More talk about metal! Today’s subject is Metallica’s 1991 album Metallica, popularly known as “the black album.”

Back when it was first released, I had it on cassette, and listened to it so much that I wore it out. I even bought all of the cassette singles, as they had kickass B-side covers of songs like Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy.” When I bought my first CD player in 1992, I got the black album from the library and renewed it constantly until I could afford to buy my own copy. (Hey, CDs were expensive back then!) Even though the band fell out of my favor in the late 1990s, the black album has remained the Metallica record I’ve listened to the most.

The black album was considered by the music press to reflect a more “mainstream metal” sound, but it didn’t bug me. Even though it was a slight shift away from the hard-driving thrash found on the previous four records, the record still had some serious fucking barnburners. My favorites included “Holier Than Thou,” “The Unforgiven,” and “The Struggle Within,” though it’s really hard to choose. Every damned track was awesome, if you ask me. I could do a track-by-track breakdown, but I don’t want to bore you. (I’m sure I do enough of that already.) Suffice it to say that I listened to the black album so damned much that every single riff on the black album is ingrained into my psyche like a stone carving. It’s very possible I’ve played this record more than any other, regardless of genre.

Even with metal on its way out of the mainstream in the early 1990s, Metallica was the one band that metalheads universally loved. As with other forms of rock and roll, there were always metal fans that only stuck with underground bands, claiming any band with some semblance of success was automatically a “sellout.” Metallica was a huge exception; I didn’t know a single headbanger that hated ‘em.

That is, of course, until Load showed up. Like every other metalhead on the face of the planet, I was stoked at the thought of a new Metallica record after the spectacle of the black album, and I actually cut class to run out and buy Load on release day.

Oh, if only I had known.

Saying I was disappointed is putting it lightly; I was fucking pissed. Yes, I was one of those kids who dubbed them “Alternica.” Load and its equally crappy followup Reload seriously dampened my fandom, and after the Napster debacle a few years later, I wrote Metallica off completely for a while. Yes, piracy is wrong, but that’s no excuse to insult your fans, which is exactly what some of the band members did. Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield were such arrogant douchebags for a while that I couldn’t even stomach Metallica’s older material!

Even fans who stuck with Metallica through the Load and Reload era are hard-pressed to defend the abominable St. Anger. Metallica’s most recent album Death Magnetic was a marked improvement, but the poor production and awful vocals are still a far cry from what the band was once capable of.

As with most things, my stance on the Load era has softened with time. Even though most of those songs were just godawful, I’m no longer filled with rage over Metallica’s fall from grace; I just ignore their post-black album material, as I do with plenty of other bands’ less than stellar offerings.

Holy shit, I went off on a tangent. Let’s bring things back to the point. For whatever reason, I’ve been listening to the black album a lot lately. The songs still hold up, and brought back many memories of just losing myself in the riffs during my early teenage years. I remember watching the many videos from the album on MTV at the time; it’s strange to think that the bandmembers were younger at the time than I am now!

Strangely enough, I’ve heard a lot of retrospective black album bashing over the past ten years. Maybe it’s because post-black album Metallica has fallen so far, but I still don’t get it. The old stuff still stands the test of time. Speaking of which, the black album turned twenty this year, so it’s yet another thing that makes me feel old. Damn it!

I’ve spoken at length about my affinity for metal, and briefly mentioned that industrial metal was one of my favorite subgenres in the 1990s. Since I’ve got nothing better to do right now, I’m going to ramble about my experiences with it.

Industrial metal exploded during that decade, and I sopped that shit up like a sponge. Skrew, Drown, Godflesh, Fear Factory, Sundown, Monster Voodoo Machine, Ministry, Rammstein, Treponem Pal, Pitchshifter, Snake River Conspiracy…you name it, I probably listened to it.

