What’s the deal with the whole extreme metal scene anyway? Every time I pick up a magazine like Terrorizor I see these chalk white faces gauntly staring out at me from behind some spidery cloud of black war paint which looks like it was applied by a 3 year old. Ok I get the inference to the pagan/pseudo Nazi stuff (which to be fair isn’t cool) but I don’t get why so many bands do it. I certainly do not get why bands from Japan with no shared culture with Norway whatsoever also put on the war paint. To me it seems like shallow shlock tactics designed to scare little girls and make loner guys who’d otherwise be sitting in their rooms wanking over the Suicide girls go ‘cooooool’ then try to form a band where the guitars sound like bees in bell jars, the vocals sound like someone is afflicted with the common cold and the drums sound like they’ve been pushed down the stairs complete with an assortment of china plates stashed away in the bass drum. What I mean is that death and black metal have been branded as much as any R n’ B or pop movement has been previously. When people start doing stuff for the mere fact that its become a ‘uniform’ or ‘tradition’ of that genre, we know we’re in trouble. I can’t really be bothered with bands who tow the party line whilst calling themselves originals and how they’re undeniably ‘doing something new’. Its bullshit, friends, and I don’t like to be a killjoy but it has to be said. The amount of times I’ve read an interview where the photo shoot has taken place in a snowy forest and the band members look like their pet hamster has just died is diabolically embarrassing. Who the hell takes them seriously anymore? I don’t know if extreme metal ever had any integrity in the sense that its already so overblown that it could easily seem like a parody of itself anyway but I digress. I digress because when I think this, I remember that we have Opeth. We have Opeth sailing along carrying the burning flame of extreme music with (barely any) pretensions and shedloads of true, exciting originality.

To listen to Opeth is (as I have said, without pretensions), to take an extraordinary journey across misty fields and moonlit glades, witching nights and rickety haunted windows. Opeth have created across 8 albums a unique aural world all of their own with signature twists and turns which always excites and surprises. Any number of their racing, claustrophobic masterpieces leave you with your heart in your mouth and the passages of music roll along like a tornado, filling every moment with something so amazing or so terrifying that they should stick a warning on the front covers saying ‘not suitable for pregnant women or people with heart conditions’. Neither epic nor grandiose are words which can describe Opeth. To use them would be derivative and lower them to the level of the oh so plentiful tacky power metal bands we seem to suffer from today. No, Opeth are as majestic as a humble wise man in ancient China. They have no pretence to anything other than what they create from their musical souls and to that end they are the true kings of extreme music today. The light and shade dynamics they are known for are so often imitated but never, ever bettered. Opeth can blast out of a storm into a meadow in a split second; from raging cymbals and guitars to some fuzzed up late summer evening acoustic guitar lullaby. Indeed knowing smiles and stunned nods of the head greet much of Opeth’s astonishing and brilliant material.

So, a gripe of mine in relation to what I just said is how people decided that after Opeth’s awesome use of acoustic/electric juxtapositions that it would probably lend an air of seriousness and musical integrity to their stuff if they surreptitiously nick the whole idea and chuck it into a few of their tracks; generally a shitty, misguided, delusional piece of ragged Scandinavian folk music that appears out of nowhere like a Jehova’s Witness and nags at you till you tell it to fuck off and then chuck the CD into the bin in a fit of burning unadulterated rage and frustration.

Opeth it seems, have unwittingly and unfortunately created a fad. I think Mikael Akerfeldt would probably be a little pissed off if he heard the result of his influence upon so many impressionable young metal bands today. The flame of bizarre 70s psych-prog has long since been pissed upon and flung out of the bathroom window and now we have a bunch of ne’erdowells who live with their parents blasting out an ‘eclectic’ range of utterly ball breaking metal music and then, to add insult to injury, a fucking cringe-worthy minute of ‘traditional’ folk music casually launched into the barrage of bloody noise to add ‘shades’ and ‘textures’. Fuck off. Your hyperbolic press releases will only serve to be written on the bands collective gravestone when you get dropped from a record label run by a guy who is a part time postman and lives in a village in northern Finland. No one wants you. Its overkill. Go and do your homework, then come back and write an album, preferably with a more creative drummer and a guitarist who is listening to the rhythm section. Geez what do you have to do around here to get people to listen? Its not just metal in which this happens but I’m just making the point so that the wonderful holier-than-thou metal fans can get a taste of their own medicine and realise that the shirt they are wearing, emblemised with what looks like a squashed spider is in fact a fake, shit, delusional, wannabe, copyist collective of people who want to be musicians because they think its fashionable. Die! Music isn’t about fashion! Burn your t-shirts and your patches! Cut your hair! Get rid of your badges! Tear your posters off your wall (as I write, beneath a large one of Hendrix)! Tell the corporatisation and standardisation of the music we love to suck Satan’s cock and realise that we’re being lied to, even out on the blackened fringes of music, blasted by the barren wind and rain of poverty and (relative) anonymity.

And I hear you scream ‘Opeth are on Roadrunner! Go and prostitute yourself to big business you sycophantic hack!’ But I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not! Opeth are a band who manage to keep the standards high and the creation original even with the forked silver tongue of big business (and bigger profits) hissing into their ears as exemplified wonderfully by Ghost Reveries. And don’t tell me that album was a ‘sell out’ one coz it wasn’t. I wouldn’t spend hours writing this shit in defence of a band who’s first major label album was shit. It wasn’t so fuck off, its subjective. You probably convinced yourselves it was shit just coz of the big red and white Roadrunner logo on the side. Get over yourselves you egomaniacs and enjoy the music. Just coz your band never got signed and had 24 fans, doesn’t mean Opeth sold out for signing to a major label. No. What it really means is that your band were godawful shit, scheisse and merde and that Opeth are brilliant and wanted the opportunity to spread that as far as possible and have the ability and means to do what their imaginations pleased. If the truth hurts then I’m sorry, but why not kick back, snort another line and quietly die whilst the rest of us can go on appreciating music for musics sake and not for some socio-political vendetta based on ones own inadequacies. Maybe I’ll be proved horrendously wrong when Opeth’s new record comes out in June but I highly doubt it. Whatever they choose to do will be accepted with interest and excitement by the vast majority of us. If they decided to employ a DJ then fine. Well its not fine but you get my drift….My point is that we gotta let the artists do what they do and we gotta also appreciate that ones so serious and dedicated as Opeth will a) always make decisions based on their feelings b) always be good or at the least, interesting and c) not follow the fads and fashions of the times. By supporting the rodent-like copyists we are undermining what we truly believe. By being one of them we are allowing Satan to anally violate us. Come on, I may be a bitter, opinionated hack with nothing better to do than vent my bile at innocent bystanders but at least I BELIEVE the stuff I write and I CARE about it and I am PASSIONATELY in love with music (and women, but that’s a different story which starts long ago….). Take heed of my word, friends, because I fear we’re on the verge of an apocalypse of creation and art and I for one wouldn’t be too happy if every band ended up sounding like Medina Lake. Yes!!!! The logical culmination of the mingling and mixing of all music to a homogenous primordial soup type entity is clearly and obviously emo! And good lord I do not want that to happen! In fact maybe I’d rather get chummy with Satan….but, oh dear lord its a catch 22! Fuck this….I’m becoming a lawyer.

By Liam McLaughlin