I do not

know anything. My name is Alex.

[alextherake]

31/156

Therion - Secret of the Runes (2001)

I’ve been depressed. I feel loved when I’m touched and feel loving when I can do things for people, and I’ve been dwelling on how it feels I don’t deserve to be snuggled at the best of times, let alone plaguetimes, or that anyone who wants to won’t for want to for very long, and also on how accountable I still am to so many responsibilities, and how useless I feel to those I care about amidst all this coronajunk, and and and... I’m not in danger; I recognize the useless spiral, and I’m dealing with it. It’s also been so beautiful outside - I waste hours just looking at the way the sun shifts around in its big dumb seat in the sky.

This album actually cheers me up. It’s epic and operatic and about Norse mythology. Very empowering. I hope it’s not accidentally racist, but it’s hard to get hung up on the words when the melodies are so FUN.

ALSO! One of the bonus tracks is a fucking ABBA cover.

I love ABBA.

Therion!

You shouldn’t have!

Wow! 

[alextherake]

30/156

Godflesh - Streetcleaner (1989)

Hey! Wow! This is dark and brutal and slow and I really like it. The vocals are like the grunt of the executioner, or the thud of wind pulled by the music’s hammer, which comes down right over your upturned face, over and over again.

And it’s an enjoyable experience! Although, it’s not a masochistic thing. It just feels honest about what it is and what it illustrates (that is, the dark, brutal, slowness of this horror of being human). It feels honest about what much of the other metal I’ve listened to has only felt postured about.

Yes, so I haven’t added to this blog since Corona came down on the world. I think this necessary isolation is bringing me closer to a friendship with my internal anger. Like, this was instantly accessible to me. Also, bourbon, yes.

FURNACE! FURNACE! FURNACE!

[alextherake]

29/156

Pantera - Cowboys from Hell (1990)

I can't hold onto what's going on here. I don't hear anything that strikes me as important or honest. If there's a single thread holding these songs together, it's the feeling of "badass" - like, the surface sense of something being badass without any particular joy or power. The effect is pretty similar to Judas Priest.

Musically, it chugs along and the solos are kind of fun, but so far it hasn't rewarded relistens. I will say this: it exists, and that's ok with me. Is this progress?

I’m trying to *get* metal - follow along with my unfolding ignorance!

[alextherake]

28/156

Machine Head - The Blackening (2007)

I like the vocals here. Compared to many of the other dudes I’ve heard so far, they don’t seem as cartoony or as performative/virtuosic. I mean, I can feel what their throats are doing, and they sound sincerely disgruntled. I also like that I can understand the lyrics, because I am a conservative grandmother.

Speaking of the other dudes I’ve heard so far, where are the female metal-makers at? Did I neglect to throw any on my list?

Are there any conservative grandmothers making metal?

DM me.

I’m trying to *get* metal - follow along with my unfolding ignorance!

[alextherake]

27/156

Deftones - White Pony (2000)

This is youuuthful and angsty. 

There are songs about bullying, songs about unhealthy romance, songs about drugs... I mostly like it, but I do feel something inaccessible and incongruous about it. It’s just not the way I experienced angst as a teen, or even during my early years of university. I mocked the teenage desperation for a place in the social heirarchy, I didn’t pursue or admit my sexual and romantic feelings, and I held it as moral and intelligent to shun drugs and alcohol. 

What I mean is: I definitely felt angsty, but not because I was growing up and making mistakes. I was growing up too anxious to do anything lest I make a mistake. So I’m not writing this to claim teenage victory; I look back at my gangly years as cringefully as anyone.

I’m writing this out to say my attitudes during those years are part of this gap I often feel between me and the metal-loving adults I know today. So many of them are among the most open, warm, and adventurous people in my life, and will often shrug and laugh that they were pretty shitty kids. I would like to access this attitude, to revel in it with them. I would like to destroy the gap. This is really why I started this project.

White Pony itself had me thinking about this:

I don’t have harrowing tales to share from my schoolyears, few lessons collected from my own irresponsibility, and yet I have so many things I wish I could apologize for, and things that I wish I’d felt free to do. All my struggles have been internal, and no one, not even me, has thanked me for my service. And expressing these regrets feels wrong of me, because they are regrets of non-action, and because a self-righteous voice keeps telling me I should be glad I didn’t get into fights or go around breaking hearts or popping pills.

