Angry Metal Guy

Orphaned Land // The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR
Rating: 5.0/5.0 — A work of art
Label: Century Media
Websites: orphaned-land.com | myspace.com/orphanedmyspace
Release Dates: EU: 25.01.2010 | US: 02.09.2010

Few bands will ever make their own mark on a genre of music—it’s just a statistical rarity. Someone once told me that there are something like 5 million bands on MySpace, if that gives you an idea of the breadth which exists when one is thinking in terms of how many musicians there are out there. Of those, most of them probably last longer than a year, never produce much of a demo much less get signed to a real label—and how many ever produce a real step forward into a new decade with a statement of great things to come? The chances of becoming a professional musician are basically NIL and then of the number that do, how many ever produce something that will be remembered and affect enough listeners to ever influence any? That number is even smaller. Orphaned Land is one of the few bands that will ever exact change in metal and they are doing so now with their new record The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR.

For those of you not “in the know,” (though frankly these guys are on Century Media if you don’t know by now…) Orphaned Land is progressive death metal act from Israel who produces masterpieces at a snail’s pace. However, they do, in fact, produce masterpieces. To do the band no justice at all, imagine Orphaned Land as the culmination of progressive metal (in the vein of Opeth and old Paradise Lost), traditional heavy metal and folk metal. But not Otyg, Eluveitie or Finntroll folk metal, which is very much a northern Europe kind of thing, but instead blending in all the textures and unique flavors of “oriental” and middle-eastern instruments and big orchestrations into one cohesive, and epic as hell, whole. Blend all of that in with a tendency to get a little chuggy at times with off-tempo and syncopation and beautiful female vocals and you have Orphaned Land.

For fans of the band, The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR picks up where Mabool, the band’s 2004 (!) release, left off. Well, musically, that is. Despite the 6 year break, the sound is still remarkably fresh. This might have something to do with the fact that this album was mixed by Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree genius-at-large, temporary keyboard player for the band and Opeth go-to guy for Blackwater Park, Deliverance and Damnation), who added some of his distinct, trademark sounds (see: telephone line vocals, mellotron keyboards, etc.) to the album giving the tracks a different flavor than Mabool had—though, I’ll guess that a higher budget probably had something to do with that as well (though this is conjecture). The tracks flow into each other perfectly, balancing mid-paced death metal riffs and mid-range death metal growls against folky klezmer sounding pieces and huge sweeping orchestras which use unison violins to imitate old Lawrence of Arabia style movie soundtracks—a stunning and chilling effect, surprisingly. [Editors note: it was confirmed for me by Kobi Farhi that this orchestra is indeed the Nazareth Orchestra, which plays the violin in a different way and that it was chosen specifically to give this album a different approach.]

As Mabool before it, The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR is a concept album—but the unfortunate side-effect of promotional media is that I have not received lyrics to give you a picture of the story. However, from what I’ve read elsewhere on the net and from the band’s own statements it is clear that they are maintaining their overarching theme of the unity and common ground of Islam, Judaism and Christianity—even appealing for peace openly on the track “Disciples of the Sacred Oath II” and singing in Arabic for the first time on that track. In a sense, these guys are breaking ground with this stuff, too. Without being an overtly religious band, they have broken away from the confines of EEVIIIIL heavy metal and moved into the arena of smart, appealing and interesting themes on their own. This gives the band a sense of sincerity that I think a lot of bands lack, and gives them credibility overall.

I admit freely that Orphaned Land has pretty much cemented its place as one of my favorite heavy metal/progressive bands of the modern era and, frankly, ever. The complexity of the thought processes, the writing, the arrangements and production are not lost on me and I encourage everyone to give this a record a listen in high quality earphones, because that is to some extent how it deserves to be listened to. I suspect that I will be listening to this album every day for a long time to come, despite the huge number of CDs I should be reviewing, because I can’t keep myself away. And if it holds up as well as Mabool has to the years, then I strongly suspect I’ll be about ready for a new album in 2016 when they finally get back around to it.

