Form and Narrative in Type O Negative’s “Black No. 1”

This is my first post in quite a few months. I’ve taken a break from working on this sort of thing to study for my qualifying exams. I’m happy to say that I passed all of them, which means I have time to write about heavy metal again!

Another unfortunate consequence of studying for my exams was that I had to miss the wedding of the two loveliest goths in the whole world, N and R. N introduced me to what is now one of my favorite bands, Type O Negative, by playing their song “Black No. 1” for me several years ago. Apparently it’s one of her favorite songs–inside sources tell me this song was played on the dance floor at the end of the wedding–so I thought it would be fitting to dedicate this post to N and R and their marriage, may it be long-lived and happy and shrouded in spooky cobwebs.

Type O Negative had released two albums before 1993’s Bloody Kisses, but this third album was the one that marked the band really coming into their own. It was the first of their albums to chart on the Billboard 200, and though all of their subsequent albums charted higher, Bloody Kisses has been the one which has sold most consistently. Bloody Kisses is the only Type O Negative to receive a Platinum rating from the RIAA (for selling over a million copies), and according to Rolling Stone, it was actually the first album released by Roadrunner records to be certified Platinum. ((http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/type-o-negative-singer-peter-steele-dead-at-48-20100415)) The flagship single for the album, “Black No. 1,” is a gothic anthem to gloomy vampire queens everywhere. The music video for this song is full of the dark horror-film-inspired tropes that have become the standard visual language of gothic rock. But what about the music? What makes the music “gothic” and “rock,” what does it mean to blend those two, and what significance does that have beyond reinforcing the video’s visual references to gothic culture?

A Pre-History of Headbanging Before Black Sabbath

I just wanted to share this conference paper which I will be presenting in a few weeks! It was written for the Modern Heavy Metal conference this June in Finland, and will be included in a conference proceedings book. But I wanted to make sure the paper was available to anyone, not just people who have the time and money to attend the conference.

The paper can be downloaded for free at the link below; it is copyrighted by myself and by the organizers of the conference, so please do not reprint without contacting me for permission. Enjoy!

“Metal Movements: Headbanging as a Legacy of African American Dance” on Academia.edu

“Metal Movements: Headbanging as a Legacy of African American Dance” PDF

Edit: The full conference proceedings are now available online.

Fragments and Asymmetrical Repetitions: Meshuggah-like Rhythms in Tesseract’s “Retrospect”

Note: This is part of a series commemorating the 25-year anniversary of the band Meshuggah by exploring the roots and legacy of Meshuggah’s style of progressive metal rhythm.

Meshuggah’s unique rhythmic style is instantly identifiable, and it is easy to hear their influence in a number of recent bands. A number of Meshuggah’s imitators have been clustered together by fans and critics under the genre label “Djent.” This name supposedly refers to the staple sound of the style, a palm-muted power chord played with heavy distortion on the lower strings of a 7- or 8-string guitar. One of the more successful bands in this style is Tesseract, who layer the Meshuggah-influenced Djent sound with clean vocals, soaring choruses, and softer acoustic sections. A representative example of their style is the song “Retrospect” from their second studio album Altered State (2013).

Metal Without Riffs? “If I Were King” by Vardis

Note: This post is part of a collection of analyses based on the compilation New Wave of British Heavy Metal ’79 Revisited, an album put together by Lars Ulrich and Geoff Barton that is not only a significant account of a particularly important period in the history of heavy metal by two people who helped shape that scene, but may also be a revealing window into the influences and musical raw materials that Ulrich drew from when he founded what became the most successful metal band in history, Metallica.

The band Vardis was a threesome who originally began playing together in 1977 under the name “Quo Vardis.” The band had dropped the first word in their name by the time they released their first album, 100 MPH, in 1980. Unlike most debut albums, Vardis chose to compile their first record from live recordings. One of these songs, “If I Were King,” was recorded in a studio the same year and released on a compilation titled New Electric Warriors (1980). This studio recording is the version which appears on NWOBHM ’79 Revisited.

Microtiming in a Riff from Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”

Metallica’s song “Master of Puppets” has extremely powerful and driving momentum, which is especially impressive given that it is riddled with meter changes and thrashes on for almost nine minutes. The 1985 album of the same name, on which the song was released, was praised by all sorts of critics, and is commonly described as one of the best metal albums ever released. ((See Steve Huey’s review of this album for All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com/album/master-of-puppets-mw0000667490 )) The title song in particular is a fan favorite, and is a staple of the band’s live sets. “Master of Puppets” is also one of Metallica’s most popular songs among aspiring guitarists, and the number of home-made transcriptions of this song available online is simply staggering — for example, ultimate-guitar.com has at least 45 separate tabs of this song alone, not including tabs of the whole album. ((At the time I’m writing this, 911tabs.com lists literally hundreds of “Master of Puppets” tabs hosted on other webpages, but a lot of those are redundant copies of the same transcriptions.))

But I feel kind of funny every time I look at a transcription of “Master of Puppets.” There’s a lot of changing meter in this song, and there’s one riff in particular in the verses which has several measures of 4/4 followed by what is usually transcribed as a single measure of 5/8. Continue reading

Accidental Variation in Jaguar’s “Back Street Woman”?

Jaguar’s song “Back Street Woman” was first released as a single in 1981, with a song called “Chasing the Dragon” as a B-side. Jaguar had released a couple of demos in the preceding year, but the recording of “Back Street Woman” that appears on NWOBHM ’79 Revisited is definitely from the ’81 single, and no earlier recording of the same song appears to exist. Interestingly enough, of the songs I’ve transcribed so far from this compilation, most seem to be from 1980 or 1981, not 1979. In other words, the title “’79 Revisited” is a bit of a white lie.

