Gazing out my window at the majestic, snow-capped peaks surrounding me, I continue to be astonished at the breadth and intensity of the metal music scene here in La Paz, Bolivia. I guess what astounds me most is how every niche genre of modern and old school metal seems to have its local fan base and, even more remarkably, its own home-grown band worshiping at its altar somewhere in the hidden corners of La Paz. My reason tells me I should not be surprised given the cosmic universality of metal’s connection to the most primeval vibrations of our primordial human souls. And yet I still stand all amazed at the contrast between the beautiful National Geographic costumes, landscapes and faces I see every day and the Aymara-tinged heavy metal maelstrom I know to be lurking just underneath.
It’s about the hair too, of course. As a pale, chubby-faced white kid from the Utah suburbs, I could only fantasize about having the flowing, thick locks that these youth of the Bolivian high plains enjoy as a birthright. Science would certainly possibly tell us, based on this writer’s rigorously unempirical observation, that the precise Precambrian gene mutation that would eventually lead to the evolution of super cool headbanging hair definitely may have arisen in prehistoric La Paz. (Just watch the first video below if you need more scientifical proofiness.)
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a couple of Bolivian bands that epitomize both the glorious fun and the no-shit devotion within the local metal scene. They are ArmadurA, described somewhere on the web as “Heavy Power Folk Metal” and probably Bolivia’s most “successful” metal band based on their having produced at least one studio album, and Antifona, an operatic metal band with two female vocalists that have recently begun composing a few of their own tunes after previously mainly playing covers. While performing for tiny, albeit enthusiastic crowds in crappy dungeons and with no hope of becoming rock and roll superstars, these metal heads play from the gut. They really mean it.
Below are two YouTube videos of ArmadurA, the first being a performance in March 2013 on a low-budget Bolivian TV show dedicated to the local rock scene and the second an example of the band’s occasional mixing of traditional Andean instruments and rhythms into their heartfelt power metal. Following those two videos, I’ve uploaded a video I personally made of Antifona playing at a dingy local metal club on 5 April 2013. The weaknesses in sound and “visual composition” quality are mine, but the earnest commitment to craft is all Antifona. Enjoy!
As I begin to finally write about it now nearly a week later, Sunday’s 10 hours of metal glory on the second and final day of Metal Fest 2013 seem to have passed in a heartbeat. The first band started playing at 3:PM, with the final group’s last encore ending circa 1:AM Monday morning. By the time I made it back to my hotel and came down enough to ease into bed, it was 2:AM. With the subsequent 4:30 AM wake up in order to make the six-hour flight home to La Paz, Bolivia (including two layovers in the Chilean cities of Iquique and Arica), followed by my immediate insertion back into everyday life, there hasn’t been much opportunity to just relax and consider. Nevertheless, I have managed to congeal two overarching personal conclusions from the Metal Fest experience.
First: What a great decision I made to go! Far from home and routine, I was able to completely give myself over to one of my favorite things, heavy music, for more than 50 hours straight. There were no work hassles, no immediate responsibilities, and few other distractions. When I wasn’t enjoying a live performance, I was either mentally reviewing the previous ones or looking forward to the next. Moreover, I was doing it all in the midst of a few thousand other folk just as enthusiastic about the opportunity as was I. No inhibitions, no evaluations, no representations… I was just me, enjoying my thing. It was truly relaxing and liberating while it lasted.
Second: Festivals are awesome! I saw multiple excellent bands I knew and had actively wanted to see mixed in with a broad selection of others that I probably would never have sought out or even known otherwise, but which proved to be great — or at minimum highly interesting — shows. In addition, the festival feeling was different from my normal concert experience. We weren’t just disconnected groups of folk arriving, rocking out, and departing in our own bubbles but rather a whole gang of like-minded people hanging out with each other all day long while taking regular breaks to go watch a band together. Each band had its unique group of fans that were there especially for them, but then those separate fan groups stayed around to mutually support all the other bands’ fans. It was a really friendly and inviting atmosphere.
Enough jibber jabber, on to the bands:
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The first performers of the day, Brutal Truth, turned out to be the easiest to describe. Their show was like standing in the middle of a giant foundry without ear protection while huge slabs of industrial metal were pounded into shape. It was the sound of the continual grinding of tons of jagged metal against metal, with the occasional screech of an industrial-size diamond saw cutting through a dry slab of titanium sans lubricant layered over the top (those would be the vocals). Let’s just say I didn’t walk out and I was happy for having had the Brutal Truth experience and leave it at that.