I’m guessing that the sound of industrial metal appealed me because I’ve always been a science fiction fan. The mechanical themes mixed with my preferred form of rock and roll was just a natural match. Grinding steel mixed with shredding guitars, distorted vocals, and oppressive piledriver beats? I was all over that shit like white on rice. Nine Inch Nails’ Broken was my gateway drug into the scene, and it remains some of the best material the style has to offer.

In the latter half of the 1990s, I fell out of the scene a bit. Although it was cool when other metal bands I was into experimented with industrial stylings (like Moonspell’s Sin/Pecado), much of the scene had moved more towards alternative rock and nu-metal. Some of it was okay, like Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills, and early works from Rob Zombie, Static-X, and Powerman 5000. My interest in these bands evaporated quickly, though, as too much of their material got too repetitive or they rapidly changed styles to keep up with current trends. It was guilty pleasure music at best.

I’ve since taken to listening to some of the old stuff from the 1990s again, and holy crow, a lot of that shit’s horrible. It definitely hasn’t aged well at all. It didn’t seem to matter to me at the time, but cripes, what was I thinking? My only excuse is that I was young and stupid.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s any good industrial metal bands left out there; got any recommendations? You know how picky my tastes are nowadays.

(I should tell you that on a completely unrelated note, there’s a secret hidden in this post. See if you can find it!)

I covered an Opeth and Katatonia show two weeks ago, as they kicked off a massive world tour. One of the hallmarks of Opeth’s new record Heritage is that there are no growling death vocals to be found. Opeth has always split between clean and death vocals on each of their albums (with the exception of 2003′s Damnation), so the lack of growls on Heritage is not too big of a surprise.

Katatonia did much the same thing, but further back in their history. They started out as a death/doom metal band, but infused some alternative rock-influenced sounds and switched to clean vocals after a few records.

Anyway, both bands’ live sets featured lots of new and old material, but no songs that included any death vocals. While the crowd overall had no problem with this, there were a few drunken stalwarts who continually shouted out “PLAY DEATH METAL!!!” in between every damned song.

I can understand many extreme metal fans’ resistance to vocal changes. I love death vocals as much as the next guy, and for most forms of extreme metal, that vocal style is absolutely necessary. More often than not, the switch to clean vocals doesn’t work, especially in tandem with a stylistic change. (Cryptopsy’s The Unspoken King immediately comes to mind.)

It’s more obvious in the case of Katatonia, as their old and new material couldn’t be more different. Fortunately, they did it to expand their own musical boundaries, rather than “selling out.” The end result worked out perfectly. Katatonia still has a hard, bleak edge, even if they’re not growling into the microphone.

With Opeth, some fans’ resistance really makes no sense, because as I’ve said…clean vocals have been there from the beginning. Not only that, so have other nontraditional musical elements rarely seen in death metal. Just listen to the song “Silhouette” off their debut record Orchid; it’s a classical piano piece!

We’re not talking about the glut of rock and metal bands that rapidly changed their genre in order to make a quick buck in the 1990s; this is a case where the band clearly evolves over time to solidify their own sound, and the progression is evident stretching all the way back to Opeth’s inception.

Hesitancy due to a vocal switch is expected, and often wise. But at the very least, give the shit a chance before dismissing it out of hand.

Did you know that I played the trumpet for over ten years?

First of all, that’s not a euphemism, you sick bastards. I wanted to play a musical instrument as far back as elementary school, and you could start taking lessons and join the concert band in fourth grade, if I recall correctly. Originally, I wanted to play guitar, but my folks were having none of that. (Remember, this was around the time I started getting into rock and metal.) Saxophone was another thought, but then I started hearing jazz greats like Herb Alpert and Wynton Marsalis through my father’s record collection. Trumpet sounded awesome, so that’s the path I took.

I borrowed an old horn from a friend of the family, and began learning to play. We weren’t playing jazz in elementary school, of course. We were lucky to fudge our way through simplified arrangeents of classical pieces and film scores. I didn’t get my jazz fix until sixth grade, when I started taking private trumpet lessons; I had gotten braces that fall, which set me back to square one. My instructor was a longtime professional trumpet player, having played in classical orchestras, jazz ensembles, and even the seminal rock band Lighthouse. Not only was he responsible for getting me back up to speed and working around my orthodontics, he also got me into all manner of new music and playing styles. Aside from practicing scales and the assigned music from class, we also worked on basic jazz technique in order to expand my repertoire.