The Norwegian journalist who Mustaine is all pissed off at has posted all 25 minutes of their interview online and I’d like you to watch the first few minutes of it, up to the part where he starts talking about Metallica.  Pay close attention to what he’s saying about 9/11 being an inside job and all that.  I know already I’m going to take a shit-ton of heat for this post, but I gotta say it.

OK, I took a lot of heat when I wrote my Megadeth Endgame review for calling out Dave Mustaine on his ridiculous lyrics, despite holding out that, indeed, the record was very, very good.  There were a lot of people who defended him in different ways, saying that Dave Mustaine has always been writing about this kind of stuff and so forth.  They particularly gave me shit for saying that Mustaine had gone of the deep end on the right side of the political spectrum.  Well, I would like to correct people who fought against me on this point.  For those who aren’t aware, Mustaine got pissed off at a journalist recently for basically turning a 25 minute interview into a 5 minute clip about Dave’s gripes about the whole Metallica fiasco.  You know, the whole “I got kicked out of the band for assaulting my bandmate ’cause he kicked my dog” story.  Some of us (myself included) absolutely don’t give a shit.  Who. Fucking.  Cares.  Right?  I mean, dude hasn’t been in Metallica since…  Well, as far as the majority of fans are concerned, ever.  He wasn’t even on Kill ‘Em All and the majority of fans don’t have anything older than that anyway.  So who cares!

So the whole interview of Dave Mustaine v. Norwegian Journalist was released, and I decided to watch it since I do a metal blog.  You know, what’s El Crazy Mustaine up to these days?  See, here’s thing thing.  I can’t interview the guy myself because Roadrunner has decided that my blog (despite the fact that it is now getting thousands of views a week and outshining itself all the time) isn’t good enough to get onto their promo list and therefore I can’t interview Mustaine myself.  This is a big access game and unfortunately, I don’t have that access.  So, as much as I’d like to interview this guy and actually delve into his political beliefs, I won’t be allowed to.  It’s a big game of access and apparently AngryMetalGuy.com isn’t cool enough for the Roadrunner folks.  Which is too bad, since it sounds like Mustaine really, really wants to talk about this shit.  But rant aside, that means that I’m just going to have to spout back what I heard here, and this is great.

First, to prove my point.  Dave starts talking about “the endgame document” and 9/11 conspiracies on the Internet.  Making use of a common logical fallacy, he says “Alex Jones … puts forward really hard theories to rebutt.”  OK, two things: first, just because you can’t disprove something doesn’t mean that it’s a fact.  By Mustaine’s logic, the whole piece from this video where he’s talking about his former drummer thinking that Jesus was an alien should totally work.  Now this idea is patently absurd to Dave, but he’s using the exact same logic to reach his own conclusions.  I can’t disprove that God exists, but does that mean that God exists? Not really.  It just means I can’t disprove it, for a variety of reasons.  But I also can’t disprove that Jesus wasn’t an alien, does that mean that Jesus was an alien?  Well, it must! I can’t disprove it!  Secondly, “Alex Jones,” I thought to myself, “why do I know Alex Jones?”  Well, Alex Jones runs PrisonPlanet.com and InfoWars.com, both are highly commercial endeavors that also allow him to pedal his conspiratorial wares.  If you’ve ever done any research on the great American conspiracy theories, such as  about the Bilderberg Group, you’ll know who he is.  Here’s what a cursory investigation (i.e., reading his Wikipedia page) turns up on Alex Jones:

Alex Jones (born Alexander Emerich Jones, February 11, 1974) is a right-wing,^[1][2][3] conservative^[4][5][6][7] American talk radio host and filmmaker. Jones, however, views himself as a libertarian, not a right-winger,^[8] and calls himself a paleoconservative.^[9] In a promotional biography he is described as an “aggressive constitutionalist.”^[10][11] His syndicated news/talk show The Alex Jones Show, based out of Austin, Texas, airs via the Genesis Communication Network over 60 AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations across the United States and on the Internet.^[12] His websites include Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.^[13]

