Stop listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Metal, as a tribe, knew that it would always face the risk of assimilation by rock music, since rock music serves as an aggregate of all popular music. It combined Celtic drinking songs, Scandinavian folk, Scots religious music, waltz rhythms, and the minimal framework of Southern blues — itself probably an old Scythian creation — into a standardized product. Metal wants to avoid becoming that product.

We can safely say that rock died in the 1980s, when it bounced back from the 1960s ranting protest music and the 1970s corporate rock, only to resurrect as a folk-hybrid with indie and then be smashed down by punk, giving way to electronic music, then rap, and later the hybrid of the two that is now international pop.

The record labels peaked in the mid-1990s with grunge since this, incorporating metal and punk as an aesthetic while discarding their musical contributions, brought rock full circle back to its roots, but got taken over by the usual emo whiners and cosmopolitan metrosexuals, so lost its momentum.

Pantera played right into this by making a form of speed metal which was barely harder than grunge, embraced blues rather than prog or hardcore roots, and focused on personal drama instead of the historical and mythological focus of the innovators of the genre.

Metallica made songs about terror and triumph, the winds of history, and the clash of ideas; Pantera gave us faded photocopies of horror movies, personal drama, and party songs. It was as if AC/DC took over Testament, then sniffed too much paint at a rest stop.

By turning speed metal into a flavor of rock music, Pantera inverted speed metal, turning a genre that wanted to be a tribe breaking away from the herd into an ultimate song of triumph for the herd which validates herd navel-gazing personal drama and rejected the impersonal, naturalistic, and historical-mythological view of metal.

Even more, they made metal simplistic like glam and inoffensively accessible like rock. Nothing in Pantera would shock the post-1960s American audience, so you could play it in your bar or club without fearing that someone might start throwing chairs. It was a perfect product.

Some might note the homosexual undertones to this music, which simultaneously champions masculinity and presents a wounded version of it, following the general feminization of the West:

…in a culture where men suppress the feminine elements of a naturally androgynous intelligence and women seek to bolster their masculine traits and appearance to become attractive to the most aggressive males. This is a homosexual under-culture or foundation of Western society that manifests in competitions at every level and glories in conquests. The other side of the coin is, the inherent denial required generates a deep and abiding anger; this is what translates into bigotry and hate. The source of the denial is fear and the fear stems from abhorrence at what any naked self-exam would discover: a hyper-inculcated homosexuality at odds with the one’s own cultural myths.

didn't read

However, to my mind, what we are seeing is solipsism: Western Culture, having lost its direction, worships the individual instead of appealing to social order, and therefore idealizes an individual without context, meaning having stripped away culture, faith, family, genetics, and past to reveal only the will, a “city on the hill” or paragon of virtue in its self-created worship of free will.

Humans in groups make the same mistake every time. Instead of staying focused on goal, which is boring because it does not change, they become focused on the individual and, through that, achieving unity in the group through compromise so that a consensus can be built. This inverts the civilization.

When metal inverts itself, we get music that reflects the fears of the audience — worries about inadequacy, sexuality, power, mortality, and meaning — instead of music which asserts an affirmative direction in which we can move to find fulfilling versions of our fears.

Pantera made the perfect product in that it reflected the broadest section of fans and their fears. It then dumbed down the form into something which offends no one. Finally, it brought in elements of rock, so the fans could be rebels without having to step off the reservation.

If that does not deserve hatred for turning metal into anti-metal, then perhaps at least it deserves recognition for what it is: like fast food or soda-pop, it is a utilitarian reduction of metal to cheap lifestyle object sold at high margin.

>no Fear Factory
NOT BASED

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Pantera riffs resemble up-tempo versions of 1970s heavy metal with a few muted strums here and there to make them “hard.” Their leads, borrowed from mostly British heavy rock of the 1960s and country music, fit entirely in the center of genericism. The vocals come from emo and NYHC.

In short, Pantera made a perfect product out of speed metal, and it appealed to an audience not so much of morons but of conformists and denialists, or those who want to believe that everything is going well in the world so their only concern should be their personal bourgeois status.

Like the navel-gazing novel which borrowed as much from the self-help as the fiction section, the civil rights politics of fearing personal inequality so much that society should be forced to subsidize it, movies about superheroes and other id-drama of the least self-aware population in history, Pantera reflected our self-consciousness in a social context, not a desire to make art that pushed us to improve ourselves.

If we distill Pantera down to its essence, it would be a drunk guy telling you that he feels your pain, bro, and it’s all going to be okay once you knock back a few Natty Lights and show him on the doll where your last girlfriend hurt you. I can’t think of anything less “metal” than that.