My brain cells are proud of me! My parents are proud of me! I fucked nothing up!

But I’ve since acknowledged that I also long for others’ excitement and warmth for me (please!), that the ups and downs of the heart are part of the vibrancy of life (hellyeah!), and that occasional intoxication does a swell job of freeing the spirit from its own chains (correct!). I’m realizing I’m jealous of the kids that did fuck up - the ones that survived, I mean. They have a shared history to laugh about, and binders full of lessons I’m only learning to grapple with much later. 

So that’s what Deftones made me think about. 

I wonder how teenage me would have reacted to this album.

I’m trying to *get* metal - follow along with my unfolding ignorance!

[alextherake]

26/156

Diamond Head - Lightning to the Nations (1980)

This sounds like cocaine to me: self-absorbed, frantic energy preoccupied with the immediate surface of things, especially success and sexuality. I mean, I’m really offput by its lack of spirituality. I don’t believe in God myself, but I believe in the cosmic significance of love, and there’s a distinct lack of human connection here. In fact, it feels like they’re celebrating the distance between people here, disguising it as rebellion, individuality, and MAXIMUM PLEASURE.

I feel like I need to unpack why I have a visceral reaction to this perceived shallowness, but I don’t exactly know. I just keep thinking about sex, thinking that sex without snuggles and acceptance, and breakfast and teamwork, and unifying revelations from each other’s true mind, is not only empty but emptying. I realize Diamond Head isn’t thinking about this at all, but that’s precisely why I kind of hate it. 

Then again, this isn’t all about getting it on. If anything, it’s my head that’s in the gutter. But it’s the gutter of love, maaan.

I’m trying to *get* metal - follow along with my unfolding ignorance!

[alextherake]

25/156

Primus - Sailing the Seas of Cheese (1991)

Let me clarify that, this time, this isn’t an Alex vs. Metal thing. It’s an Alex vs. Primus thing.

Full disclosure: I admire Les Claypool and co. for all their hard work and wild ideas. I love the humour they find in the surreal nightmarescapes they create! Tom Waits, one of my top weirdo heroes, even makes an appearance on this! But Primus always succeeds in their mission to fuck me up gastrointestinally and I just don’t like it.

When I was a budding lad, Youtube was fresh on the scene. My friends and I would spend hours, sometimes whole weekends, just gawking at weird shit. Like, comedy videos where the joke was that there was no joke and it was actually very senseless and frightening. Y’know, this kind of thing.

One of the things a friend of mine would throw on was Primus’s “Mr. Krinkle” video. The way the images and music fuelled each other’s unreality unsettled me to my core for some reason, making me sick to my child-tummy. All through my life in art, I have loved the thrill of not knowing exactly what’s going on and being made to feel surprising things, but this was different. It felt sort of traumatic, for lack of a better description, every time I had to see and hear it.

Even to this day, I feel bad bad bad when I hear Claypool’s cartoon voice over the smack of his wet, wet bass playing.

Ughghghghghghh

I listened to this a few extra times trying to work past that, but all it did was make me feel distressed about yogurt for a week. I recommend this one in theory, but please don’t make me listen to it again... I’ll return when I’m ready. I’m trying to *get* metal - follow along with my unfolding ignorance!

[metal-memes]

[alextherake]

24/156

Autopsy - Mental Funeral (1991)

Another one I listened to with a bad attitude at the beginning of January. I’ve since relistened, and what a difference mood makes.

Listen A) Agitating. My teeth are sanding each other down, because it just keeps going and going and I GET IT. Grumble grumble body horror apocalypse goo everywhere. I feel much more resistance from myself trying to relax into this than say a campy, disgusting horror movie. Why?

Listen B) There’s actually some cool, focused dissonance going on here. Like, not just noisily, but harmonically. And I get it. Grumble grumble goo horror. But getting it doesn’t make me grit my teeth and sigh. It’s kind of silly but it’s not totally mindless or heartless. Like an early Cronenberg film.

What’s the difference between then and now? I’ve finally stopped traveling 8000 hours a week and have given myself time to really relax during downtime. I’ve been working on my tendency to ruminate on what I can’t control and have resumed being the centered dude I know I can be. I’ve been fanning away the fog that collected around what I’ve taken for granted and have taken back my vision for my life. I know what I want, motherfucker! This could all be temporary, as it has been before, but I appreciate it with full awareness now.

