Dudes. Who play rock music.
Some bands toe the line between hardcore and metal, creating a third genre that doesn’t follow any of the rules. Gray Area attempts to catalog these works.
Gray Area Deluxe, however, is a spotlight on a fantastic band’s brand new album.
Gray Area: the place where Black Metal and White Light/White Heat come together.
These guys are pretty great.
When I first conceived this column, I didn’t have Venom or the Velvet Underground in mind. But both bands sort of staked out new territory that their peers weren’t quite sonically keen to, and ultimately, the new Gray Area is the space between metal and hardcore that can’t quite be musically defined. That was the original idea for the column, and television and movies quickly fell in line as well.
When talking about the Gray Area of music, two labels that stand out are Seventh Rule and Hydra Head. Both labels were founded in the Great American independent tradition, by folks who loved music, and might just need an outlet for their future material. And while Hydra Head has really come into it’s own these past few years as one of the ultimate frontrunners in metal music, Seventh Rule has been rising steadily from a part-time Chicago based label to the signing of Kongh, the label’s first international band, out of Sweden. Fitting, then, that Kongh’s debut should coincide with that of Harvey Milk on Hydra Head. Both albums pull from doom metal and sludge in entirely different ways, and I couldn’t think of two better bands from two better labels in which to write about for this week.
This is a different type of metal than this post is about.
When discussing the current state of our music collections the other day, a good friend of mine had the revelation that getting into metal was a slippery slope. The sub-genres are myriad, there are cross overs and purists, and it’s a worldwide talent pool.
“Metal,” he said, “is an international currency.”
And he’s right. But for right now, fuck the world. It’s hard enough keeping track of this stuff stateside. There are two clear categories, too. Purist metal groups that grew up on Sabbath, Metallica, and Iron Maiden who don’t really understand punk (and many times despise it), and then there are cross over bands that acknowledge The Greater Influence, a sort of demi-God that guided Toni Iommi and Greg Ginn’s hands one and the same.