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Progressive death metal band Nile were up next and they will forever get points from me for seeming the most family-centered, dude-next-door death metallers ever. Guitarist
Karl Sanders (see photo) appeared to have his son or maybe nephew on the trip with the band and invited the boy out onto the stage to bring him a bottle of water a few times between songs. You could tell the clean-cut kid was having a ball looking out at the giant, enthusiastic crowd as he smiled broadly and seemed to share words with Sanders about how awesome it all was.
While they employed the normal incomprehensible growling vocal style of their genre, Nile’s tunes were very melodic and even sort of jazzy in a technical, complex riffing sense. These guys smiled a lot and seemed to be having a ball on stage. I couldn’t help but smile along as they assaulted me with their Egyptian-themed extreme metal.
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Self-described “narco-satanist” extreme metal band Brujeria was pretty unique. The band’s logo – and the cover of their best known album Matando Güeros (“Killing Whites” in translation) – includes a scene of a person out of shot holding up a decapitated head, a photo which was apparently taken from a Mexican newspaper, according to Wikipedia. Sung in Spanish, most of Brujeria’s short, aggressive songs seem to be about the joys of smoking large volumes of marijuana, taking 
revenge against white people (“güeros” in Mexican Spanish slang), or doing both at the same time. One tune about Cuban immigrants in Mexico called “Anti-Castro” did change things up for a moment, ending with a call for the head of Fidel Castro.
As part of the shtick, the band members wore bandanas over their faces to hide their identities. The crowd and band all appeared to be in on the joke however, and despite the lyrics, this particular güero didn’t feel personally targeted by Brujeria’s violent, tongue-in-cheek threats against my kind.
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Another of the bands on the bill that particularly drew me to make the trek to Santiago was melodic prog metal group Symphony X and they did not disappoint. From the first few notes, Symphony X changed the atmosphere of the festival, if only temporarily, with their soaring (vice pounding) style, “normal” vocals, and willingness to actually employ treble in their metallic attack. With longer songs that often shifted through multiple movements and lyrics that tended toward fantasy, the band created a sense of epic questing to replace the war mongering that
had carried us along through the first part of the day. Hell, they even threw in a beautiful, arena-ready ballad or two.
After all the enjoyable, but highly aggressive bands that had played before, it was almost a shock to be reminded as Symphony X played that it was actually possible to make music that included spaces between the notes. The addition of keyboards to the mix, and the relatively more sparse use of a “galloping” style of drumming were other things that set Symphony X apart from most of their festival mates.
I regretted for years having failed to take an opportunity to see Symphony X in Brazil roughly a decade ago, an error made because I simply did not know their music well at the time. Experiencing them along with my new gang of Metal Fest pals significantly eased my pain over that earlier mistake. These guys are serious composers and virtuoso instrumentalists, but they also know how to get the booty moving. What a blast!
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I wrote previously about the abysmal beauty of My Dying Bride‘s music and won’t repeat that here, but seeing them live added a whole new dimension to the miserable splendor for me. The theatrical delivery of the gloom-ridden lyrics by 
bandleader Aaron Stainthorpe was amazing. His voice is as unique and full of pained sorrow live as it is on record and his doomed physicality in acting out the anguish of the words as he sings them plays as honest rather than over-the-top. I believed he was in emotional pain. His dark eye-liner (on just one eye), blackened fingernails, and black and red intricate henna tattoos on his hands came across as exactly fitting. This is what a man in eternal spiritual torment looks like.
The use of sense-of-doom purples mixed with fleeting flashes of sharp white in the well-considered light show added to the dour ambience, as did the just-right stoicism of the rest of the band as they blasted out their slow/fast, doom-laden music. And they had a violin!
Judge me not, but there is nothing quite so captivating as a gothic, dark,
hard-rocking female metal musician, and bassist Lena Abé is all that in spades. Her playing was amazing and tight, and her stage presence was enthralling. With her bass hung low, a slightly leaned-back stance, and her emotionless-face, she rocked confidence. I apparently was not the only one who thought so as, after Aaron, Lena seemed to get the most close-up time on the venue’s video screens as My Dying Bride performed.
My Dying Bride’s show was, in this fan’s view, the best of a festival full of fantastic performances. It would have ended too soon even at double its 70-minute running time. A commenter on my previous post about the band called them enigmatic and I think that is just right. My Dying Bride have found their own unique niche and it is glorious.
