of Xasthur and Hildolf of Draugar, but since the group's self-titled debut was released in 2005, Malefic and Hildolf have departed, and some unlikely new members, including Aaron Turner of Isis and Sanford Parker of Minsk (who, along with Wrest, also plays on Addicts), have joined.

Each album seems so different from the last. Are you headed in a specific direction, or is the band’s evolution sparked in the studio, in the moment? Or does each album depend on who’s playing on it?
I think it’s a little of all three of those things, actually. In general, I’d like our music to head in a more accessible direction, just 'cause that’s where my tastes have gone as I’ve gotten older. I’ve found myself less drawn to really extreme metal music, and maybe it’s just me growing up or whatever, but I listen to a lot of different types of music, and metal has kind of dwindled on the spectrum of things I’m listening to lately. I think that has the most to do with the sound you’ll find on Addicts being a little more rock-oriented. But also, the people that are playing on the records, they’re all chosen specifically for what I’m trying to go for at the time, and I’m fortunate enough to know a ton of people that play in good bands and are willing to come and work with me. So it’s a little of everything. But as far as the future goes, I don’t think we’ll ever have one set style, and it’s not like we’re lost directionally at all. It’s what I feel like doing at the time more than anything, and currently it’s kinda this wannabe Killing Joke/Queens of the Stone Age thing, and I think the music we’ll be doing in the future will be more on par with what we’re doing now than, say, Demise or Instinct: Decay or something like that.

The Pink Floyd influence that was so prominent last time seems mostly gone, except on “The End is Eternal.” Why did you choose to call this one Black Meddle Part II, given how little it has in common with the last record?
Basically, the lyrical content is pretty similar. The themes of the records are the part that’s the most cohesive—the visuals and the lyrics are the connection between the two. I kinda wanna throw a curve ball at people, too.

Listening to what you're doing now, I kinda feel like your vocals no longer fit, that maybe you should start pursuing a more Pete Steele/Andrew Eldritch type baritone delivery. Have you thought about that at all?
You know, I agree with you, and I actually tried to sing in the studio for Addicts. I tried to do a more proper vocal style, and basically, I’m good at some things but singing just ain’t one of 'em. Given my limitations naturally with my ability to sing, the thing I try my best with is to make sure that even with the harsh vocal approach, you can understand me. I try to be more intelligible than most people. I think that’s one thing that keeps a lot of people away from metal music, is that they can’t understand the lyrics, and I figure if I’m gonna have this kind of delivery, I’m gonna enunciate enough that if you listen carefully you can pick out good chunks of the phrases if not all of em. That’s about as good as I can do at that. And I struggle, too. Ideally, I would love to have an actual singer at this point, but it would change the dynamic of the band so much that it wouldn’t be Nachtmystium anymore. So I feel like I’m kinda stuck in this place where I need to continue to be the vocalist, just because we have about ten releases prior to this. If we brought a real singer in, that would mean we’d probably have to abandon the majority of our back catalog in terms of live performance. And it just wouldn’t be the same band anymore. So if I ever get inspired enough to do something where I really wanna bring in a new singer, I’d probably just start a new band.

There are some clean vocals on the record—who’s doing those?
That’s our producer, Chris Black. He can actually sing a little bit, so we stick him in there and let him do it.

I thought it was Bruce Lamont from Yakuza. It kind of sounds like him.
He’s on the last track on Addicts. The throat singing, the kind of Eastern vocalizations, that’s Bruce Lamont. As far as anything where there’s actual lyrics being sung, that’s all Chris Black.

