RIFF MARKET

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: TOM BREIHAN
A Whole Other Can Of Worms

So my pet obsession this year has been metal. The music is only part of it, though a lot of the music is great. But what's really been resonating with me lately is the sweeping immersiveness of the whole shit: metal isn't even just one world, it's a string of tangentially connected sub-worlds, all with their own ideas about how to best convey a worldview defined by ambient, directionless rage. Part of what attracts me so much is how repellant it is. Seems like metal has spent the past decade or so bleaching itself of crossover urges, folding in on itself instead. As far as I know, metal 2006 has no Danzig figure, no titanic figure who can capture eighth-graders' imaginations the way Danzig captured mine when I was an eighth-grader. Instead, it's turned itself into an only-for-obsessives cult, comfortable with its own ridiculousness. Xasthur can say in interviews that he pretty much devotes his life to attaining a platonic ideal of black-metalness, for instance. That's a completely ridiculous thing for a grown man to be doing, but I'm really glad someone is doing it anyway.

Looking at most of my favorite metal records of the year (Mastodon, Celtic Frost, Nachtmystium, Enslaved, Gojira), there aren't a whole lot of hooks to be found. Songs don't follow standard pop-song structure, and neither do they intentionally fuck around with pop-song structure the way the Unicorns or Deerhoof or whatever other boring indie bands do. Their sprawl is more symphonic: songs lurching from movement to movement, prettiness to ugliness, punishing blastbeat to squabbling solo, not following any logic I know how to recognize. The big exceptions here are In Flames, who I guess are pop stars in Sweden and thus pretty much inhabit another universe entirely, and the Sword. The Sword is a whole other can of worms. They're unapologetically retro, and they write songs with hooks and structures and stuff. They're also signed with Kemado, an indie-rock label. All that stuff, from what I can tell, makes actual metal dudes react to this band with extreme suspicion, the sort of thing I remember from my high-school punk days when we worried that any remotely catchy band was trying to piggyback on the purity of our scene to get dirty mainstream money or whatever. When the Sword opened for Trivium a couple of months ago, there was this weird shouting match that went down: some kids chanting for Trivium, others screaming "THE SWOOOORD!" back at them. It was funny. And Trivium aren't exactly standard-bearers for pure-metal authenticity either; they're twenty-year-olds with flashy onstage theatrics and painfully obvious next-Metallica ambitions. You pretty much can't advance beyond suspicion in metal unless you live in a cave and eat candles and stab your own eyes out, so that's sort of what some people do.

Anyway, the whole Sword thing brings me to something else: a lot of ostensibly indie-rock people like me have also been nurturing pet metal obsessions this year, and that's probably because indie-rock has purged itself of all its ugliest, most misanthropic impulses on the way to being Sufjanized. This whole phenomenon would help explain, for instance, how that garbage-ass Boris album ended up getting so much love. Metal types, of course, are pretty uncomfortable with the idea of their power-fantasy scene being invaded and diluted by all these dilettantes; that's why Decibel, the best music magazine in the world right now, did its hipster-metal roundtable. But then, that's basically the fate of anyone who wants to explore a whole lot of scenes: you're an outsider wherever you go.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006