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What can I say about Carcass? They are highly-skilled and creative musicians who craft mesmerizing aggressive music over which they lay incomprehensible cookie-monster shrieks about horribly clinical gore and torture. Is it even possible to vomit one’s anal tract via a perpetual retch? And why would a series of songs about such procedures prove to be the catalyst to squeeze the greatest volume of undulating human flesh into the festival venue at any one time during the entire two-day event?
Carcass was one of the few bands that used the venue’s screens not to broadcast close-ups of their performance but rather to stream specially-crafted visuals to accompany the songs. We started out with an illustration of a white dove impaled on a 
bayonet that sort of phased in and out for the first song, then later moved to a panoramic vintage photo of a mass public hanging somewhere over which religious symbols were repeatedly superimposed. By midpoint in the show, we were watching looped images of horribly infected human genitals, followed by clinical photographs of apparent victims of violent, disfiguring deaths.
As Carcass’ show ended to documentary-style, black-and-white film footage of ongoing human autopsies, I think I was in a state of dazed confusion. I was disturbed throughout but couldn’t look away. There had been music played and I think I might have even liked it, but all I can call to mind here nearly a week later are those images. What the hell?!
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In the 20 minutes between the end of Carcass’ performance and the first note played by the Devin Townsend Project, more than a third of the crowd departed the arena. For all I know, they were in a hurry to buy Alka-Seltzer or maybe call their therapists. What can be
said for certain is that they missed a great show by a truly unusual band. It is difficult to describe exactly but the group’s offerings hit me as a sort of heavy new age progressive fusion, with large doses of aggressive riffing and death metal technical explorations sprinkled in throughout. Townsend himself called some of the selections “alien shit” and that is probably just about right.
Whatever it is they play, Townsend’s amazing guitar skills and larger-than-life stage persona are the backbone on which the DTP experience is built. Apparently aggressively sober after years of drug use, Townsend is nevertheless untiringly wired and manic in front of an audience. He plays “experimental” music without losing any of the preening fun of rock stardom. I will be adding some DTP to my stack near term.
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The trip from Bolivia to Chile to attend Santiago’s second annual metal music festival proved worth it the first night as I went directly from the airport to the Caupolican Theater for what was billed as the “Pre-Show” (“La Previa” in Spanish). The amazing Friday-night concert by German old-school heavy metallers Accept, soon to be available on DVD at a store near you, was a major highlight of this adventure, albeit one that deserves its own separate write-up later. For now, I’ll focus on Saturday’s face melting:
Standing outside Santiago’s Movistar Arena in the searing sun with my “international online ticket reservation” printout while a couple of overwhelmed cashiers struggled to issue passes to a long-line of travelers wasn’t especially metal. Nevertheless, it did allow me to interact briefly with other folk with whom I apparently share both sufficient discretionary income and a belief that national borders should pose no barrier to head-banging opportunity. Most cue companions appeared to be from Brazil, although I did note the occasional Peruvian, Argentine, or Venezuelan visitor. I didn’t personally meet any fellow travelers from Bolivia, but I later saw a pair of Bolivian flags being waved in the arena crowd’s center mass, thus confirming additional representation from the Plurinational Republic at Metal Fest 2013.
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The wait for my entry passes caused me to miss the first few songs by Lock Up, described on Wikipedia as a “grindcore sideproject supergroup.” The only member I recognized however was Anton Reisnegger, and that was only because I had just watched him and his 
regular band Pentagram Chile — not to be confused with U.S. doom legends Pentagram — as they opened for Accept the night before. As the first group of the day, the crowd for Lock Up looked relatively small inside the big arena, although they were still enthusiastic and probably numbered a couple thousand.
Having entered late after waiting for my pass and then having stopped to buy a festival T-shirt and a terrible precooked hamburger from an arena food stand, I unfortunately can’t say much about Lock Up other than confirm that they were loud and tight. I did notice they boasted dual bass guitarists, which of course immediately brought Spinal Tap to mind. Unfortunately however, Lock Up’s harsh metal did not recall The Tap’s Big Bottom in any way, much to my chagrin.
