Beer of May: Köstritzer Schwarzbier

I actually put some thought into this month's highlighted beer. Several possible beers were considered only to be discarded. However, a visit to the enchanted confines of Burp Castle ended the quest. I ordered the Köstritzer black lager and I knew. It is to be a black spring.

The initial attraction was the seeming contradiction in a black lager. How did that happen? What can it possibly mean? They used dark malts. And it means that you get a beer with a flavor like that of a stout or porter but milder. Once I got my head around all this, the intriguing flavor and the aesthetics of Köstritzer Schwarzbier made her our May queen.

There are actually plenty of black lagers out there, but the Köstritzer is a German beer with a pedigree that dates back to the days of witch burning. It may even be the first of its kind. And something about that fits my mood and, perhaps, the zeitgeist, what with normal people suddenly fetishizing black metal because of Until the Light Takes Us or the new Burzum album or whatever.

My SO agreed it was the perfect beer for celebrating the impending mainstream acceptance of black metal, adding something like: "It's a lager. For all you normals." He had the double IPA.

I prefer to think of it as a beer that genuinely evokes Norwegian black metal, despite its German origins. True, the flavor was only mildly smoky, but you could think of that as being simply flat and monochromatic. And the aftertaste is slightly acrid, maybe even charred. And it's a lager, so thin and stripped down, pallid even.

Of course, a real black metal fan would insist on a pre-Christian lager, but for our dilettantish purposes Köstritzer is quite old and blackened enough.

Until the Light Takes Us

I finally got to see this black metal documentary, Until the Light Takes Us,which came out on DVD recently. I enjoyed it in a way that I'm not really comfortable with.

The subjects are the surviving members of the Norwegian black metal scene in the '90s, a scene that imploded in the wake of a series of church burnings, a murder or two, and the subsequent media circus. The filmmakers chose to provide a more or less blank backdrop against which their completely batshit subjects could tell their own story. And then the movie is paced and edited and shot in such a way that you feel reflective, even meditative while watching it, and the filmmakers are very much invisible in the whole process. You don't hear the questions, only the answers, which are mainly culled from a series of very intimate interviews with Gylve Nagell of Darkthrone and Varg Vikernes of Burzum. Some of the figures in the movie are charming, or at least unforgettable, and each of them is also completely out of his mind to this day. So, you have this kind of freakishly peaceful and elegant encounter with some genuinely dangerous artists.

I loved it because it was such an aestheticized treatment of the characters and events, but I was also uncomfortable with it for the same reason. It featured a few visual artists, including Harmony Korine, who have been inspired by black metal to create paintings/installations/performance art for galleries. In fact, there are more visual artists who have been inspired by black metal than were included in the documentary. It's easy to see how the scene appeals to them, but their interest is also almost more unsettling than the reality of the scene itself. In the wake of the DVD release I've been seeing enthusiastic posts about black metal cropping up on hip blogs, which is similarly weird and creepy.

In the end, the subjects relate just enough of their story that a few misconceptions about Norwegian black metal are corrected (They're not satanists, okay?) and an intelligent viewer can pick up where Until the Light Takes Us leaves off and fill in a few blanks for themselves. I was happy to mull things over on my own as the credits rolled and it definitely leaves you with plenty to mull over. So, fine, it was kind of amazing and easily the weirdest movie I've watched in awhile.

On a related note, Varg Vikernes is coming out with a new Burzum album, because he's not in jail anymore. I'm not endorsing this. I'm just telling you. I'm also just telling you about these black metal greeting cards on Etsy. I'm kind of in love with Etsy's dark side lately.

Trailer:

Black Math Horseman

I find some of my favorite music wandering through the Internet like a babe in the woods.
Black Math Horseman is the newest of these discoveries. The bit of raw noise lacing the band's stripped down songs makes for a kind of awesome lo-fi metal. Their song "Tyrant" is more like soulful kraut rock though, if you can imagine that. Some of their fans identify them with post-rock but that term would divert attention from  the wild beauty, purity, and fundamental gnarliness of their style. Post-rock isn't inaccurate either, because of the seeming simplicity in their hypnotic music that masks its real sophistication. There's a lot of masking going on here really. The raw metalness tends to hide the bits of goth filigree that's always there on the fringes. A bit like this:

It was this interview with vocalist/bassist Sera Timms at Invisible Oranges that piqued my interest. Her vocals rule.


