Three years ago, I fell in love with Elder’s Reflections of a Floating World, an interplanetary blend of doom metal, psychedelic rock, Krautrock, and prog.
Their fifth record Omens takes Reflections’ more meandering elements and lets them really breathe. Synths and electric pianos are just as prominent as crushing guitars, creating an album that feels more Rush than Black Sabbath.
And the results are stunning.
For years, I’ve mistakenly thought of Black Sabbath as a one-trick pony—probably on account of the monotony of the horde of copycats citing their catalogue as their bible.
But after digging deeper into their discography, I can see now that the source material is much more diverse than I could have imagined. Vol. 4 is especially varied, and not just in comparison to their other records, but within its own tracklist.
For my great love of metal bands that are often described as “Black Sabbath worship” (see: Pallbearer, Elder, Baroness, Isis), I’ve never dug too deep into Black Sabbath themselves beyond some superficial listens to Paranoid.
But on a recent trip to the record store, I decided to change that. Trying to decide between this record and Vol. 4, I pulled up an article that called this record the “ultra-heavy” foundation of doom, sludge, and stoner metal.
I just wasn’t expecting so much overt Christianity.
If I were to ask you to imagine a female singer-songwriter, there’s a good chance your mind would go to a subdued, pensive artist, a la Joan Baez or Julien Baker.
But lately, there’s been a crop of women whose particular brand of introspection is better accompanied by rattling, detuned guitars and a pummeling rhythm section than an acoustic guitar. Women like Kristina Esfandiari of King Woman and Chelsea Wolfe.
Heavy metal is a rich genre, but to the casual listener, it often just sounds like a bunch of noise. The blistering riffs, machine-gun drums, and screaming vocals can send many people running as far away as they can. And for a long while, that included me.
But, through a fortuitous string of events, I discovered that I love metal, with all of its raw power and crushing beauty.
But there are many metal records that offer all of the same heaviness with a healthy dose of conventional beauty. If you’ve been curious about metal, here are ten albums that offer all the power of heavy metal without all the chaos. Continue reading
Black Sabbath is often cited as one of the founders of the popular rock subgenre “metal,” but you’d never guess if you compared it to the drop-D tuned, breakdown plagued, double-kick-drum fury of today’s metal.
This is too melodic, lacking the palm muted chunks of contemporary metal, instead favoring dark (for the time) lyrics put over heavily distorted (again, for the time) blues rock.
But don’t take that as a criticism of the music, only of modern semantics.
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