A goat pissing on his own hooves

Leviathan - Howl Mockery at the Cross
Jef Whitehead was asked in an interview what he saw in the ink blot above and, like all black metal artists, he gave a great answer.*

A man looking at himself in the mirror at the mouth of hell.
A goat pissing on his own hooves.

Jef Whitehead is the mortal name of Wrest, a key figure in US black metal, operating the one-man bands Leviathan and Lurker of Chalice. I really got into this stuff a year or two ago when a metal PR guy kept sending packet after packet of discs. I had forsaken metal as greasy kid's stuff, having spent junior high in The Ozzy Years, but I felt bad because he was sending me all this stuff. It was a split album from California's Xasthur and Denmark's Nortt that got me, and for a while, black metal was my favorite subject to write about.

Here is the review of that very album, and one about attending an all-ages black metal concert.

Black metal is such a compelling subject because it is one of the few truly rebellious musics around anymore. It even has some real danger in it: murderers, church-arsonists and unfortunately, extreme racists are among, but far from define, its practitioners. It rebels against form, function, society, God, country, everything. It seeks the pit. It generally sounds like shit, recorded in the dodgiest of circumstances by loners of dubious talent, at either breakneck speeds or tar pit lugubriousness, the vocals are rendered into belched screams. In other words, it is often defiantly unattractive music and yet therein lies the appeal.

There is an article about U.S. Black Metal in the upcoming music issue of The Believer, which will also contain an interview I did with Fugazi's Ian Mackaye. Just sayin.

You should go read the preposterous and smart "Gidget on the Couch" in the current issue that goes to great lengths to connect surfing culture to brooding ex-pat Austrians.

Beck - Mutations
Ya know after that Leviathan, I had board in hand to surf the Plutonian tide raging in the Gulf of Sorrow, but magically I am completely over it, so I thought, "what is the breeziest music that I still like" and this Beck album came to mind. It's no Odelay, which I pull out every couple months just to marvel at postmodernism at its most funnest, Mutations has its own dopier vibe to it that I appreciate. And though I risk making one of the more schizoid playlists, turning my back on my Satanic black metal brethren, I am reminded by Beck:

Blame the devil for the things you do
It's such a selfish way to lose, to lose these selfish blues
Tell me it's nobody's fault but my own

and speaking of blame the devil, Louisiana governor and possible Republican Vice-presidential candidate Bobby Jindal is, or has been at one time, a practicing exorcist. I shudder to venture as to whether this would hurt or help the McCain campaign. I can hear Pat Robertson yelling into Jindal's voice mail "Where were you when I needed you in '88??"

It's enough to send me careening back into darkness

Anaal Nathrakh - The Codex Necro
Anal what now? According to the book bound in user-generated flesh, Anaal Nathrakh got their fun-to-say name from here:

The name comes from Merlin's Charm of Making in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981). Given Michael Everson's transcription, Anaal Nathrakh means "serpent's breath".

This brand of hyperkinetic metal is really not my bag, it feels more like the work of machines (marketing) than actual pitchfork wielding monsters. I need something between this and Beck to get the taste of childish religion out of my mouth without making me unfit for congenial interaction with humans. I have meetings this afternoon.

Wolf Eyes - Burned Mind
When all sides of humanity's weakness is too much to bear, its time to go post-human, do the opposite of Beck, who glibly humanizes the machine, and jack in with Wolf Eyes, making wild-eyed robots out of our quivering carcasses. I'd really like to hear the album free-jazz legend Anthony Braxton did with them, just to hear what kind of beast-with-two-backs Apollo and Dionysus can make when the shit gets serious. Here is what it looked like from far away.


On Burned Mind, we get the lullaby of the 60-cycle-hum, the howl of dogs shot into space, the benediction in the church of busted effects pedals followed by a peal of bells deadened by lichens and neglect. In other words, good stuff! They even get a little "Iron Man" (Black Sabbath, not Robert Downey Jr.) during "Black Vomit."

Six Organs of Admittance - For Octavio Paz
Man cannot live on post-human nihilism and breezy denial at the face of the end times alone, there needs to be beauty in even the most dire of situations for there to be something on which we can grasp. That is what grates me most about dull Christianity and its pervasive tendrils infecting all of human life, offering sophomoric morality to resolve messy issues - there is no beauty in it. I think human life is an extension of the protein chains that are its building block, differing pieces adhering to each other in whatever hooks we can find, and beauty is that bonding agent. To disregard that, to live your life in Sunday school and endless cycles of unconvincing cuz-the-Bible-tells-me-so reasoning is a travesty, an insult to the beautiful, horrifying life in which we are thrust. I may be failing the Pascal triangle in brazen denial of the almighty, a foolish goat pissing on his own hooves, but I'd rather be a stinky goat than a well-shorn sheep any day.


* to see an even better example of a black metal artist giving good answers, just ask Gorgoroth's Gaahl about his influences