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Next up was avant-garde Norwegian metal band Arcuturus, another group I did not know but who seemed to have quite a following in Chile based on the number of folk waving Arcturus banners and singing along to all the songs. It is hard to put into words just what avant-garde means in Arcturus’ case, but the word calliope springs to mind (and I’m not even sure what calliope means exactly). The best I can do is to describe this band’s music as the sound of 
traveling into the outer reaches of space in an old-timey hot air ship propelled by gears and ropes only to become trapped in the slow-motion gravitational pull of a distant black hole as all the while a carnival barker seeks to entice you into the bearded lady’s tent. I found myself happily lost in the journey as I focused on the black-and-white video projections of spiral galaxies and phased-out Phantoms of the Opera that accompanied the band’s set. The singer’s clear vocals, a nice contrast from the gruff grunts and screams of most of today’s bands, ranged from soaring and dramatic to puppet-show falsettos. While I’m likely too stuck in my comfort zone to actually add any of Arcturus’ Scandinavian weirdness to my own collection, I must say I enjoyed their freak show today.
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Next came Corrosion of Conformity, the first band of the day that I knew well and one of the draws that enticed me to make my way to Chile. The band, touring on their most-recent album as a three-piece (bass, drums, and guitar), was tight and energetic and put on a great show. That said, it was during CoC’s set that I came to a realization regarding my personal inability get beyond the margins when it comes to extreme metal. (I know that 
CoC is by no means “extreme” but bear with me here.)
Variously described as stoner rock or sludge metal, CoC for me hearkens back to early 80s American heavy metal, albeit with more low end and a bit of a weed-loving groove added in. Tonight however, the band had the dual kick-drums turned up to an earth-shaking volume that somewhat overwhelmed the guitars and vocals. This sound worked great for most of the Day 1 bands for whom ear-pummeling and brain-scrambling was the point, but CoC’s music called for the occasional groovy sway mixed into the headbanging. From this listener’s perspective, by trying to match their more extreme festival mates in punch, CoC lost some of the stoned heaviness that defines them. While I still enjoyed big and rocked hard, I must admit to some disappointment in what I viewed as the band’s attempt to fit in with the day’s tone rather than to proudly stand apart.
The three-piece version of CoC stood easily on its own right up until the last two songs when they called up on-again, off-again band member Pepper Keenan to guest with them. The addition of the guitar and vocals from Keenan, who was here with his current band Down (see below), ended up serving to remind us what we had lost without him. The second guitar rounded out the band’s sound and added a level of groove we hadn’t fully realized was missing until that moment. Moreover, Keenan’s vocals simply made the band sound like themselves, or at least the selves we think of when we think Corrosion of Conformity. Having him onstage was both glorious – they played Vote with a Bullet!! – and disheartening as, until then, we had believed we were content with the current version of CoC.
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CoC was followed by German thrash legends Sodom, another three-piece. With some 30 years of history and experience behind them, these guys looked and played great, reminding more elderly metalheads like myself that we can most assuredly still fit into the scene. Sodom was one of the day’s most popular bands with the Chilean crowd and, for reasons inexplicable to me, seemed to be able to boast the greatest relative proportion of female fans. They played a careening mix of old and new, and included their unique cover of Surfin’ Bird; for me is a Ramones cover, although the song’s true origin dates to 1963 and American surf band The Trashmen. At risk of putting off thrash purists out there, I’d say Sodom reminded me of a less self-serious Slayer. As with the other longer-in-the tooth groups on the festival bill, Sodom seemed to be cranking up the drum speed in order to fit alongside the younger bands, an effort that I do not support. Even so, the elder thrashers still had enough melody in their cranium-bashing songs to keep an old dude like myself happily closing my eyes and doing the vigorous back-and-forth head nod all night long.
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Morbid Angel were definitely the coolest-looking band of the day. The singer’s side burns, drummer’s long and shiny black locks, lead guitarist’s Slash-like perm, and rhythm guitarist’s pointy red goatee were pure metal. The veteran death metallers also seemed to be the most accomplished instrumentalists of the day, at least as judged by my own novice ears. 
I only wish I could have found a way past my disdain for growled vocals so I could have more fully participated in the Morbid joy. Happily for me, the sound mix was such that the vocals were somewhat subsumed into the larger emanations, easing my aural pain a bit. Morbid Angel definitely knew how to get the crowd moving, with the mosh pit growing to encompass a vast area in the middle of the floor as the band hammered out their relentless set.
If and when Morbid Angel offer up instrumental versions of their tunes, I will not only be first in line to buy them, I will gladly become an international ambassador for their greatness. In the meantime, I’ll simply have to accept my place outside their target audience.
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The biggest surprise of Day 1 was Twisted Sister. I had always written them off as glammed-up metal posers since way back in the early 1980s and had even blown off a chance to see them live in Bolivia (freaking Bolivia!) a couple of years ago. How was I to know that they not only enjoy a huge, enthusiastic following in South America, but that the old, goofy farts can truly rock!
