BACK IN BLACK (METAL)

Who would have thought, 14 years ago that fateful day when I picked up ‘A Blaze in the Northern Sky’ by Darkthrone (coolest cover ever), in Penny Lane Records on Bold Street (Liverpool)that Black Metal would ever become acceptable in any shape or form. The auspices weren’t good; its distant precursor thrash metal had achieved a modicum of credibility through bands like Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth; its immediate precursor, death metal, was still considered incongruous noise by the mainstream rock press, let alone the mainstream press; and Black metal, well…. Black Metal was a bunch of long-haired misanthropic Scandinavian kids posing in make-up, waving pseudo-medieval weaponry above their heads, screeching about Satan and Vikings over a hissing racket that only the most involved would recognise as guitars – what chance did it have. Oh yeah, and the now infamous spate of murders and church burnings that followed obviously didn’t help…

Look at it now though. It has had a whole photography exhibition dedicated to its subculture, courtesy of Pete Best (which I took my mum to see at the Horse Hospital last year) and Black Metal reviews are appearing in ‘credible’ if not hugely popular music magazines such as The Wire and Boomkat, and even non-Black metal fans are starting to Southern Lord (coolest label name ever) have had an awful lot to do with it. By taking the sludgy guitars of doom and the repetitive hum of drone music a whole audience of bespectacled music nerds realised that the utter distortion of this kin dof music had some worth. Although the first few Sun O))) albums were more doom n drone experiment, bringing on board the likes of Merzbow, in the last couple of years they’ve brought in actual Black Metal types to help them out and covered an Immortal song on ‘Black One’.

In turn Black metal itself seems to have had a resurgence of sorts, in the form of the latest releases from Darkthrone, ‘Sardonic Wrath’, and 1349, ‘Hellfire’, the latter of which I truly believe is actually the sound of evil, although whether or not these albums will ever get as far as The Wire remains to be seen. The important thing is, that this is the kind of music I would paint Citadel Miniatures to, I kid you not (images coming soon).