On the Status of Stadium Status

Fives on Friday 4/26/2024

Happy Friday!

Last week I speculated that something in my life may have ended without my noticing, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. One potential candidate might have been my “career” as a freelance music critic. Other a brief return to Invisible Oranges last winter to cover a grindcore show and my print debut in Decibel in 2022 I haven’t written for anyone but myself since the start of the pandemic. I’m not broken up about this. I have no interest in playing the game. I love the writing, but I don’t have patience for the rest of it anymore. I never experienced the thrill of the hunt when sending pitches. Frankly, most of my best work, whether at IO or at Kerrang! happened because I could harangue my editors over texts or drinks until they plucked an actual idea for a piece out of my breathless monologuing. I’m grateful to everyone that’s let me slap my name onto their website but the itch has been scratched, in no small part because so many people are willing to let me harangue them directly instead, for which I am also extremely grateful.

I’ve noticed since I’ve returned to my blogspot-bred roots that my natural inclination to defend other music critic’s work, whether from my musician friends or from my own meaner instincts, has gradually melted away. I still sympathize and respect my former colleagues as workers and people, but I’m finding it harder to resist getting a little cranky when a stray sentence doesn’t sit right with me. With the understanding that my criticism comes from a love of the game, that I wish everyone the best professionally, and that I would happily buy a round of beverages for all involved, I’d like to extricate two thorns that have been bugging me for the last few weeks.

Let’s tackle the smaller one first. When scrolling through Pitchfork’s new release roundup post last week I saw the following excerpt from Sophie Kemp’s review of the new Chanel Beads album:

…a record made by people who really freak out about music, who know every twist and turn on Steely Dan’s Aja and are crazy enough to say, but what if we kind of rapped over this?

Now if I’m being generous the hypothetical italicized “this” that Chanel Beads are “crazy enough” to rap over is their own music. Music informed by Steely Dan’s Aja, apparently. Having listened to Chanel Beads I’m going to guess that Aja was an arbitrary example meant to signify the seriousness of the band’s craft and execution rather than a straight-on comparison. Nothing on Your Day Will Come sounds much like “Deacon Blues”. Still, I really wish Kemp had gone with a different example because history has proven that rapping over Steely Dan, and especially Aja, is an extremely normal impulse.

Is this a consequence of De La Soul being off of streaming for so long? Are we so done with the 90s that we’ve forgotten about Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz? I know Kanye is out of his mind now, but was he crazy to sample “Kid Charlemagne” on “Champions”? I can accept that Steely Dan aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the idea that you’d have to be some kind of creative maverick to rap over 70s jazz rock played by the best session musicians of the era strikes me as ahistorical at best. Again, I suspect that Kemp was only using Aja as a stand-in for musician-friendly music. If the plan was to provoke guys like me with music degrees into checking out Chanel Beads, mission accomplished I suppose. They’re alright, not really my thing. Personally, I prefer Steely Dan.

The second piece that got stuck in my craw is going to take a little longer to sort out, so bear with me a little. A few weeks ago Stereogum published a long essay by former Revolver editor and fellow newsletter-er Eli Enis called “Metal’s Stadium Class Is Less Metal Than Ever.” I encourage you to the read the whole piece. Enis’ argument is that bands like Ghost, Sleep Token, Bad Omen, and Spiritbox have garnered a huge audience by slapping the surface aesthetics of heavy metal on otherwise unremarkable pop rock tunes. It’s a strong thesis, and I had a lot of fun reading Enis tear these acts a new one. Despite Langdon Hickman comparing my new album The Lonely Atom to Bad Omens and Spiritbox to my face on his Death//Sentence podcast, I have no real fondness for any of these bands. I’m happy to watch music critic target practice from the sidelines. All of these bands are big enough to weather the blow, and I doubt that the majority of their fans even know that Stereogum exists. Knowing that no one’s career is in jeopardy, it was easy for me to lean back and enjoy the show. It’s refreshing to see a writer draw a line in the sand about what mainstream buffoonery they can no longer sanction.