The show was just plain fun as Dee Snider bounced around like a blow-dried hamster hyped up on caffeine. The “robust” bassist’s repeated happy-metal slapdance move with his bass was pure rawk joy, as were the plentiful glory-days melodic hair-fest solos traded off between twin guitarists Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda. The audience was giddy throughout, especially as the big hits I Wanna Rock and We’re Not Gonna Take It bounced out from the stage. Meaningless to all but Spanish-speaking readers, I note that Snider’s lyrical change-up from “We’re not gonna take it” to sound-alike Spanish phrasing “Huevos con aceite” (eggs fried with oil) most certainly ingratiated the band with the already-loyal Latin American crowd for life.
Twisted Sister, I beg forgiveness for my failure to previously recognize your rock worthiness. I will now go forth and sin no more.
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The final band of the night was Down, featuring both Phil Anselmo of Pantera fame and the aforementioned Pepper Keenan. As it turned out, “angry Phil” made his appearance early, concurrently encouraging and berating the crowd’s fist-pumping “stupid shit” before Down were even two songs in. He soon went on to further admonish the diminishing crowd for “standing there with your fingers up your ass.”
As Phil continued to rage, I found myself thinking more about how I was going to find a taxi to my hotel than actually enjoying the stoner sludge that Down was expertly launching forth. As such, when Phil announced just a few songs later that “this is the last time you assholes are going to have Down playing for you way down here,” I mindlessly joined the steady stream of folk abandoning the arena.
As I eventually entered my cab after making my way to the nearest major street, I found the driver listening to a live broadcast of the very same concert I had just walked out on. Sitting there in the backseat, I discovered a pounding, tight Down playing awesome groove-filled songs. I even heard a seemingly content and almost loving Phil Anselmo thanking the audience for staying on through a long day to listen to Down’s slow-played, southern-fried metal. Damnit! I should have stayed!
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And so, the first half of my first-ever multi-day festival was done (and fantastic!). I can barely wait for Sunday’s bash…
Ensuring both my reserved spot in Christian hell and my status as cool Dad, on 17 September 2006 I shared with my then 15-year old son the appearance by thrash legends Slayer at the Poliedro in Caracas, Venezuela, during the world tour to promote their album Christ Illusion. It was only our second concert together, the first having been a fantastic show by Jethro Tull in Lima, Peru, the year prior. As one can imagine, the Slayer show was just a little different from what my son had experienced with the Tull.
The Slayer crowd was scary, made up solely of angry, aggressive males in black T-shirts, who seemed to get an enormous kick out of ripping bits of seat coverings off and hurling them into the gathered mob. The band had to stop the show twice with threats of walking off if audience members didn’t stop throwing bottles and other hard objects directly at them. I’ll always remember fondly Slayer vocalist and bassist Tom Araya’s angry lecturing of the throng of assholes about their asinine apparent effort to injure a band that they had bought tickets to see and which had traveled all the way to freaking Venezuela (he didn’t say “freaking”) to play for them.
The Poliedro is like a two-tiered bull ring, with a circular floor area underneath a semi-circle upper balcony stacked directly above. In between watching the band, my son and I were also entertained by a continuing flow of drunk idiots dropping over the rail from the balcony in an attempt to get closer to the stage, only to be either carried away with injuries sustained from the 18-foot drop or grabbed immediately by burly security guards and violently manhandled out of the venue.
The mosh pit was not the joyful mutual total body massage that springs up at most heavy metal concerts but rather a full-on brawl with a surprising number of boneheads actively wheeling fists and kicks at their fellow moshers. Audience members also seemed to take great joy in flipping the bird at the band and each other, with outstretched middle fingers being much more prevalent than the more customary raised devil horns. My boy and I found an isolated place away from the free-for-all in an attempt to maintain focus as best we could on the stage and performance.
That was our first concert in Venezuela and I must admit that I began to doubt whether I’d go to many more based on the non-metal atmosphere, at least compared to the shared headbanger jubilation I had always felt at shows elsewhere. Happily, that particular ugly mob turned out to be an outlier, as my son and I discovered at a subsequent Motörhead show six months later that was pure unified heavy metal harmony. I’ve come to think of that night’s Slayer crowd condescendingly as a bunch of overexcited, inexperienced children so overwhelmed to see the long-coveted pile of gifts under the tree on Christmas morning that they couldn’t think straight and simply began to tear at paper and boxes maniacally with no ability to focus on the actual presents inside.
