“Between the velvet lies
There’s a truth that’s hard as steel
The vision never dies
Life’s a never ending wheel”
- Ronnie James Dio “Holy Diver”

If you haven’t heard yet, Ronnie James Dio died this morning at age 67. The cause of death hasn’t been announced, but he’s been battling stomach cancer since last year. Until that’s confirmed though, I’m just going to assume that the real cause was dragons. Those bastards.

There’s always a tendency to inflate a celebrity’s death into something more than it is, or to turn it into a personal thing. I’m certainly guilty; when Hunter S. Thompson’s died it put me into a real funk for a few weeks. It’s always terrible when anyone dies, and when it’s someone who’s made a major impact in a lot of lives, it’s easy to treat it as a big thing. But I don’t think that’s fair.

We, by which I mean pretty much all heavy metal fans, will remember Dio for the music we love. He’s in that rarefied echelon of artists whose influence can be seen in almost everyone who came after him. He’s absolutely one of the best vocalists of all time, and he helped define the style and substance of the entire genre. When we say things are “metal,” we’re saying it’s something Dio would have done.

He also popularized the devil horns, which is almost on par with inventing the high five.

In a world where most frontmen are histrionic man-children, from Ozzy Osbourne to David Lee Roth to Axl Rose and anyone else you can name, Dio stands out for never trying to be bigger than the music. Sure, he had the outrageous costumes and over-the-top videos (see below), but that always felt fun.

I guess my point with all this is that Dio never needed to be anything more than what he was in life, so let’s not make him something more in death. I’m just gonna crank up Holy Diver and rock out the way he would have wanted.

]]> http://www.seitzwrites.com/2010/05/16/the-world-just-got-a-little-less-metal/feed/ 0 http://www.seitzwrites.com/2009/01/14/you-should-really-listen-to-skeletonwitch/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=you-should-really-listen-to-skeletonwitch http://www.seitzwrites.com/2009/01/14/you-should-really-listen-to-skeletonwitch/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:17:20 +0000 Seitz http://www.seitzwrites.com/?p=151

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.

I first saw this over at Metalsucks, where Corey Mitchell called it his sight unseen nominee for best metal DVD for 2009. I’m inclined to agree with him, but I guess we’ll both find out for sure whenever it gets released (Amazon has a book of the same name slated to come on out March 12, 2009. Let’s hope the DVD will follow shortly after.)  Apparently, the movie has been screening at festivals, been nominated for a couple of awards and generated some positive press, but like I said, I only heard about it a few days ago.

Watching the trailer, I honestly thought that this was another Spinal Tap-esque mockumentary at first (I mean, one of the guys is named Robb Reiner, and Anvil is already such a great fake band name), but a quick wikipedia search revealed that no, Anvil is a real band (and I’ve been worried that my site looks bad), and they’ve apparently been pretty productive while languishing in obscurity.

I love music–metal in particular–and I’ve been playing guitar for years, so you can imagine why I’d be interested in seeing a movie about underdogs chasing a dream as rock stars. There are so many bands that fell by the wayside over the years, but it looks like the guys in Anvil are legitimately making a run at relevance in this movie (of course, being Canadian, their only real competition in their homeland is Rush). I’m also glad to see movies about unheralded bands being made. The world really doesn’t need another Some Kind of Monster (There’s a reason why the movie was called Rocky and not Apollo, if you get what I mean).

When I heard about Anvil though, I started to get curious about why there aren’t more good rock movies. This is Spinal Tap and “Metalocalypse” are the only two that come to mind, the former for the same reasons listed in the last paragraph and the latter because it so easily mocks everything about metal and stardom. The thing is, every band out there seems to claim that their lives were no different from Spinal Tap, so I guess maybe filmmakers just don’t see a reason to make them. I think I was trying to hint at this in my “Legend of Master Legend” post, but a lot of rock bands exist in near-fictional worlds or arrested development anyway. We expect them to play music and entertain us, but there are very few bands I would actually want to watch in a film context.

(I hate to keep harping on Metallica, but that movie almost ruined the band for me as much as St. Anger did. I don’t want to watch anybody go through real therapy. I’d much rather watch fictional therapy, where all you have to do is have Robin Williams repeat “it’s not you’re fault” until Matt Damon cries and everything is fine. I don’t want to see a band that writes songs like ‘Seek and Destroy,’ ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ and ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ suddenly start taking themselves so seriously once they get to their 40s. The only good part of that was seeing Dave Mustaine cry. He has to be the only person who makes Lars Ulrich sound reasonable.)

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. There are, of course exceptions to bands I’d want to see onscreen. Chief among them is Every Time I Die and their “Documentary” DVD Shit Happens. Those guys don’t take themselves seriously at all.

The other movie I really want to see made some day would be an adaptation of Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van. That would be the anti-Spinal Tap. Instead of getting lost behind stage, they’d get beaten by a bunch of skinheads behind stage. Or instead of having Stonehenge be too small, they have the show broken up by police. And instead of talking about amplifiers going to 11, Henry would just talk about how much he hates everyone.

But maybe I’m the only one who wants to see that one…