Their debut album Wyllt, came out last year.

Bleeding Ears, Heart

The 2007 Vice documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad made a deep enough impact on my social world that, without having seen the film, I've been peripherally aware of its subject, Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda, for some time. Now, after enduring persecution for playing metal in their homeland, war, and finally two years in refugee camps, the trio is living and gigging in New York, thanks to help from Vice. Vice has also just released their EP, Only the Dead See the End of the War, recorded with Alex Skolnik of Testament.

The mainstream press is all over the story, so I'll just pass you this New York Times piece,"One Band Moves Its Metal Out of Iraq." (Short version: They have been granted refugee status and got to meet Metallica!) The Star-Ledger has good piece too: "Acrassicauda: Iraqi heavy-metal band finds new home in NJ and NY."

The four-song EP is a short, fast ride through a gray landscape of disciplined chug-chug riffs and spiraling, er, arabesques. With its tinge of middle eastern rhythm and tonality and vocals that sound both outraged and mournful, "Garden of Stones" is definitely the single; while "Message from Baghdad" closes things out on a note of pure, driving, demonic fun. That is, if the word fun can really be applied to songs that are about destruction more lived than fanciful.

Acrassicauda's strengths include an ability to turn raw guitar and drumming power into terse, grinding songs without a hint of wank. But that's to be expected from a metal band that managed to stay together in spite of death threats from Islamic extremists and that time their practice space got bombed. It would be totally unforgivable if any part of the release was even slightly flabby. I'm happy to report that they are not fucking around.

In the sense that Acrassicauda sounds like any completely righteous metal band, they are not stylistically transforming the genre. That said, these guys recorded an EP that actually stands up to their brutal back story. It's an impressive accomplishment. In the Times article, drummer Marwan Riyadh expressed the hope that people will listen to his band for the music and not just because their one sheet mentions a lot of explosions and bloodshed. Nearly all musicians want their music to be heard on its own merits. And yet Acrassicauda's story really is a good reason to listen to them.

The lines "They stole my land / They stole my home / They ripped my flesh / They stripped my bone" in the song "Massacre" would be corny and predictable coming from a frontman born in, say, Orange County. On Only the Dead See the End of The War, those lines are genuinely jarring.

Music is more than a series of notes floating in the platonic vacuum of your iPod. It is always made by an artist who is bound to a place and time, whether that artist cares to admit it or not. Listening to a song and disregarding the person who made it is just obtuse. As long as music is made by people, a band's history, along with the history of their influences, will absolutely matter.

http://heavymetalinbaghdad.typepad.com/

Dark Castle/Bloody Panda

These blurry pictures serve to document my recent awesome metal head sighting at the Drunken Unicorn on August 1. All of the bands were pretty amazing, but I went to check out the heavy, stonerish duo pictured above. They are Dark Castle. There is Rob Shaffer behind a very large drum kit and Stevie Floyd behind a flying V and, boy, can she ever scream. I thought they were very groovy, and I like my metal groovy, but then the drummer recommended Bloody Panda, playing second to last. Shaffer promised Tibetan throat singing and I think I got the genuine article.

I very nearly crapped myself. First of all Bloody Panda features a bunch of dudes in hoods and a beautiful woman named Yoshiko Ohara in a goth hippie outfit. They're from New York, of course. Second, they dismember every mode of heavy music there is and then string it all together in a kind of grisly musical daisy chain. And then there is a male singer, Gerry Mak, who makes some very strange and startling sounds: like THIS but extra evil. And Ohara (who, I have learned, is also a respected painter) screams and screams. The first one she let out, I wanted to grab the girl next to me and cling for dear life. I didn't. This wasn't hardcore-style screaming; she was just scream screaming. It was beautiful once I accepted that no demons were about to appear and take my soul. In fact, after it was over, I felt kinda cleansed. I rushed to the merch nook buy the most recent album, Summon, from Ohara. Because, like, I like to be frightened.