I’ve been trying to avoid writing straight up reviews with this site. I generally don’t read them, because I think it’s a boring format, and most of the time they just come down to a number/letter/star rating with some weak justification to explain it, so why bother writing them? However, the lack of interesting things happening in my own life has consistently pushed me towards writing about art/media kinds of issues. So I’ve been trying to offer criticism, rather than just reviewing because I like to write about what the I think about a subject, not just whether or not it’s any good (this is also a minor semantic debate, and it makes me sound like an ass, so consider yourself lucky that you don’t lay awake thinking about these things at night). I think that all art can and should be judged by itself. It’s kind of like that thing about the tree falling in the forest, except I’m more curious about why the tree fell than what it sounded like.

Which, somehow, brings me to Skeletonwitch and their album Beyond the Permafrost. I’m just going to throw that whole last paragraph out and tell you that this band rules. Their name rules. That album art up there rules. If that doesn’t make you want to listen to this band then I’m afraid you’re beyond the kind of help I can give. There’s really not anything I can say that will give you a better idea of what the band sounds like than you could get just by going to their myspace and listening yourself. However, in the interest of writing something interesting, I’ll make an attempt at getting in depth after the jump.

If there was ever a genre of music that needed to be measured solely by its own merits, metal is it. If you compare it to just about any other kind of music, metal’s basically a joke. It tends to come across as a bunch of macho-posturing, with everyone trying to be louder, faster and heavier than everything that came before it. It probably doesn’t help that the only metal that ever gets popular is inevitably the worst representation of the genre (with the possible exception of Guns ‘N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction and Metallica’s Black Album). Hair metal, rap metal and nu-metal were pretty much the last examples of metal to go mainstream, and that stuff was awful.

Skeletonwitch probably isn’t an exception to that. There’s a certain suspension of disbelief that you have to adopt in order to really enjoy it. It’s sort of like watching a horror movie. You know that you’re going to be subjected to all kinds of stupidity and unbelievable situations, so you’ve got to just shut off that part of your brain and go with it.

So what do you get with skeletonwitch? Well, on the top, you’ve got lyrics about demons, witchcraft and the like, along with song titles like “Sacrifice for the Slaughtergod.” I think, to some extent, nobody is meant to take that stuff seriously. Since Black Sabbath, almost every band in the genre has just been recycling the same themes for their songs, because you couldn’t exactly sing about love and peace over this kind of music. That said, I think there are some moments in this album where they push it to the limit almost for comedic effect. For example, the song “Fire from the Sky” has something to do with demons taking over the earth, and there’s a line that goes “Evil now rains down upon us/with fire from the motherfucking sky.” It’s funny in a Dethklok kind of way. There’s also a point in “Within my Blood” where singer Chance Garnette introduces the guitar solo by saying “Cannot escape what is within my blood. Two, Three, Go!” almost in a demented blues style.

But that, in my opinion, is all pretty much ornamentation. The real focus of the album is the guitar work of Nate Garnette and Scott Hedrick. This album is nothing if not a clinic of metal rhythm guitar. It’s not just the typical palm-muted open E and power chord riffs that most people stick with. There are seamless harmonies all over this album, my personal favorite being the opening of the aforementioned “Within my Blood,” along with intricate, technical rhythm fills that almost upstage the lead work. One refreshing thing about this album is that it’s all guitar, drums and bass, with almost no effects or even downtuning present. When seemingly every other band is bringing in all kinds of synths and tuning down as far as C, it’s nice to hear a straightforward album with just the band playing their asses off.

So yeah, you should really listen to Skeletonwitch. I’m now going to go back to not writing reviews, because this took way too much effort.

Update:
I just found this interview with Metal Hammer and this road blog by guitarist Scott Hedrick from Revolver, so I felt like sharing.