The above aside, here is what is most important: SLAYER KICKED ASS!! I’m still amazed to look at the setlist from that night. They played a set filled with song after song from their legendary early albums, alongside deep cuts from older EPs, with only one song offered from the new album they were touring to promote. It was as if Slayer had decided to reward their Venezuelan fans with the glory-days tunes in recognition of the fact that the band had seldom made it to their country over the prior years, an offering completely lost on the self-absorbed, preening violence mongers who had happened to show up that night.
Among the many gems, Slayer played three songs from 1986’s Reign in Blood, three from 1988’s South of Heaven, and six tracks from 1990’s Seasons in the Abyss. The signature angry bee solos of guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman scorched ear drums ruthlessly all night long while Dave Lombardo‘s innovative double-bass drum bombardment threatened to bring the pulsating venue toppling down on top of all of us. “Mandatory Suicide” indeed. Tom Araya’s vocals were clear and powerful throughout as well, preaching Slayer’s anti-gospel gospel at us relentlessly and without mercy. (Yes, they even played “Die by the Sword” from 1983 EP Show No Mercy!)
An iPod playlist made to mimic the setlist from that 2006 concert has become my most repeated soundtrack choice to accompany long treadmill journeys into the recesses of my troubled mind. At the risk of putting off my fellow thrash metal fanatics out there, I must admit to having come to view Slayer’s music as beautiful and cathartic in an inner-peace-attaining way rather than as an aggression fest designed to fray nerves and call up bile. This almost certainly reflects the experience of my boy and me in seeing them live from within a confederacy of dunces that night in Caracas. Slayer was the voice of reason screaming at us to set aside unfocused, scattershot rage aimed mindlessly at everyone and everything and replace it with laser-guided fury and indignation targeted at the specific ideas and authorities that muddle our vision of the truth. And, for Slayer, truth is to be found in ferociously drawing attention to and casting off the self-serving, corrupt dogmas of diseased systems, be they political or religious, that lead us into violence and war in the first place.
To paraphrase Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, “You don’t talk to Slayer. You listen to them. The band’s enlarged my mind. They are poet-warriors in the classic sense.”
As an accompaniment to pitch black or candlelit tread-milling, it is hard to imagine a more effective conveyance. Within minutes your consciousness is transported into a land of perpetual night, foggy-marsh stone castles, and loam-covered knolls. The castles host a maze of shadowy passageways lit by flickering torches, a few wrought iron adornments affixed to otherwise bare walls. You instinctively make your way towards the faint glimpses of a ghostly maiden that tease your peripheral vision in the twilight. Her flowing hair, flowing gown, and flowing desire tantalize you, but she is continually beyond reach, not in mocking but rather sharing despair at the futility of your attempts to join her. With each failure, your need for her grows until you can think of nothing else. Only she matters. You sense an inexplicable yet timeless connection. You can discern not where or when but you know that you were are soul mates.
She has been taken from you unjustly and your love, no that’s not strong enough, your longing for her is all-encompassing. Eventually you realize that she is being kept from you by otherworldly powers against which you have neither recourse nor remedy. They care not for your suffering. Your desperate pleas for compassion fall on deaf ears. Despite the bottomless depths of your anguish, to them you are naught but an insignificant midge, unworthy of even a moment’s thought. You cast yourself to the stone floor in hopelessness, doomed to forever haunt these nocturnal halls and hills with your beloved just beyond your grasp. You yearn for Death to take pity and end your torment, but it will never be. Your sorrow is eternal. You are crushingly alone, with no one to lament your circumstance nor even to take pleasure at your woe. You are inconsequential, and yet your pain fills the universe. Please. End. This.
Such is the awesome splendor of English doom metal band My Dying Bride. Their music is the perfect soundtrack for solitude, albeit not the reassuring solitude of sunny forests filled with chirping birds and gleaming, dew-covered leaves. This is music for dark, lonely rooms and extended solo road trips through desolate landscapes. This is music through which to escape the misery of one’s own earthly isolation by subsiding into the deeper, blanketing gloom of the vast, empty cosmos.
Joy is to be found here; the joy of recognizing one’s own utter irrelevance, the joy of realizing that there is no greater scheme, the joy of seeing that one’s personal suffering, while wholly unavoidable, serves no larger purpose. My Dying Bride represents liberation from the shackles of hope. There is true, boundless beauty in the abyss. Come. Join. Us.
Victim of the Fury 