Two cultivars of human ugliness

Although this post has the title of one I've been thinking of writing for a long time (I mentioned it two and a half years ago!), it will probably not be the one I wanted to write back then; while I might at one point have been capable of writing such a post, I fear it is too late now. In particular, this post doesn't really have a point.  The proximate cause of anything appearing under this title is that last night at an Edmund Welles concert Cornelius Boots (not his real name! I'm shocked!), after a spectacular performance of Asmodeus the Destroyer, King of the Demons,* acknowledged that he'd ripped off the coda from Bethlehem, and then commended that band to the audience, saying that in the rest of their music (he'd adapted the ending from a song that I infer is called Aphel, die schwarze Schlange), there's near-constant screaming, real screaming; it sounds like he's dying at every note.  (He also said that he doesn't tell people about the Bethlehem connection frequently, which struck me as very strange, since it's acknowledged in the liner notes to Agrippa's 3 Books.)  And that comment of his reminded me of this idea, you see.

Partly I just think that "cultivar"—"cultivated variety"; cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and kings are all cultivars of the same species—is a cool word; the other part was listening for the first time (not long, I think, after first encountering the word "cultivar") to Black Dahlia Murder's album Miasma.  The Allmusic review of that album ends somewhat hilariously thus:

This harsh, blistering sledgehammer of a CD falls short of remarkable, but it's a decent (if somewhat uneven) effort that is worth checking out if one holds Scandinavian-style death metal and Scandinavian-style black metal in equally high regard.

Totally.

Black Dahlia Murder features two singing styles (and in fact two different singers).  That's not all that unusual; Opeth's Mikael Åkerfeldt employs both "clean" and "cookie monster" (as they're known) styles, frequently in the same song, though I didn't bother poking around Youtube long enough to find a good sample of that.  So here's clean vokills**, in a cover of Soldier of Fortune, and cookie monster***, in a song from My Arms Your Hearse, an album I don't actually have (and whose name demonstrates some of what makes Opeth so interesting; it comes from the rather grisly Comus song "Drip Drip"****).  What makes Black Dahlia Murder interesting is, rather, that their each of their singers practices a different form of deliberately ugly-sounding singing: they have a death metal growler and a black metal shrieker. Here's the song Flies; you can hear both within the first twenty seconds. The black metal dude comes off more repellent on this track; there's something about that style that makes it sound as if the person singing might really be simultaneously vomiting, or as if listening to it ought to make you really vomit, or something like that.  Definitely some vomit involved.  But that could just be because their death metal guy isn't as talented; it's certainly possible for that kind of growling to be discomfiting. (You'd think it would also fuck up your throat, but Åkerfeldt seems to be doing ok.) At the beginning of that second Opeth clip, there's really something uncanny about seeing that voice coming out of a person.  It might also be that that simultaneously constrained and high-pitched black metal stuff is just genuinely creepier, at least to me; one of the few vocal performances I can recall really being kind of creeped out by came when, at Chicago, I was overseeing the end of a previous DJ's set before mine began; he had been playing Khanate's Too Close Enough to Touch (last two minutes). While in the some lights***** it can seem just kind of goofy, in the right setting that raspy, constricted speak-singing can sound genuinely ugly, which is, you know, not an easy effect to achieve.  It helps to listen to the whole thing, but it's 11 minutes long.

Car Bomb seems to have a similar strategy to Black Dahlia Murder, though they have only one singer.  There's a pretty sweet bit, vocally, in Cellophane Stiletto, around 1:56–2:04.

And, of course, while I am wedded to the title Two Cultivars of Human Ugliness, because I think it's a great title, I'm not really wedded to the idea that contemporary ugly metal vox have to be traced to either black or death metal, especially since I'm basically talking out my ass here.

I'm not quite sure where it belongs but I want to include this great bit from the Tokyo Damage Report, which I am very pleased to learn has started up again (apparently quite some time ago, too):

There are two main approaches to noise : high brow and low brow.

The high brow noise guys see themselves as the latest in a long line of non-melodic, avant-garde music. . starting with Music Concrete in the 20's, Futurism in the 40's, and the weird shrieky sounds of Xenis Xenikakis or Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 60's. the goal, (like the goal of Modern Art in general) isn't to be aesthetically pleasing. Things like 'notes' or 'melodies' or 'rhythm' are for sell-outs! The goal is to be 'challenging' and take the listener to another world where he or she can contemplate the subtle sonic textures hidden inside the noise.

The low brow nosie guys see themselves as the latest in a long line of angry metalheads. . . Their attitude was, metal was noiser than rock: Distorted and angry . Death metal was noisier than metal-non melodic, dissonant. Grind bands like A.C. pretty much demolished the few remaining musical rules- becoming a blur without tempo or notes. Pretty much the only way to take things further out than A.C. was to just abandon rock instruments altogether and just produce pure white noise. Rather than thinking of noise as intellectual or contemplative, they are convinced that it's super duper extreme/ intense / messed up, and put totally disgusting pictures of mutilated corpses on their album covers.

The irony is, both approaches sound about the same!!

I assume A.C. is Anal Cunt? You also get totally disgusting pictures of corpses, or pornography, on Naked City album covers; it's well known that John Zorn admires metal, but he probably belongs more in the high-brow category.  Or: the high-brows who wish they were low brow.

* That is really the title, no lie; he drew some titters when he announced it before they started playing, but I think they managed to convince the audience by the end.  The other high point of that concert was a new piece apparently called "At the Soda Shop", which started out in the same style, I guess, as Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co.'s Harpsichord Truck, and which was gradually varied to have a kind of off-kilter melody, much more dissonance, and, uh, you know, spreading things out more. (I know what I mean.) Good stuff!
** I don't think I will ever stop finding that word amusing.
***I wasn't really paying attention when I listened to that song; it does have clean singing, though not that much of it.
**** Good lord, apparently Comus has started playing live again?! If you want to see a pudgy man who's probably in his sixties sing about being caked with blood and necrophilia, here's your chance; really, though, you're better off getting the album, since the audio quality in this video is predictably sucky, and it doesn't seem like the best performance anyway.  Dollars to donuts David Tibet was in the audience rocking a huge boner.
***** Another time at KZSU Tim Aher and Brian Collins were talking about the propriety of playing black metal during the day (and specifically right then, at the end of Tim's show, at around noon, I think).  The eventual conclusion was that while it would be incongruous to play music like that on a sunny day in Spring, the true darkness is in your soul anyway.