Here’s the most popular lists:

* Rhapsody Music: Best Metal albums of the decade
* A.V. Club: The decade’s best albums
* Decibel: the 100 greatest metal albums of the decade
* Noisecreep: Best albums of the 2000s
* Houston Examiner: Best metal albums of the decade 1999-2009

Our list stacks up well:

“Forget what the labels want you to buy. Forget the tends and the one-note purist music. Here’s a list of the best metal had to offer during the last decade, for real metal fans, by real metal fans!”

* Best heavy metal of the decade 1999-2009

People are too content to let others define the terms of discourse. As a result, they end up pushing corrupted definitions onto their allies, and corrupting them. – A.D. Vilanova, 1932

The idea of metal-specific music theory seems silly because all music theory is basically the same. What differs is method of composition, types of modes, scales, harmonies and melodies used — and these differences give each musical genre its unique sound and meaning.

If you look at the greatest metal albums, what you’ll notice is that often, they are composed of eight to twelve songs that all sound relatively the same, but on repeated listens, each one becomes unique and stands out…Like a collection of baroque pieces or Gregorian chants, it all sounds alike on the outside, but each individual piece varies greatly, at least to a trained ear.

Metal, more so than other forms of popular music, is structural music with narrative song forms, meaning that the music is composed of a series of repeated phrases (riffs) that follow each other and interact with each other…It’s more complex not only musically, but artistically as well, due to the fact that some form of ideation or ideology often precedes the composition of the actual songs.

Zach Zimmerman, L.A. Metal Weekly

This is a good place to start: we can’t look at metal in terms of rock music, or a fixed song structure with a single harmony and varied modes, but as a song structure defined by its phrases and from that, selecting modes and harmonizing them.

The approach to riffing in old school metal is designed to make small melodies or phrases complement each other, and have that define structure; in metalcore, like in rock or punk, riffs fit into a pop song structure, even with some modifications.

Brett Stevens, Examiner

That leads us to a study of melody and phrase, which is where metal is similar to free jazz, in that how phrases fit together determines “meaning” in a song, in contrast to other genres where coming back to a tone signifies a meaning in terms of harmony.

Nowadays, when people are taught classical theory, they are taught about harmonic progressions. It’s a fairly dry and academic pursuit. Back in the era when classical music was actually written, all composers were schooled in renaissance style counterpoint: that is, the way in which melodies fit together. Most people’s idea of a melody is an elaboration on a progression of harmonic notes, whereas in reality it is the only spontaneous part of a composition.

In my view, melody is a sequence of notes which manifests something the artist wishes to express, and this may be disguised by a harmonic progression, meaning that a melody does not have to be a ‘tune’. Every great composition has an underlying melodic structure which is its ’soul’; sometimes this is immediately evident, such as in Gregorian chant, Indian classical music, or even Mozart; in other works, it can be disguised either by polyphony proper, by harmonic notes (romantic music), or through the repetition of small sequences (riffs).

For me, the study of counterpoint has been far more engaging than the study of harmony, because the melodic integrity of the music gives birth to its theory.

Metal Hall

As that quotation points out, it’s a lot like classical music: structure through melody. And riffing heavy riffs!

War Master – “Chapel of Apocalypse” Demo 2009

“…For any career metalhead, it’s impossible to hear the name War Master without thinking of the classic Bolt Thrower album of the same name. War Master takes the patterns of later Bolt Thrower, like For Victory… and IVth Crusade, and renders them in the simpler, messier and more rhythmic style of the first two Bolt Thrower CDs.”

War Master “Chapel of Apocalypse” Demo 2009 (Examiner.com)

“…this demo is primitive and powerful grinding material; unlike the Bolt Thrower album, this material is less grindcore than old school death metal that grinds, and if you listen long enough, you can hear other classic death metal influences creeping in.”

War Master “Chapel of Apocalypse” Demo 2009 (Dark Legions)

You can get the cassette demo for $4 from Torture Garden Picture Company, and you can add War Master to your friends list on MySpace. You can also download the demo in mp3 format below and spread it around so this band gets some popular momentum:

War Master – Chapel of Apocalypse (Rapidshare) / War Master – Chapel of Apocalypse (Megaupload) 15mb

The mighty Imprecation, who in the 1990s helped develop a stype of death metal shared by Incantation and Possessed, have returned to music over the last few years and are now playing a live show in advance of new recorded material. If you like old-school blasphemous death metal of the faster variety, this is for you.

In some contrast, but of the same spirit, Blaspherian are the brainchild of ex-Imprecation guitarist Wes Weaver and several others. Their sound is more like Immolation or Obituary, dirge-laden death metal that specializes in dynamic contrast. The world moves with their shuddering ribspreader riffs.

To catch some of the best death metal Texas has to offer, visit Walter’s on Washington for this crushing show.

Saturday, September 26 8:00 PM
Walter’s on Washington
4215 Washington Ave.
Houston, TX
713-862-2513
http://www.4215washington.com

Vomitfest

This is one of those rare progressive and/or “weird” death metal bands that not only holds together, but generates an atmosphere. Unlike bad prog bands of all varieties, who patch together different artistic impulses in the same key or tempo and call it a song, these riffs are made to work together as if part of a continuing dialogue within each song.