Enis takes particular issue with the way the bands in his crosshairs openly claim inspiration from non-metal pop acts like The Weeknd and Beyoncé. Things get shaky once Enis starts arguing that this influence from non-metal pop is unique to the present:

So what’s novel to this moment isn’t that Bad Omens’, Sleep Token’s, and Spiritbox’s most popular songs happen to be their catchiest ones. It’s that the totality of their sounds — not just their singles, but album cuts, too — are directly dialed into major-label pop, and they’re explicitly taking influence from some of the most mainstream, non-metal pop singers of the day. It would be like if Metallica were folding Michael Jackson parts into the “Black Album,” or if Slipknot mined influence from Maroon 5 on Vol. 3.

Huh. Are we seriously holding up Metallica and Vol.3 as our beacons of “true metal” in the mainstream? The same Vol.3 with all of the acoustic ballads and pop rock hooks? The one produced by Rick Rubin? The same Rick Rubin that had just shepherded Red Hot Chili Peppers into their soft rock era on Californication and By The Way? The same Metallica that become synonymous with the concept of selling out in the 1990s following the release of the black album?

I want to examine the case of Metallica in particular because I think it reveals a rhetorical error in Enis’s approach. Did Metallica take inspiration from Michael Jackson for their self-titled album? Probably not. But you know who did? Def Leppard. A minute and a half into the Classic Albums episode about Def Leppard’s Hysteria guitarist Steve Clark asks “why can’t a rock band sell records to an Elton John fan or a Michael Jackson fan without losing their original market?”. Hysteria might not be as astronomically popular as Metallica but it is a platinum album fifteen times over and home to a Billboard no. 1 hit in “Love Bites”. Surely this qualifies Def Leppard as part of metal’s stadium class during the high days of hair metal. Strangely, hair metal barely factors into Enis’s piece at all save for a stray mention of Motley Crue. I suspect that Enis is excluding hair bands like Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, and Guns’n’Roses who dominated rock radio and stuffed arenas in the late 80s because they aren’t heavy enough to qualify in his eyes as metal. This puts his whole argument into a bind however, because if Bon Jovi aren’t metal and are instead pop music what should we make of Metallica hiring Bob Rock to produce the black album? Are we supposed to imagine that the guy that engineered Slippery When Wet hadn’t spent a lot of time listening to Thriller, even if only out of professional obligation? Moreover, in David Masciotra’s book on Metallica for the 33 1/3 series Metallica cite a show opening for Aerosmith as the catalyst to streamline their sound and aim for what Kirk Hammett calls “soul groove”¹. Is trying to compete with “Dude Looks Like A Lady” any less of a betrayal of thrash metal than trying to compete with “Beat It”?

Hair metal is extremely inconvenient to Enis’ argument regardless of whether you believe that it counts as “real metal” or not. If hair metal is real metal, then it’s a great example of another moment when metal’s mainstream was inspired by pop. If hair metal isn’t real metal, then all of the famous hair metal bands were just pop rock acts disguised as metal bands, which is exactly what Enis claims Sleep Token et al are. In either case the present is hardly unique in metal’s history. Enis runs into this exact paradox when he acknowledges that Linkin Park, Evanescense and Disturbed all served a similar “metal exterior, pop interior” role in the early 2000s. If metal has been here before in 1987 and 2002, why all the fuss in 2024? The answer lies in Enis’ description of the current pop metal playbook “where the vague idea of metal is used to market a hunk of normie-millennial cultural detritus as something alternative.” If you sent this sentence back in time with the word “millennial” swapped out for Gen X or Boomer it would work just as well as a critique of nü-metal and hair metal respectively. The same is true of Enis’s balking at modern bands bringing in pop songwriters, something that both Bon Jovi and Korn are equally guilty of. What bothers Enis isn’t metal being inspired by pop music, its metal being inspired by millennial pop music in particular.

