Kicking off a Brand New Hell Year
Brand new sections, brand new social media, same Old Gods
Welcome! The Apotheosis Newsletter would like to congratulate you on making it to the sequel of hell year. We’ve got a few exciting changes, like the return of label highlights and a brand new subgenre guide section. There’s also exciting developments on the social media side. Now you can follow the Apotheosis Newsletter on Twitter and like our page on Facebook. Give us a follow to stay up to date with any news that wasn’t fit for the letter, and for general thoughts on music.
With that out of the way, I know what you’re here for, let’s dive on in.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Svrm - Розпад
Svrm’s 2020 album Занепад, established them as major players in the atmospheric black metal and folk metal scenes. Hailing from Ukraine, the group pulls distinct influences from their homeland and jams them together with raw black metal to create a whirling tornado of negative emotions. Their new project, Розпад, continues this trend but adds a layer of refinement to their already impressive sound. Svrm deftly balances acoustic sections, sizzling black metal portions and even electronic elements with shocking ease. The only complaint one could possibly have is that it’s not long enough. But if this is just a taste of what’s to come, then the wait for a longer record will be well worth it.
Great Metal from this Week
Very little stood out this week because it was so sparse. The self-titled record from Haine stood as a lone bright spot in a sea of mediocrity, but it really gave Svrm a run for its money. Hopefully there’s a few more albums present next week.
To keep up with the best metal each week, follow Apotheosis’ Fresh Kills playlist. Right now it still has tracks from 2020, but once 2021 starts to come through with more releases it’ll be scrubbed to feature only music from this year.
Noise With Friends
Feels good to be highlighting great label’s once again. For this one, we’re digging deep into the underground to bring you a cassette focused harsh-noise label run by none other than knifedoutofexistence.
Many of the artists on the Outsider Art label adhere to the wider definition of the term. For the unfamiliar, outsider art (or art brut) per Wikipedia is the “Outsider art is art by self-taught or naïve art makers.” Focused almost exclusively on noise music, a deeply academic but strangely outsider friendly genre, Outsider Art as a label will never be hyper-popular. However the challenging ideas that you’ll find in these releases almost always bubble up to more popular music, and the moment of delight when you catch a well-known artist using a trick you heard in the underground is so worth the discovery process.
If you want to get into noise music, there are precious few places that could better introduce you to the genre than Outsider Art. In particular, I suggest starting with the music of label founder knifedoutofexistence. We highlighted him in our favorite EP’s of 2020 article, and for good reason. He has a tremendous command of sound which allows him to push music to the absolute limit while remaining compellingly listenable.
This isn’t the type of label that will hold your hand, but that’s not really what you want from noise music. What it will do is provide you with an incredible starting point in the genre. Plus you can really pull the indie card on these artists, if that’s a thing you like to do.
Sticking With the Noise
In keeping with the label highlight, our merch selection this week comes from knifedoutofexistence. While the shirt itself doesn’t break away from the traditional metal vibe (photo on front, graphics and text on the arms) it does have a pretty compelling appearance.
Using a photo print as the image on both the front and the right sleeve, it has an attention capturing quality that many metal logo shirts lack. It breaks the mold just enough to draw your eye to it, and the unclear nature of the photos will keep them locked there.
If that’s not enough of a selling point, take a look at the merch below and see what I mean. Also there’s only 30 of these shirts so technically it’s way more exclusive, and therefore higher fashion, than anything you can buy from Gucci.
The Beginning: What Counts as Metal?
This is by far the section I’m most excited to dig into this year. By popular demand (at least one of you asked about it) we’ll be taking you through various metal subgenres to see what makes them different from other styles.
But before we even begin to breach the gnarled tangle of metal genres, we need to come to a consensus on what counts as metal.
Approaching this topic from a “popular consensus” angle is basically impossible. Even within the metal community no one really agrees with where hard rock stops and metal starts. It’s remained such a sticking point that people still fight over whether or not a band is metal today. Whole subgenres sometimes find themselves subjected to the judgement of the reddit metal brigades, who have at times termed styles like metalcore, melodic death metal and nu-metal to be “not metal.” So instead of looking to consensus, I’ll do the much easier thing and tell you where I land.
The most commonly referenced trio of bands when discussing the beginning of metal are Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. All three bands started in 1968, and pulled from blues rock, psych/acid rock to create a musical blend that featured flashy guitar solos, depressing lyrics and more distortion than nearly anything preceding it. For my money, the only band from this trio that truly hits the mark of “metal” is Black Sabbath. Both Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin are excellent bands, and have songs that even I would term as metal. But you can mistake Deep Purple for slightly louder psych rock and Led Zeppelin for hard rock or blues rock. Zep even has tracks that would border on pop/rock n’ roll, though that may be more related to their popularity than their sound.
