http://www.npr.org/2015/03/15/392100467/first-listen-liturgy-the-ark-work

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Falcons, Braves, Bulldogs and Hawks

Geto Boys, Poison Clan, UGK, Eightball & MJG, OutKast, Goodie Mob

Don't get me wrong, to a metal head this has "Lil B" levels of troll and it should utterly fail:

the cheap casio keyboard horns in half the songs. many of which have no guitars(!!!)
Him rappping like bone thugs
Them borrowing Lex Luger trap samples and plugging them into Ableton, lol.

But its a great fucking record. They may write boring ass academic papers on why black metal sucks but to wax poetic over 20,000 words you HAVE to know what you're talking about. They know their genre and they know how to play within those lines.

The keyboard horns could easily be replaced by guitars and still sound heavy.

The 'rapping' is half spoken word and buried so low in the mix, its indiscernible (just like traditionalist black metal screams). Going this route as opposed to traditional rap metal is less cheezy and akin to alot of vocal phrasing types you've heard in rock before anyway.

Those 808 hits are balanced out by a fantastic metal drummer in Greg Fox.

It all works because most importantly its still dark and atmospheric as fuck which the ultimate goal for any metal band anyway. Kudos to them for pulling it off; this record should not exist.


>http://www.npr.org/2015/03/15/392100467/first-listen-liturgy-the-ark-work

>But its a great fucking record. They may write boring ass
>academic papers on why black metal sucks but to wax poetic
>over 20,000 words you HAVE to know what you're talking about.
>They know their genre and they know how to play within those
>lines.

An american writing an academic paper on why black metal sucks is about as useful as me sitting here in gothenburg, sweden writing a manifesto on why Hip-Hop sucks. Regardless of what points that are being made, I wouldn't expect anyone to take it seriously. Americans were busy digging Pantera and "grunge" when Black metal was all the rage in the scandinavian metal-underground in the early-mid 90's; this dude was probably into indie before reading Lords of chaos. It's perfectly understandable, even natural that people think he's a clown who DON*T know what he is talking about... Yes, authnticity matters-ESPECIALLY in such an ideologically driven genre as black metal

EDIT:For the record, I like to point that *I* don't give a shit and I actually think the dedication to "grimness" and "kvlt" and "krieg" and "frost" and "pagan winters" and whatever in Black metal is retarded and outside of a few bands like Darkthrone and bands from south of europe playing the genre in a different way (think Rotting Christ or Mortuary Drape), I personally have very little use for the genre after the OG 80's stuff. Just want to point *WHY* black metal-fans got upset. I feel the need to add this disclaimer as to not appear totally retarded...

>EDIT:For the record, I like to point that *I* don't give a
>shit and I actually think the dedication to "grimness" and
>"kvlt" and "krieg" and "frost" and "pagan winters" and
>whatever in Black metal is retarded and outside of a few bands
>like Darkthrone and bands from south of europe playing the
>genre in a different way (think Rotting Christ or Mortuary
>Drape), I personally have very little use for the genre after
>the OG 80's stuff. Just want to point *WHY* black metal-fans
>got upset. I feel the need to add this disclaimer as to not
>appear totally retarded...

Ultimately you gotta let that corpse paint and shitty tape recordings(which used to irk me considering how complex a genre it could be, with the worst fidelity known to man) go.

Im not defending him being a dickhead. But the reason the dickhead got so much traction over one paper was because it was way too incestuous a scene for too long, hence why someone like Burzum is still around.

...I actually don't know *any* existing subgenre of metal that has allowed as much experimentation as Black metal has done LONG prior to the hipster acts. That purists whine and moan, we'll they/we always do, in *every* genre.

I don't want to repeat myself too much but it ultimately comes down to the nature of the experimentation/"openmindedness"; like, I fail to understand how/why "innovating" by means of going shoegaze/post-rock/whatever is more "innovative" than drawing from, say, classical, jazz/fusion, folk, punk, even-dare I say it?-the rich history of metal *itself* (all things metal-bands been doing for decades).

Because it puts the music more in the context of the cultural zeitgeist (whatever that may be today)? As a strong believer in the concept of genre-music, I don't see that as a plus at all, quite the opposite; that music-regardless of style-*needs* to conform to cliched and stereotyped definitions of cool/modern is truly sad to me.

Actually, that's where nu-metal fucked up majorly. It's like you hear Hip-Hop and "angst-whine" alternative on the radio and then so-called metal is doing that too? It totally defeats the purpose of metal as an insular genre that offers aesthetics that *must* be appreciated on their own terms. That's why an act like Opeth-who I don't even like and who are actually quite controversial in many sectors of the metal crowd-can spend like half their songs gently caressing acoustic guitars and *still* have more metal-cred than acts like these; drawing from obscure and mellow folk-prog (or classical, old punk, fusion, whatever in the case of other eclectic bands with a reasonable amount of cred) from the 70's does not by any means compromise metals outsider/genre-music status whereas drawing from grunge, Hip-Hop or-in this case-hipster indie very much do...

Actually, this shit feels like nu-metal all over, just coming from "cool" people rather than jocks...