Shaun, my band’s drummer, has gone from having a mysterious untreated pain in his leg to working on healing from leukemia. It sounds worse of course to have leukemia than a vague pain in the leg, but I find knowing what the deal is has been relieving to me as his friend. What I’m getting at is that Listen A was an abstract pain in my leg and Listen B was a blast of chemo.

Grumble grumble it’s raining slime - hallelujah.

[alextherake]

23/156

Atheist - Unquestionable Presence (1991)

I listened to this in early January. I was coming down from the high-octane Christmas season, going through some strange personal turmoil, and feeling a little (or a lot) exhausted from my monthlong metal binge.

Instead of helping me process my angst, this album just agitated me. I felt, intellectually, that I could jive with the anxious, jazzy movement of this music, but emotionally I was ticked off by what I heard as pseudo-enlightenment in the lyrics. It was all too reminiscent of the righteous ramblings of a mentally ill friend of mine, whom I miss incredibly.

Outside of the music, I kept circling around the themes delusion and disillusion. The sentence that kept coming to me was, “Why can’t people just be truthful with themselves?” I expect this most of all from artists, which is perhaps unfair of me, given how much myself and my friends, as artists, suffer from equal self-unsureness and delusion.

I’m letting myself feel anger about the fact that people can’t always be truthful with themselves. I’m not letting that anger get in the way of compassion for those people, including myself. I’m trying really hard not to let my attitude be coloured by self-directed anger. And all these swirling emotions aren’t attached to either action or repression, which is new territory for me. I discover I’m a stranger in a strange land, and that strange land is my own consciousness, and the only thing to do there is hang out.

Oh great, now I’M the Messiah of pseudo-enlightenment!

Anyways, looking back on my January notes for this, all I wrote was “I miss Nina Simone” - and left myself a reminder to link this song, so here ya go.

[alextherake]

22/156

Burzum - Filosofem (1996)

I was curious about this one in particular. 

On one hand, I’ve heard Filosofem was a great piece of art. On the other hand, Varg Vikerness is a violent white-supremecist dingus who up until last summer spent his mumbly post-prison days teaching people how to play his songs on an unplugged electric guitar on Youtube. 

I believe there is a difference between an artist and their art, that you can condemn one while praising the other, but I also have a hard time reading around a doofy biography.

Doof or no doof, what I’m hearing here is a scared man. He’s not acting tough or espousing any disgusting solutions (none that I can understand, that is); he’s just splashing through his terror, swimming around in circles. I guess his terror manifests in daily life as xenophobia and violence, and in art as this strange, buzzing wall of discomfort.

I feel a similar buzzing on the surface of my consciousness whenever things haven’t exactly been smoothsailing , especially when I figure I deserve a little tenderness from the universe (“I’ve been so accomodating to everyone else!”). My fear doubles on itself when I think of all the bad that can come from freeing these bees through some non-artistic mode, hoping they don’t manifest uncontrolled as murder or arson or hatred like with Varg over here. 

I doubt I would ever act so extremely, but I still fear pushing away the people I love by asserting myself thoughtlessly... But then, instead of assertiveness, the buzzing manifests as hypervigilant anxiety, a desperate, repetitive need to confirm the existence of justice and stability somewhere, which has pushed away people I love.

At this point in my metal journey, I’m starting to touch on the same data over and over again. @junesprout illuminated to me that there’s a difference between needing to learn and needing to practice. I’ve already made the discovery that I have some repressed rage inside me, so I guess now I’m using fear as an excuse to not move on to the practice phase of creating a healthy relationship with anger.

I just need some goals here.

*(I wrote this almost two months ago before going on hiatus with this blog. I actually think I’ve been making progress on my relationship to anger, moment by tiny moment)*

[alextherake]

Tiny hiatus

Large transitions The queue is now full and will resume feeding y’all sweet, sweet metal bafflements tonight

[metal-memes]

[alextherake]

metl

hevy

[metal-memes]

[soothifying-sounds-asmr]

Två Konungabarn - Nyckelharpa by Myrkur

[alextherake]

21/156

Angel Witch - Angel Witch (1980)

These are just fun, solid rock songs about spooky supernatural ladies. Was the title track inspration for the Big Blue theme from F-Zero?