There are a lot of Goth and postpunk and early industrial sounds on this album. What were you listening to and taking inspiration from this time out?
Oh man, I’ve been totally guiding into classic Goth rock, and some industrial as well. I kinda went back to some of my roots—when I was a kid I was really into Nine Inch Nails' early stuff, basically right up through The Downward Spiral and including all the EPs that followed that record. I kinda shelved those records for a lot of years, 'cause I turned into "Black Metal Kid" and I didn’t wanna listen to the music that was associated with the guys wearing makeup at my high school, so to speak, so I didn’t listen to a lot of that stuff for a long time, but I found myself coming back to it in the last year or two and being like, "Man, a lot of these are really great records, I don’t know why I stopped listening to them as much as I used to." So there’s that. Killing Joke is a new band for me. I never got into them when I was younger and Sanford Parker turned me on to them when we were making Assassins, and since then I think I’ve obtained most of their discography, and I find that to be an endless wealth of great music. Also lots of Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus, early Christian Death, Fields of the Nephilim, all bands that I listened to when I was a kid and, again, just kinda shelved those records and didn’t find myself coming back to them until more recently. So it’s all that stuff, in combination with my love for anything that sounds like Joy Division, including Joy Division. I’m the guy that loves all those knockoff bands. I love Editors, I love Interpol, I actually kinda like the Killers, I’m not gonna lie. There’s an influence from all that stuff coming through.

You’ve got Wrest from Leviathan playing drums on this disc, and he’s also part of the second Twilight album, as is Sanford Parker. How did the sessions overlap?
They didn’t really overlap at all. We did the second Twilight record in March 2009, and it just came out this year. The reason that album got held up is, I’m not sure if you heard, but I broke my leg really severely during the recording, so there was a three-month window where I wasn’t walking. I broke it on the first day of mixing, and we just put the session on freeze until I healed up, and then we got back in and mixed it months later. Then we had to wait and get it mastered, and get the art together, so there was a huge delay between when that was recorded versus when it was released, and it’s just a coincidence that that album and Addicts are being released so closely together. But as far as the sessions go, there’s really nothing too similar between the two records other than the fact that the three of us were there. Twilight’s a cohesive thing between a group of people, where Nachtmystium is more guided by me. Not to say that the guys involved don’t have their own input, that would be a lie if I said they didn’t, but we just operate differently. What I did take away from the Twilight session and bring to the Nachtmystium session was an extremely easy time bringing my ideas to life, because I did write a chunk of that Twilight record, and Sanford and Wrest know exactly what to do with my music. It’s kind of amazing, especially Wrest and I. You put us together, we don’t even have to talk about it. We just show each other the parts and the other one just feeds off of it. We work really, really well together like that; it’s not a challenge to create together. Sanford is the same way. Sanford’ll have some idea that neither one of us is hearing, and he’ll start incorporating that and say, "What do you think of this?" and it’ll be like, "Well, duh, of course that’s what we should do there." He’s just the guy to bring that to life, so it works really well. Those guys are great to work with and I hope to continue to work with them in the future.

What changed between the first and second Twilight records? Was there ever supposed to be a second Twilight record?
Yeah, I think right after we finished the first one, we were all really excited about it, not the fact that Southern Lord hyped it as much as they did—that was a great thing and a really horrible thing. What people don’t realize about the first Twilight record is, that’s a demo. None of us had ever played music together, and we made that album on a Tascam 424 MK3 four-track, in Wrest’s bedroom, with V-drums, which are like an electronic drum kit, a pod, a guitar and a bass. We never turned an amplifier on to make that record. The loudest thing recorded was the vocals. It was basically thrown together, like, "OK, I’ve got these ideas, you’ve got these ideas, we have two weeks here because this is all we can afford." Because this was before Southern Lord was in the picture. That record was done for a year before we even knew Southern Lord Records. We made that with a thousand bucks. And none of it was spent on gear. It was spent on getting myself and Neil from Krieg and Scott from Xasthur out to San Francisco to try and make a record happen. Once it did come out, and people actually seemed interested, we all got excited and wanted to make another one, but that’s also when I was running my record label [Battle Kommand], that was really dominating my time and Nachtmystium was becoming more of a priority to me, and everybody involved had personal lives, so that’s why the second album didn’t come to fruition until years later. At one point we broke up, too, because Scott from Xasthur didn’t want to be involved in the project anymore. He’s kind of a head case in general, as I’m sure you know. He doesn’t like to work with other people and this and that. And basically we put the whole thing on ice. But Wrest from Leviathan is a tattoo artist, and he told me he was coming to Chicago in February 2009 and asked if he could stay with me for a couple of weeks while he tattooed. I was like, "Sure, you can stay here, and since you’re gonna be here for a month, instead of rent why don’t you make a record with me? Let’s do the new Twilight album." And he was all for it, so we just kinda started writing in the evenings when he was done working, and we put that record together in about a month. And we went into the studio and cranked it out, and brought the other people in last minute, and it worked out really well.