Comparisons to Demilich, Voivod and Gorguts would be appropriate. Cosmic Atrophy do not try for the killer awkward and difficult riff, but fit together a series of smaller, eerie riffs that comprise an overall attitude or spirit to each song. The 2009 teaser track you can hear on their myspace represents not a new direction but a clearer vision of the same direction they showed on 2008’s Codex Incubo.

Cosmic Atrophy — Progressive Death Metal from Houston

While most of the world has gone nuts trying to make black metal into a blasphemous yet trendy extreme, Blaspherian go back to the roots of the death metal genre. Allegiance to the Will of Damnation uses the simple riffs in complex formulations that made bands like Morpheus Descends and Asphyx favorites among the old school.

Nodding to the American punk tradition, Blaspherian also employ a number of one- and two-chord rhythm riffs that ride an unsyncopated rhythm into bounding, pummeling heaviness. Vocals resemble the occult rantings of Sadistic Intent or Resuscitator, and song pacing calls to mind the spirit of the aforementioned Asphyx. At its heavier moments, this EP will appeal to those who enjoyed early Obituary or Infester.

While it does not work to distinguish itself in style, this music gains a voice of its own by how it combines the artifacts of the past and finds a new voice for them within that style. This expression, while somewhat chaotic as first releases always are, surges forth with a voice of its own despite keeping itself firmly anchored in the old school tradition. In that, it succeeds where others have gone nuts over style and forgotten substance.

I was listening to Lord Wind Atlantean Monument today, and while I’ve been of a long time of the opinion that this CD is the culmination of many themes he started with the second Lord Wind and fourth Graveland albums, now I’m seeing the pure simple truth of it: it’s the completion of his vision, as if enabling him to move on to something else.

Similarly, Profanatica’s latest is the culmination of all the rushed demos and early Havohej/Profanatica albums put together. It reminds me of how the first Master album summarizes Deathstrike and the unreleased 1985 material, and how the STP record then summarizes the next four years of work.

Some might say the latest from Immolation is also of this nature: artist learns his or her art the hard way, by practicing it, and finally reaches a maturity of both artistry and mind, and so summarizes themes that could not be expressed before but ran through their formative works.

I would argue that in an odd way, Immortal Blizzard Beasts is of this nature, although it doesn’t approach the grandeur of the early black metal. Rather, it develops on what the death metal demos wanted to be, a vision of what death metal would be with the passion of black metal.

To some degree, Averse Sefira Advent Parallax is this way also, combining that Deicide-style technicality with the Demilich quirkiness, and then mixing into it nineteen years of melodic black metal.

These albums are immensely satisfying in this light, like finally hearing the second side of a conversation heard years ago in that moment before dropping off to sleep, when everything seems of mythological symbolism. It’s like accepting death in triumph.

Rock music, at its core, was a product of the suburbs. Kids saw how fake it was to run away from problems to a boring little world where there was no hope of adventure. They also finally had money, because they were gonna need cars to get around.

Marketers saw this and started selling them country music sped up with black vocal styles, except made white, because the audience was completely white. It’s important to note that rock and blues were a scam. Nothing in them did not pre-exist, but by making some elements of what did exist outlandish, the marketers were able to claim it was new.

As a result, rock promised the other side of adventure, but it made a fatal mistake, and chose to idolize only the things that suburban life did not celebrate: sex, drugs/alcohol, staying out late, breaking laws, and so on. As a result, it wasn’t a different way as much as an inverse of the current way, and it rewarded those who didn’t take it seriously and so went on to become bankers and be comfortable.

Metal was a rebellion against this, in that in the midst of the summer of love, Black Sabbath were preparing to unleash something that sounded like a horror movie and had the same dark topicality which wasn’t about any single human. Rock was about the individual escaping by doing the forbidden, but metal was about finding the forbidden, esoteric truth to reality, which is that the individual is frail.

The horror movie concept — new horror arises, existing methods don’t work against it, people must struggle against the panic and delusion of others to survive, and finally may or may not conquer it by using cold cruel logic — was echoed in all of metal with some exceptions for the productization of Black Sabbath, heavy metal from 1972 to 1978, and the liberalization of speed metal that occurred as it assimilated hardcore in a time when we all feared the Republican candidate (who, as it turns out, was right more than wrong, but that’s the advantage of experience talking: ignore people who whine during conservative administrations, because most of them are just making a fashion statement).

Death metal was the flourishing of this concept, but it brought metal to a stop-point. All of metal up until that point had preserved its ludic, or playful, side, but death metal was coming dangerously close to being boring protest music like grindcore band Napalm Death and their mediocre forefather, the Dead Kennedys. Protest music is the music of those without souls who wail so someone else might save them. It’s impotent. Death metal took one look at that abyss and self-destructed.