In seventh grade, I finally got to join a jazz band, as my junior high school had one. Junior high school was my first exposure to music festivals, where schools from around the region would descend upon a venue for a few days and compete. Those were an absolute blast, and aside from being a pretty cool getaway (complete with trips to amusement parks), the competitive aspect really pushed us to practice harder and sound the best we could.

After a few years, my borrowed trumpet wasn’t cutting the mustard anymore. In eighth grade, my folks bought me a Getzen 700 Eterna as an early birthday/Christmas present. Yes, I still have it.

Getzen doesn’t make that specific model anymore, but here’s their 700 Eterna II series, which is pretty damned close.

The difference in sound between that and the old one was like night and day. It did wonders to bolster my confidence, which I sorely needed; as a jazz player, I was expected to improvise from time to time, and I found that to be extremely difficult. I don’t like being put on the spot, and I almost always made mistakes. (The trick, I was told, was to learn to hide them.)

In high school, I didn’t get into either of the jazz bands (yes, we had two of them) until my sophomore year. At the same time, I discovered the works of countless other jazz horn players including Chet Baker, who remains my favorite jazz musician to this day. Our high school jazz ensemble even opened for Maynard Ferguson during my junior year, the first of many performances and clinics that the jazz legend would offer at the school.

The downside was that those overnight festival trips were off the table. For some inexplicable reason, our band director refused to let the concert or jazz bands attend them; the orchestra and choirs traveled every year, but we were never considered to be good enough. Most of us found this to be highly offensive, as we busted our asses all year! That kind of nonsense may have been one of the reasons why there were around thirty members of my freshman class in band…yet there was less than ten of us left by the time senior year rolled around.

Speaking of which, my senior year was undoubtedly the apex of my playing. The jazz ensemble got to play much more advanced material, plus I scored my school’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Award and a Judge’s Choice Award at the annual Berklee Jazz Festival. The sky was the limit, eh?

Well, not quite. I tried to continue playing once I moved on to college. I didn’t get much practicing done freshman year; I was too busy acclimating to college life, focusing on my studies, and dealing with some rather serious personal problems. By the spring of that year, I really tried to get back into it…but to no avail. There were no jazz bands nearby. Sophomore year I tried to start one myself, but got zero responses. Even with that ridiculous swing revival in the late 1990s, I found nothing. By the start of my junior year, I had given up. Practicing alone really sucks.

Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, but in my own defense, I was in college to work on my art degree first and foremost. I even dropped my acting hobby in order to further focus on my artwork. (That, and the actors there became insufferable pricks.) I have not played my trumpet since, yet I have no desire to start playing again, as strange as it may seem.

I look on those jazz days as another closed chapter in the book of my life. I would never say that I was a great trumpet player…just a good one at best, and a competent one at worst.

Mark and Jason from the Requiem Metal Podcast brought up an interesting point during their Maryland Deathfest recap show: why do so many extreme metal bands have their kick drums turned up so goddamned loud during live performances?

If the double-bass is so thunderous that you can’t hear the other instruments or vocals, then that’s a serious problem. Hell, sometimes you can’t even hear the rest of the fucking drums!

I’ve reviewed many a show for Musician Photo Journal and others where the overall performances were good, but the double bass drums were overpowering. In a few cases, it’s completely ruined a band’s set.

Too much kick drum does not sound “extreme.” It sounds fucking stupid. I’m there to see a show, hear some killer riffs, feel the low end through the floor, have my eardrums assaulted by some brutal vocals, all with drums providing the backbeat as intended. I’m don’t want to listen to nothing but a damned pulse generator. I can hang out by the countless road construction sites nearby if I want that.