Nachtmystium’s developed a reputation as a pretty strong live act. What's your live show like?
Basically, we just go out there and try to be Motörhead. It’s a rock show. It’s a little more stripped-down than the albums. We don’t bring all the electronics into the live show, though we’ve done that a few times, Roadburn [festival in Holland] being one of those times. We did a special psychedelic set, which basically means we do what we normally do but we have a Moog player. But live it’s a lot more raw and more of a fuckin’ kick in the teeth. Everything’s a little faster, and I think we look a little more like a black metal band, and sound a little more like a black metal band, just because everything’s that much more intense and that much faster and more aggressive. There’s definitely a very aggressive approach visually from the four of us, assuming we’re having a good night.

For a long time, Chicago didn't have much of a reputation for metal—all you had was Usurper and Disturbed. But lately it seems like with you, Minsk, Yakuza and Lair of the Minotaur, the city’s metal rep has really been rehabilitated. How organic and unified is the scene there?
To be honest, it’s incredibly unified. Everybody in those bands you just mentioned, with the exception of a few oddball members who aren’t from this immediate area, I can walk out my front door right now and go five minutes in one direction and be at Sanford’s studio, I can walk five minutes in the other direction and be at his front door, I can walk ten minutes in another direction and be where all the guys from Pelican live, and then everybody else kinda lives in between those points. The entire Chicago metal scene, we all live in the same neighborhood, we all record at the same studio, we see each other all the time. It’s really fucking cool. It’s a really interesting time to be here. The Wicker Park and Humboldt Park areas of Chicago are just where everybody’s at. Everything happens here. Our mastering studio’s here, our recording studio’s here, most of the venues we play at are rock-throwing distance from our homes, and we all live in the same neighborhood and all hang out quite a bit. I think it’s the only time since the Touch & Go Records era of Chicago in the late 80s and the early 90s on the indie scene where there’s been this wild explosion of creativity coming out of a bunch of bands that are linked not only by geography but by what they do.

THIS WEEK ON ALTPRESS.COM

RHINOCEROS
They Are Coming For Me (Eulogy)
This Buffalo, New York-based straight-edgers like their hardcore old school. Their sound predates the Hatebreed worship of their Eulogy labelmates, all the way back to the glory days of Sunday matinee shows at CBGB. Vocalist Joe Riverside has a harsh, ranting style descended from East Coast legends like Agnostic Front's Roger Miret and Breakdown's Jeff Perlin--every word is a perfectly enunciated accusation. Guitarist Greg Styliades offers buzzsaw riffs, pick slides and shards of feedback and distortion in the mold of Sick Of It All and Gorilla Biscuits, while only rarely heading into the downtuned territory far too many of their cookie-cutter peers call home. Bassist Ian Pless even gets a solo intro on "Choices Made," and Aaron King's drums sound like wooden boxes filled with cement. This band's only been together since 2006, but their sound is straight from '88.

SHINING
Blackjazz (The End)
Norway's Shining mix industrial and metal into an unholy screech that takes elements from Nine Inch Nails' Broken EP, Meshuggah's Nothing and the collected works of Magma and King Crimson (this album includes a hellish version of KC's "21st Century Schizoid Man"), plus ultra-distorted, shrieking vocals and skronking saxophone. It's a major leap into the abyss for the band; their last two discs, 2007's Grindstone and 2005's In The Kingdom Of Kitsch You Will Be A Monster, had their ferocious moments, but there were stretches of gentle, jazzy melody, too. Blackjazz, by contrast, is fierce and unrelenting, a slavering beast of an album with the complexity and dissonance of the Flying Luttenbachers and the head-down intensity of upstate New York ultra-power trio Borbetomagus. Absolutely not for the faint of heart--or people with cranky neighbors.

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."