I spent an afternoon recently making charts and transcriptions of songs from Metallica’s early albums, looking at how musical details of their songs reflect the topics of the lyrics. I was fascinated by their epic instrumental “The Call of Ktulu,” which stretches out a captivating atmosphere of foreboding for almost nine minutes, making it one of Metallica’s longest tracks. The form of this song, which I’ll describe later as a kind of gargantuan, distended version of the protoypial verse-chorus form with bridge that is used in most metal music, is unique among Metallica’s earlier repertoire. Unlike most instrumentals on earlier metal albums, which are sort of transitional acoustic guitar or synthesizer bits that don’t feel quite like whole compositions (like Black Sabbath’s “Orchid” or Venom’s “Mayhem With Mercy”), “The Call of Ktulu” is a full-length track and stands on its own in comparison to the rest of the tracks on the album.
Month: June 2017
“Fade to Black” and the Performativity of Genre (ISMMS 2017 conference paper)
StandardI just went to the International Society for Metal Music Studies biennial conference in Victoria, BC, June 9-12. The conference was titled “Boundaries and Ties: The Place of Metal Music in Communities”. Like my last conference paper, I thought I would post my abstract here, so it’s at the bottom of this post.