Here I should probably ask myself whether I’m wincing from my own proximity to the blast radius of Enis’s bombshells. After all, I am a millennial who plays heavy metal-ish music and isn’t shy about acknowledging the influence of Future or The Weeknd on my songwriting. Am I feeling the heat because I spent my peak metal blogging years as the head editor of Invisible Oranges arguing for a nü-metal revival and a friendly relationship with pop music? Maybe, but I have no desire to make this about me. If Enis is coming for the throat of The Millennial Metal Poptimist as a Type of Guy, good. I won’t stop him. Come kill me bro. It’s reasonable, healthy even, to be sick of Imagine Dragons and The Weeknd, especially if you don’t belong to the generation that vaunted them into their current state of over exposure. If the rules of poptimism brought us here to Sleep Token, throwing the rulebook out the window is a rational response. It is high time for a new set of critical values and some new bands to represent those values in practice. I have some theories as to what that new set of values should be, but I’ll save them for my forthcoming essay “Toward Progmatism”.

Bottom line, I agree with Enis that these bands are wack even if I don’t think they’re historically unique. I think my advocacy for pop influence and Enis’s dismissal of it both make a lot of sense if you compare our careers. I was the head editor of an underground metal blog who got particularly sick of the worst parts of underground metal. Enis was the head editor of a major metal magazine who is particularly sick of the worst parts of mainstream metal. No wonder we both got green with grass envy.

If we can meet in the middle and agree that metal needs some new stars, what candidates should we consider for the role? The way I see it, if metal bands are looking for hooks firmly within their own genre’s history they’re going to owe a huge debt to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. How lucky then that classic metal is having a bit of a moment, both on its own and by proxy in the resuscitation of melodic death metal. As I’ve pointed out in my Listening Diary for a few years now, classic metal is in the midst of a goth phase. I suspect a lot of the guys I saw in Chicago who scoffed at Tribulation when they opened for Envy and Deafheaven are taking a big ol’ bite out of their winter boots these days. The biggest band of this wave, and the one with the most industry muscle behind them, is Unto Others. I wouldn’t be surprised if them or a band like them but just slightly cuter cracks into the Sirius circuit. As for melodic death metal, I wouldn’t bet against Gatecreeper elbowing their way into the “next Lamb of God” category. Those boys hustle hard, and I suspect their new album will have a lot of guitarists pillaging their old Amon Amarth CDs for new riffs.

Whatever the next generation of A-listers looks like I’m certain that there will be another generation of critics who can’t stand them. By that time it’ll be Enis and his generation’s job to set the kids straight. I’ll probably have gone fully hermit mode by then, but before I do here’s one last piece of advice: if you’re having a hard time grappling with the cyclicality of pop culture it might not hurt to get a little into Camus before you hit 40. You can thank me when the rock rolls back down the hill.

# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #

• On April 29th I’m drumming with Laughing Stock for our first ever show in Manhattan. We’re playing at Berlin on Avenue A, opening for Sugar Milk. Grab tickets while you can!

• If you’re interested in metal-ish music that takes inspiration from popular music but doesn’t sound anything like Imagine Dragons, you’ve come to the right newsletter. My latest record of genre-warped tunes full of both riffs and hooks is out now where records are streamed and purchased. It’s called The Lonely Atom and it’s about how the internet tears us apart. Listen to it now on my bandcamp page:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Listening Diary ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Here are five songs that I enjoyed listening to recently! You can find a Spotify playlist with all of this year’s tracks here.

“So Excited” by They Hate Change (Wish You Were Here…, 2024)

Shouts out to Cabbages for putting me on to this dance/rap group. Who knew that listing cities in Florida could be so catchy?

“American Caveman” by Liquid Mike (Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, 2024)

I saw these guys getting some props in the Indie Baksetball Discord and decided to check them out. Not surprised in the least that they’ve since toured with Joyce Manor. Both bands are good at squeezing big melodies into tight spaces. Liquid Mike’s brevity makes it all the more startling when the lyrics in the second verse zoom out to the scale of geological time. Neat harmonica, too!

