Week 8: Heavy metal parking lot

I had a good conversation with my friend Adrian this week.  He’s a crazy talented artist who’s seeing some legitimate success with his work, and nobody deserves it more.  Check out his blog here, pictures are worth 1,000 words: http://ajalouden.blogspot.com.

Our chat got me thinking about art and the question that’s launched a thousand essays: what is art?  Who gets to carry that mantle and call themselves an artist, and what separates the artist and his or her work from someone who strives to be an artist but lacks a certain element that gives their work legitimacy?  Is art, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?

I am constantly on the hunt for music that captivates and transports me to a higher plane of thinking.  Every once in a while, an artist comes along and creates a piece that changes the way I think about music, art, and even life and the possibilities that it offers to people who are creative and disciplined.

Music is most compelling when it is revolutionary; true artists push aside constraints of genre and structure and advance the art form in innovative ways.  In my view, the greatest musical artists create works that - very broadly speaking - fit three key descriptors: progressive, outstanding and challenging.

Here are three songs by three exceptional heavy metal artists that have recently blown my mind.  They exemplify the best of each of these requirements and everything that I love about heavy music:

Step 1: Progressive
Artist: Leprous
Song: Thorn ft. Ihsahn
Album: Bilateral

Progressive is a generic tag that’s often attached by default to music that incorporates, or blurs the boundaries between, numerous genres.  Heavy metal and jazz are a common crossover.  There is more to progressive music than genre blending, though.  The key is the “progress” part.  The greatest progressive artists like Leprous and their ilk stand as a testament to the importance of paying homage to the masters who came before them, then building great musical structures on the earlier foundations.  

The progressive tag on music is the antithesis of derivative, band-wagon hopping musicians.  Bands that are lacking in passion and knowledge of their musical forebears become especially evident when they are unable to evolve past the “fad” phase of new or popular styles.  Forward thinking musicians like the members of Leprous are pushing boundaries of genre, song structure, and definitions of music just as progressive painters experiment with form, texture and themes and media to create new artistic movements.

In this song, influences from classical and jazz, and even some nods to European folk music, are audible in the textures and modalities of the song.  It also features nods to modern metal stylings - the riff/pattern first heard @ 2:28 - and pays tribute to the giants of Norwegian black metal, as Ihsahn of the legendary band Emperor features on vocals @ 3:14 of the track.  All the while, Leprous manages to create a unique sound that sets them apart and makes them easily identifiable, which leads me to my next category...


Step 2: Outstanding
Artist: Meshuggah
Song: Dancers to a Discordant System
Album: ObZen

When an artist creates a piece of music that forces the evolution of the genre from which it emerged, there will invariably be copycats who grab hold of the idea.  This is especially common in heavy music today, evident in the glut of bands with slavish attachments to the stylings of trending genres.  The outstanding artists of any breakout style quickly become apparent.  They are easily distinguishable because they have a great deal more to say within the contexts of music history and pushing the paradigm of their niche.

For those unaware, “djent” is a recently named genre of heavy music.  It is the first that I am aware of that was named by onomatopoeia.  It features extremely low-tuned 8-string guitars and odd time signatures.  Due to the decreased tension on the low 8th string, heavy picking combined with heavy distortion causes a slight pitch bend with each pick attack, that (apparently) sounds like a “djent,” hence the name.

This term was retroactively applied to Meshuggah, considered by some to be the founders of the genre and by many others, myself included, to be well outside the constraints of a silly-named label.  A horde of bands with tremendous technical abilities but lacking great songwriting skills quickly followed in their wake.  Time signature trickery, complex riffing and staccato rhythmic playing is impressive for a moment or two, but Meshuggah is worlds apart in terms of style and substance from almost every similar band.  Their guitarists were instrumental in designing and popularizing the 8-string guitar for heavy metal, and they are still the masters of the challenging rhythmic style of extreme metal, which leads me to my final category...


Step 3: Challenging
Artist: Behold...the Arctopus
Song: Canada
Album: Skullgrid  

Since I became involved in the recording process for music, I have a much greater appreciation for competent music played by talented people.  Despite advances in technology that allow copy-and-paste performances, real musicians who have truly  mastered their craft have used the avails of music technology, both in hardware and software, to challenge the limits of human capability in instrumental performance and recording.

Behold...the Arctopus might not be the most listener-friendly trio, but their abilities as musicians are beyond simple technical mastery.  They are a brilliant example of how to own an instrument through study and practice, then use it to say something absolutely unique, rather than to simply apply familiar sets of chords, modes, tempos and time signatures in faster or more technical displays.  They readily challenge the notions of conventional songwriting, and do so with jaw-dropping skill.

Art in heavy music comes from the extremities of human emotion.  It allows for music that carries real weight (see what I did there?) which is noticeable above the din from the massive explosion of music that has taken place online in the past decade.  Behold...the Arctopus represents a group who have come nearer to the absolute apex of artistic capability than almost anybody else in terms of painting pictures with sound.

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