The question was: if modern society is so awful that it resembles a horror movie, and the suburban lifestyle is just a manifestation of that society, and reinforcing “only death is real” removes the illusion, how do we reconstruct or build a new and better society? The answer came in black metal: turn toward the Romantic past, and unite it with a future where those who aren’t befuddled exterminate all the others and move on. Quintessential Nietzschean overman theory, merged with British Romantic poetry (Blake, Wordsworth) and American Gothic (Poe).

However, all through these years, metal has carried along the baggage from rock, which is idiots who “just want to have a good time,” which is the hipster code-word for do nothing but further the decay, because they’ve already given up on themselves. If metal doesn’t break the rock barrier, it will be dragged down into irrelevance, but I warned you of that back in 1992, so it shouldn’t be rocket science.

In discussing the Enlightenment, we stressed that it arose, in large part, as a strong reaction against what had characterized the previous one hundred and fifty yearsa series of inconclusive but extremely destructive religious quarrels and, often under the guise of religious issues, collisions between rival nations growing in power. From this perspective, the Enlightenment we can view as Western civilization’s attempt to seek through reason a means of understanding human problems and discussing them without involving conflicting traditions, especially religious traditions, which, given the loss of unity in the Christian Church, provided no longer a continuing way of reaching a consensus.
…
All of our political options, no matter what we call them (Liberal, Progressive Conservative, Christian Democrats, Social Credit, New Democratic Party, Republican, Democrat, or whatever) all adhere to this Enlightenment program. We have no significant electoral options outside of this tradition. The parties may quarrel about the extent of government control, about rates of taxation, about support programs, but underneath the apparent richness of choice there is a massive fundamental agreement about how society ought to be organized, what priorities society ought to pursue. This is particularly true of North America, since both America and AIDSland were founded as Enlightenment experiments and have no traditions from before this period, other than the Aboriginal cultures, which have been generally marginalized or exterminated in the service of this agenda.
…
There seems to be considerable agreement that what happened in that period we call the Romantic Era (in England from 1798 to about 1840) was of almost unparalleled significance, not simply in the amazing resurgence of quality in English poetry but also in our very understanding of art. Isaiah Berlin, a very well known historian of ideas, called the Romantic Movement the single most important shift in the sensibility of Western thinking since the fifth century BC.
…
In a spirit of boldness I want to offer the following idea as central to what was truly revolutionary about the shift known as the Romantic Movement: it marked for many people (although not for all) the abandonment of the idea that there was a given order in nature; it posited the notion that order was something not discovered in nature but created by the human mind. In words of John Adams: Chaos is the law of nature; order the dream of man.

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/introser/romantic.htm

The Enlightenment was the idea of rationality, and his definition of Romanticism is probably limited, because while it celebrated human choice it based itself on the antiquities and beauty of nature.

I think death metal, more profoundly than black metal, understood that the Enlightenment was a rejection of nature along with the church, and that the best aspects of Romanticism were its praises of nature and the chaotic, bloody, struggle-bound process by which our world came about.

Praising death as having meaning, for example, totally shits all over the idea from this author’s “Romanticism” rejects the order of nature. And one more from a Romantic poet.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; (1)
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, (2)
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus (3) rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton (4) blow his wreathed horn.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/wordsworth.html

This reminds me quite a bit of this:

As a “rational” being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them.
…
At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence. In comparison with its previous conduct, everything that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation, just as that previous conduct did of distortion. The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it.

Paradoxically, death metal is in praise of life, not by mourning death but by cheering its order in a time of insane delusion. I found that particularly fascinating.

Several threads here (Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, the various Venom arguments, and the Swedish DM thread in particular) have focused my interest on the question of abstraction in metal. It seems to me that key factor separating the classic albums that emerged between say 1988-1995 and both the first couple of generations of heavy metal and most of what has appeared since is the level of abstraction the great classics achieved.

The great inherent weakness of rock based metal was always its insipid literalism. With bands like Venom, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Cannibal Corpse, Cradle of Filth etc., neither music nor concept leaves much to the imagination. Such bands fill their musical spaces with the utterly predictable and their conceptual spaces with lyrics that are painfully self-explanatory. Metaphor and other more oblique approaches to communication are lacking on every level.

In contrast, death metal bands like At the Gates, Incantation, Deicide, Dismember, Therion, Atheist and Demilich introduced music that worked almost as if according to dream logic, as if calculated to leave an ambivalent interpretive space. Among such bands, the juxtaposition of seemingly opposing elements (consonance and dissonance, blasting and doomy passages, violence and beauty) served to create an ambiguous sensibility that embodied both the dissolution of the modern age and the haunting possibility of rebirth.

In black metal, this tendency was even more highly developed, with many bands projecting their music almost entirely into intellectual spaces defined by ideal rather than by fidelity to the current historical moment. Some bands did so through an embrace of the heroic past (Bathory, Burzum, Graveland and Enslaved), while others set their music in worlds that exist only in the mind (Immortal and Summoning).

An Abstract Revolution in Metal?

Some good points made here. Abstraction is a removal from the human perspective, but can be easily abused, because to idiots, the Unicorn in the sky and the the theory of relativity are both either “magic” or “stupid.”