Incomplete Choruses in Sweet Savage’s “Eye of the Storm”

Sweet Savage’s “Eye of the Storm” is the second track of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal ’79 Revisited compilation. ((In the rest of this article, New Wave of British Heavy Metal is abbreviated NWOBHM.)) According to the extensive and fairly reliable fan database Encyclopedia Metallum, “Eye of the Storm” was first released by the band in 1981 on Sweet Savage’s first demo tape. ((This 1981 demo tape also is the first appearance of “Killing Time,” a song Metallica covered on their 1998 album Garage, Inc. Apparently the title “’79 Revisited” doesn’t refer to the year 1979 specifically.)) The version on the NWOBHM ’79 Revisited album doesn’t sound like a demo tape, and is from a live session Sweet Savage recorded for BBC Radio1 in 1981. ((This recording was released by the BBC the same year as part of a compilation of sessions from Radio1’s Friday Rock Show. http://www.discogs.com/Various-The-Friday-Rock-Show/release/1722530 )) Sweet Savage released a few singles in the ’80s, but they didn’t manage to put out a proper album until they had a reunion in 1996, too late to get the kind of fanbase or commercial success that landed bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest in the history books. ((Eduardio Rivadavia over at AMG music describes this compilation as including “relative unknowns such as Sweet Savage…”)) Continue reading

Subtle Meter Shifting in Pantera’s “Primal Concrete Sledge”

Note: This is part of a series commemorating the 25-year anniversary of the band Meshuggah by exploring the roots and legacy of Meshuggah’s style of progressive metal rhythm.

The groove metal band Pantera may not seem like an obvious choice for a series of posts about Meshuggah and progressive metal. Pantera began their career in 1981 as a power metal band that performed in spandex and had huge hairdos. In 1987, Pantera switched out their lead singer and started developing a new visual brand and playing style. ((This parallels a general shift across many heavy metal genres away from the flamboyance and theatrics of 70s stadium rock and glam metal, towards a cultivated every-day look and dirtier sound. A notable recent book that tells the whole story is Ian Christe’s 2004 Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, although his claim that Pantera “fused metal and rap in a more fluid manner than Anthrax” (p. 229) is misleading at the very least, given that vocalist Anselmo demonstrates disdain and near-complete ignorance of rap and hip-hop in many interviews.)) “Diamond” Darrell switched his nickname to “Dimebag,” and the band ditched the leather and the hairspray in favor of t-shirts and jeans. Musically, the new lead singer Phil Anselmo began using a rough, more growled delivery style instead of a power metal falsetto, and the band’s music began to take a few cues from thrash metal bands like Metallica.

But the most influential and innovative part of Pantera’s new playing style was their approach to rhythm in their riffs. They borrowed from the aggressive, percussive approach to playing the guitar that you can hear on some of Metallica’s heaviest songs, with lots of bottom-heavy palm-muted guitar accents and a few string bends. Sometimes, like on the song “Heresy,” they actually sound a bit like Metallica. But on quite a few songs, Pantera uses riffs with syncopated, off-beat rhythms that groove much more than anything Metallica ever wrote. When I say that Pantera is groovy, however, I don’t mean that they are anything less than heavy — in fact, even though Pantera strays farther from the beat than most thrash metal bands, their heavier songs are more visceral than Metallica. (That’s my opinion, maybe not yours — let me know if you agree in the comments!)

Fragments of Riffs and Small Alterations in Meshuggah’s “obZen”

Meshuggah is on a tour they’re calling “25 Years of Musical Deviance,” marking the 25th year since their first official release, Meshuggah EP (1989). I saw them perform with Between The Buried And Me here in Chicago on June 15th, which got me thinking about commemorating this anniversary in my own way. Meshuggah is famous for their mind-bending rhythm tricks and their devastatingly heavy sound. What better way to pay tribute to their career so far than a series of posts about progressive metal rhythm?

The Promise and Perils of Online Sources: Trying to Figure Out a Riff from Death’s “Torn To Pieces”

The song “Torn to Pieces” from the 1987 album Scream Bloody Gore by one of the progenitors of death metal, Death, has a simple verse-chorus structure that I’ve seen a lot in early death metal. ((Lots of other songs on this album have a similar verse-chorus structure. The demos by Swedish death metal trailblazers Nihilist (later Entombed) also use a lot of similar simple verse-chorus structures. There’s a popular myth that death metal is better than other rock music because it avoids verse-chorus structures, but it’s not entirely true. For lots of examples of this claim, see Natalie Purcell Death Metal Music: The Passion and Politics of a Subculture (2003), pp. 12-15)) In the version of the song that appears on the album, there are two verses for each chorus, and each of these three units in the cycle has its own riff:

0:00 Verse 1 (Riff A) 0:30 Verse 2 (Riff B) 1:01 Chorus (Riff C) 1:19 Verse 3 (Riff A) 1:50 Verse 4 (Riff B) 2:21 Chorus (Riff C) 2:39 Bridge (Riff D) 2:56 Guitar Solo (Riff D') 3:14 Chorus (Riff C) [Timings from the album version of the song]

There’s a nice bridge section with a short guitar solo, followed by a reprise of the chorus before the song ends. Unfortunately, Riff D in the bridge section is not very clear on the recording from the album. Many early extreme metal bands recorded their demos and debut albums when the members were just teenagers, and sometimes even at home with amateur studio equipment. Death’s Scream Bloody Gore is no exception — it was recorded before lead singer and guitarist Chuck Schuldiner had reached his twentieth birthday. I don’t know if Schuldiner just had a bad day in the studio and didn’t notice, or couldn’t actually play the riff correctly before he ran out of recording time, but no matter how much I tried re-listening and slowing the bridge section down I just couldn’t figure out what notes were there. Continue reading

Metal In Theory

Analyzing Heavy Metal Music