Black Metal Bands: Dime a Dozen

Of course, back in the day, composing music comprised entirely of blast beats, rasped vocals and drawling continuous guitar lines with no low end whatsoever may have been considered unique, but in a day when a couple dozen new black metal bands are submitted to Encyclopedia Metallium a day, you'd think someone out there would consider doing something a little bit different. Each one of these new bands you hear have very little to offer. While I must point out that there is nothing wrong with the traditional raw black metal sound, there is something wrong when the world and his brother are using this fairly simple sound that's been recycled over and over. And of course, who can forget the age old black metal cliché of covering Mayhem's Deathcrush.

A simple search for bands that have this song on a release reveals that 169 releases on the database include this song. Of course, some of these releases are by Mayhem themselves, and the odd cover was inevitable, and this being a particularly basic song to play, this was an obvious one, but 169 releases?! And that's just the bands in the database, who knows how many other obscure bands have covered it during live performances...Hundreds? Thousands perhaps...

And it's not just the Deathcrush cliché that's been taken to extremes, every cliché in the book of black metal has been recycled over and over so much that the entire genre can be regarded as a joke to some. Heck, the first black metal song I heard made me laugh, plainly because it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. And the album in question has been ridiculed by the core black metal fan base anyway, primarily because of the vocal performance.

The most obvious cliché is the corpse paint. Even the bands who pioneered black metal, such as Mayhem, Darkthrone, Emperor and such, have abandoned this image because of the fact that it has become a bit of a trend, which was what black metal was originally against; the oncoming trend of death metal (urg!). And of course, who can forget the incredibly illegible logos, with their pentagrams and inverted crosses and what not, blended into them?

Yet, the sad thing is, and this is almost unique in black metal, as soon as a band does attempt to take black metal in a new direction and do something different, they're hated for it! Cradle of Filth are a prime example. They took the synth based black metal of Emperor, increased on the amount of synths/keyboards used and added more melody to it with the odd symphonic part here and the spot of female vocals there, and they're dubbed as heretics against black metal! Sure, their earlier releases were received fairly warmly, but they were closer to traditional black metal in style anyway, and even these releases had their haters. If you look at the later releases of the band where they started to leave the traditional black metal roots behind (although this varies from who you hear it from; I generally conclude that everything up to and including "Cruelty and the Beast" as black metal) and incorporate a more melodic (although they’d always been melodic anyway) sound rooted heavily in NWOBHM music of their "Midian" album, they were said to be the biggest sellouts in the history of metal. I mean, you could always tell that the band was never going to stay the same anyway; even their earlier black metal releases all had a very different sound. And let’s never forget their early attempts at death metal with their first 3 demos. I'll admit that I’m not to struck on the bands latest two releases since they got signed to Roadrunner Records, but to say that this band is generic and then go on to praise some obscure band who's demo sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom with the shower running is unthinkable! There are those who would point to the "unique" vocal styles of Dani Filth as a reason to dislike, but black metal elitists don't seem to like anything unique...

Sadly, Black Metal is a dying genre of music anyway, despite the optimists of a third wave of black metal from Sweden and France, these days most black metal bands are just a throw back to the genres heyday in the early nineties, except not as good. It's a shame really, the only newer black metal bands I can enjoy are more melodic based with heavy use of keyboards and synthesizers. When I finally succeed and seek out musicians with the same ambitions as me, you will see some unique takes on black metal (Ha!).