Couldn't think of a hipster equivalent to them :(

awesome post

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Fear Factory have always played radio rock disguised as "metal" throughout the entirety of their history as a band, but with this album they seem to have fooled some people into thinking they had a "death metal past". In reality, this is the same product with a different skin. The same commercial soul rests in this machine and was all that Roadrunner Records needed to test the waters before dropping their entire death metal roster to make way for Coal Chamber, Slipknot, and Nickelback (except Deicide since they still made money). While the surface traits of this album seem to have been borrowed from the Napalm Death and Godflesh (maybe even Pitch Shifter) recordings of the time (to the point of not being signed by Earache for being too derivative of their roster), what we really have is an aesthetic mash-up that functions as yet another prototype for Nu-Meddle that deserves it's place next to Pantera, Chaos AD, and Biohazard in the pantheon of recordings that ruined music for future generations.

The bands aesthetic seems to be juxtaposing Napalm Death derived power-chord rhythm riffs and vocals against Godflesh inspired discordant melodic passages and clean vocals. Thankfully, the grunt/growl style of vocals do a pretty good job at imitating Barney Greenway and the cleans are kept to a Justin Broadrick imitation which isn't annoying unlike the later faux-operatic U2 styled singing vocalist Burton Bell would later utilize on their more obviously Nu-Meddle recordings. The lyrics tackle on interesting subject matter (judicial system, animal lab testing) but are written in an angsty "keeping it real" simplistic manner that have more in line with their Korn-y descendants. At worst, lyrics become "personal" or a parody of generic death metal lyrics (Manipulation and Desecrate, respectively).

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Godflesh

The main thing this band did that would inspire legions of mall musicians is varying up rhythm picking patterns of 2 notes or chords against kick drums into a mechanical groove for a "machine like" feeling. Some tag this 'industrial' because of this feel but, despite ornamentation through samples on select tracks, the compositions feel more akin to the alternative rock of the day that is analogous to the dreadlocks-wave that was just beginning (Rage Against the Machine).

Songs are organized into a standard verse-chorus format, where verses are filled with grooved out power chords or mechanically patterned rhythmic chugging of notes, and choruses are "melodic" affairs with a repeating meme (if not song title) that occasionally are accompanied by melodic sung vocals. It gets boring very fast, especially if you're already accustomed to real death metal since this has more in common with the Nirvana album of the time on a structural and communicative level with it's radio formatted display of suburban misery (where angsty loud choruses are verses here instead, choruses the whining drone). In other words, a corporate sham right out the gate. It comes off as being aesthetically unpleasant with it's intent to sound aesthetically pleasant by making the "brutal" sections seem "warm and fuzzy" when thrown next to those "safe and reassuring" choruses.

Tracks like Scapegoat and Crisis place an emphasis on vocals and have shuffling rhythms akin to rap music (sure enough, the riff to 'Scapegoat' was stolen by Korn for use in their single "Blind") and are representative of Fear Factory's unfortunate contribution to the music scene at large. Some variation to the formula occurs on select tracks like 'Desecrate' which sounds like a mash-up between Deicide and Napalm Death, one of few songs with melody embedded into a blasting angry verse riff but soon devolves into generic mosh death during the bridge that's not unlike Benediction. 'Flesh Hold' seems to ripoff Napalm Death's Utopia Banished throughout, being nothing but aggressive grinding death riffs but having melody incorporated during a couple of those riffs. This album's flow is also inconsistent, with the B-Side (or all songs starting from Big God/Raped Souls) having afterthought experiments such as Self-Immolation (the most "industrial" song here, utilizing a dance rhythm throughout) and Arise Above Oppression (a Napalm Death short blast track), where one idea is used and exhausted before the track ends, seemingly cobbled together at the last moment to fill time on this album.

That's the album in a nutshell - angry and hackneyed groove patterns and variations of similar rhythms patterns drone on before a melodic chorus and back again with any variations to the formula coming through incomplete failed experiments, never mind this band's attempt to make death metal "nice" being a failure of an idea to begin with. It is machine like with it's dishonesty, assembled through the parts of other bands with a focus group like flow chart mentality.

It would be wiser to listen to Streetcleaner and early 90's Napalm Death than this (the last track on Napalm Death's Utopia Banished is more effective at bringing a sense of "contemplation" to blasting frustration aimed at society than the entirety of this album). It should be no surprise the route this band would take since this album just seemed to be a space for the band to stretch out into more commercial pastures by using what was popular and trendy at the time as a spring board. Vapid. Purchase some Godflesh and Napalm Death instead.

I guess that's true as much as i like them