In a metal mood

Since writing this recent post on the recent Village Voice article, “Is Metal the New Indie Rock?”, I’ve been on something of a metal kick myself. My musical tastes have severely mellowed in recent years, to the point where I actually find myself occasionally thinking that something is too loud, too obnoxious, too much. This, from a guy who owns multiple albums, at least one on vinyl, by The Locust.

As an angsty small-town teenager, I always swore that I’d stay true to my brutal, heavily-distorted, head-banging roots, but for the last few years, I’ve found myself drawn more and more to light, lyrical—but still complex and serious—stuff like Iron and Wine and further away from the sledgehammer onslaught of, say, Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Still, after downloading some of the Buried Inside tracks linked to in the Village Voice article, I was transported, for a moment, back to my power-chord worshipping 15 year old self, and I had the sudden desire to start slamming myself, straight edge style, into my bedroom wall. Which maybe speaks to my general desire to flail around like a coke-addicted banshee more than the music itself, but that’s fodder for another post.

And what, you ask, is the point? Maybe just that the reason I don’t recognize Mozart when I hear it is that I’m too busy filling my mind with drop-D tremolo picking and double-bass drumming. Maybe just that sometimes a little bit of violent musical madness can be a good thing. Or maybe that I look back at my younger self, jamming away to chugga-chugga hardcore CDs and drinking over-sugared Waffle House coffee and idolizing Surge soda and think, maybe my misspent youth wasn’t so misspent after all.