The other reason for Sabbath holding the title is that of these three, only Sabbath can lay claim to the direct influence of every metal band in existence. If you were to release a Zeppelin album tomorrow, no one would call it metal. We have factual evidence of this because Greta Van Fleet, a band that definitely isn’t just trying to be Led Zeppelin, has released albums that sound almost exactly like Zeppelin and everyone called it rock or hard rock. But Black Sabbath puts out a record today and you’re calling it metal. There are bands that continue to operate at the exact same level of “metality” that Sabbath did on their first album and we still all call it metal.
If you’re wondering why this matters, the answer is fairly simple. Knowing the beginnings of metal allow you to look at what separates it from everything else, including the similar things, and it gives you the tools to pull apart the sound of the genre’s founders to see how groups latched onto specific elements and hammered them to the point of perfection. Unfurling the work Black Sabbath, you can see the roots, webs and connecting fibers of the entire style spread out across the whole globe. Even their earliest albums contain glimpses of styles that wouldn’t reach mainstream metal listeners for decades, and if you’d like to get maximum enjoyment from this genre guide series, I highly recommend listening to at least their first three records.
As part of this series, I’ll select one album that best encompasses the subgenre being discussed. This week the selected album is none other than Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath. Released in 1970, this album sets the tone for the next half-century of metal music. Everything from the sound to the aesthetic of the album art still exists in metal released in 2021. While their next two records, Paranoid and Master of Reality are more complete and focused works, the raw passion and experimentation of Black Sabbath established the conventions of the genre as we understand it today. There’s few, if any, albums that could feasibly be called “more influential” and it holds up remarkably well.
The Myth of Being “Ahead of Your Time”
During the storming of the Capitol I stumbled across a tweet where someone asked how Rage Against the Machine managed to get so many things right decades before they happen. That got me thinking about the common misconceptions surrounding predictions and artistic genius, and most importantly, the myth of an artist being “ahead of their time.”
From the sonic standpoint, the way the music sounds, artists can absolutely be ahead of their time. This is true of any technical or stylistic flair in any art form. Melvins made their music too early, but Nirvana took those same ideas and delivered them right on time. Vincent Van Gogh famously died young, hungry and raving mad from poverty after having experienced numerous failures in his art life. Now his paintings sell for untold sums of money.
So it’s not the stylistic side, but the thematic content. When people say an artist was ahead of their time in regards to their lyrics, they’re usually referring to how a line from a song was “eerily predictive of current events.” But unless they call out something truly absurd, like an 80s song saying “on September 11th 2001, thousands will die in a terrorist attack that leads to the collapse of both World Trade Center towers” it’s usually something that comments on the current moment. If you marinate in that, the ghoulish truth begins to peek its head out from the muck. These bands didn’t predict social movements, backlash, government responses or brutal murders by the state. They simply talked about what they saw happening around them and sang about that, and to put it bluntly “ain’t shit changed.”
This same idea came up in the dissection of RTJ4 on our Favorite Albums of 2020 list. On that record, the song “Walking in the Snow” features a line where Killer Mike alludes to being murdered by a cop via chokehold, and gives his last words as a whispered “I can’t breathe.” The accuracy is stunning, yes, but the prediction isn’t something akin to a Nostradamus. It’s just the assumption that things won’t change. Time and again, these pessimistic assumptions are proven upsettingly accurate.
Non-Metal AOTW
ANAVITÓRIA - COR
Our first non-metal highlight of 2021 is the remarkable COR, by ANAVITÓRIA. When I first listened to this record I believed I had stumbled across an unknown gem, but one look at the Spotify listening data dissuaded me of that assumption. But popularity doesn’t imply a lack of quality, and this album is loaded with quality. Compelling, textured and eclectic, the albums bounces from sounding like Sade in Portuguese to a folk rock album. There’s plenty to dig into here regardless of your ability to appreciate the lyrics. It’s no surprise this is the first 8/10+ of the year.
Runners-up
Where’d All My Music Go?
Looking at the releases from Friday, January 8th nothing particularly catches my eye. But that means there’s a lot of artists I don’t know about who could surprise us with great music. Check in next week to see which artists dropped a surprise into our open hands. If there’s an album you’re excited to hear, let us know about it in the comments.
Shrinekeeping
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Welcome to the new year, we’ve got a raging disease, poorly attempted political insurrections, and an increasingly unstable relationship with the other side of the aisle. All this to say, I’m in my element baby, this year is already metal as hell.