“Canned Air” by A Fish In The River (Forest God, 2024)

Patrick Lyons wrote these guys up on Inbox Infinity, describing them “doomy indie rock” and compared them to Cloakroom. Well, you can call me Willem Dafoe because I happen to have made some doomy indie rock myself. Thus obligated to support my unaware contemporaries I gave Forest God a spin and walked away very impressed. Turns out this Portland band have some prog chops hidden up their presumably flannel sleeves. The EP covers a lot of ground, but this tune might be my favorite of the bunch. Sounds like Pedro the Lion covering the best parts of a Kayo Dot song.

“Double-Crosser” by Maneating Orchid (Hive Mind, 2022)

Mathcore Index repped this band from Bangalore years ago, and for reasons that I can’t explain I saved their bandcamp page to my reading list instead of my listening list. If I hadn’t made this error you would have likely have heard about this song on this blog back in 2022. Oops. Do you like music that sounds like the a fax machine seeking vengeance for mankind’s crimes? You’ll dig this.

“No Condition Is Permanent” by Marijata (This is Marijata, 1976)

In the coming weeks you’re about to see a lot of tunes that I heard as a result of binging that RateYourMusic charts YouTube channel I shared a few months back. This is the highest rated record from Ghana. This of course says more about the users of RateYourMusic than it does about the nation of Ghana, but don’t let that stop you from getting down to some nasty grooves. As I’ve found with a lot of the older Afro-Funk records, the “rough” production is a big part of the appeal. Listen to how ghostly the keys sound on tape, and the way the recording distorts when the singer really goes for it in the second half.

\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /

Here are five micro reviews of CDs from my high school and college collection. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.

Unhallowed by The Black Dahlia Murder (2003) - Death Metal

This band got lumped into the metalcore scene because of their look and the bands they toured with, but they were and remain a straight up melodic death metal band. The metal scene is dumb for this reason and many others, but through sheer perseverance The Black Dahlia Murder have turned themselves into a reliable legacy act on the metal circuit. Good work, lads. That said, they were never quite my thing. Their songs don’t have the hooks of At the Gates or the atmosphere of Dark Tranquillity for example. They’re fine, and I respect any band that can last this long, but I can’t say that I listen to them often.

In Utero by Nirvana (1993) - Alternative Rock

I believe this was a birthday gift from my sister after she caught me listening to her copy of Nevermind and chided me for listening to “heroin slacker music”. Frankly, this album fits that description way better than Nevermind. The drumming on this album made a huge impression on me, the combo of Grohl and Albini is *chefs kiss*. This thing is kind of a tough hang though, the post-success career demolition and Gen X lethargy does not leave a great taste in my mouth.

Bee Thousand by Guided By Voices (1994) - Indie Rock

My dad got this for me when I was 13 because he had read somewhere that Guided by Voices were an influence on some of the other rock bands I was listening to at that age. I had no patience for the lo-fi production asa youth so I never listened to it much, sorry Dad. Hearing it with fresh ears, I really enjoyed it. Feels like someone having an extremely fruitful “song a day” project. White Album era Beatles stuff. Very funny at times, great melodies throughout.

Son, I Loved You At Your Darkest by As Cities Burn (2005) - Post-Hardcore

I bought this at Warped Tour 2005 shortly after being handed a bunch of Hare Krishna pamphlets. This band however are part of the Christian side of the post hardcore scene. Spun the hell out of this for a week and then got sick of it and moved on. There’s some really cool guitar stuff going on in this record. The vocals are, hmm, a lot. I could see the delivery being a bit too calibrated towards the white belt/youth large t-shirt contingent for most people. From what I’ve read this band has changed their sound a lot since this record.

Take A Look In The Mirror by Korn (2003) - Nü-Metal

The last album their original lineup, and the final album on their record deal at the time. Apparently this was rushed out so they could get out of the contract and you can tell. “Y’all Want A Single?” is fun in the dumbest way imaginable, but the rest is pretty tired. You can see why they started experimenting with their sound and songwriting process after this album. Nas shows up at one point and really mails it in. Did Jay-Z beat him on the nü metal collaboration front too?

1. Chapter 1, pages 25-26.