Mainstream news sources have referred to him as a conspiracy theorist.^{[14][15][16][17][18]} Journalist Michelle Goldberg has stated in The New Republic that Jones represents “an old strain of American conservatism–isolationist, anti-Wall Street, paranoid about elite conspiracies–that last flowered during the John Birch Society’s heyday.”^[19]

A right-wing conservative dude who spends a lot of time pushing out ideas about the Amero and things of that sort.  He basically believes that we don’t have a valid government and that our government, and well, actually the coming WORLD GOVERNMENT is going to insert chips into each and every one of us, and control us with our money.  Sound familiar?  Yeah, it’s an end of days kind of conspiratorial orgy that roots back to conservative Christian concepts of the Number of the Beast being a barcode and number that we’re all going to have and so on and so forth.

As for the Endgame document that “mysteriously disappeared,” according to Mr. Mustaine, it took me about 3 minutes to “find” it again (I’m sure he’ll be happy to know).  It didn’t actually disappear, it’s available through Wikipedia and through the ALCU’s website (http://www.aclum.org/ice/documents/endgame.pdf) and it is listed by the ALCU as a concern in regards to immigrants.  In fact, the Orwellianally named Operation Endgame (which is a terribly scary name, one must admit), is not at all about rounding up American citizens and putting them in camps, it is in fact about rounding up immigrants and kicking their asses out of the United States.  Now whether or not you think that this is a fascist policy it a) doesn’t appear to actually be happening, b) doesn’t actually relate to American citizens and c) doesn’t support that we’re all going to be fitted with RFID chips and told to suck the government line.  Nor does it seem that everyone is going to be ordered to report to camps any time soon, either, despite the scare tactics of certain organizations.

Mustaine then goes on to cite the movie Zeitgeist which has captured the imaginations of many young people with Internet access in the States, but is probably the most ridiculously poorly reasoned and thought out films ever made.  The sourcing is terrible.  They use pretty much no one of consequence or with any standing anywhere in the film, they combine three completely different trains of thought and try to tie them together into a whole and they push that simultaneously as the government is trying to control you monetarily through the Federal Reserve, the bankers are trying to set up a One World Government or New World Order which is going to enslave everyone in the world. At the same time that this is happening, other groups are working together to work out a never-ending War on Terror which can be used to scale back on civil liberties (an actual concern for any civil rights-minded individual like myself), but in doing that, they’re just working towards sending people to camps for some unknown reason (because really, there’s no good reason given here—every crime and ill-deed has a motivation, what’s the motivation here?)¹

There is, of course, inherent populist appeal in the discussions of money, the Federal Reserve and not allowing the government to control us with money, I admit.  And these things have long been a part of the American collective unconscious, so to speak. The Green Backers, for example, were deeply afraid of bankers² and were highly populistic.  And, as mentioned before, The John Birch Society, one time a mainstay in right wing circles in the US, were ostracized by the conservative movement because they were pushing this concept of elite conspiracies against the masses—something that appeals to the common working man who feels like he’s getting screwed by a system but doesn’t know where to put the blame.  But the problem is that these things are unprovable and sometimes just patently false.  Instead, Alex Jones and other conservatives of this nature, rely on dubious evidence and hearsay to show that we’re headed for DOOM.  There are, of course, many endgames in this for a guy like Jones.. but the most obvious of them would be money.

The point here is that what Dave Mustaine is saying is crazy and he totally gets a pass for it.  Not only that, but it’s absolutely tied to a right wing tradition of conspiratorial views and attitudes, that spawned the militia movement in the 90s and included individuals like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Oklahoma City building.  Just because it is now being picked up by left wing social libertarians doesn’t mean that it’s not still founded in right wing, conservative Christian dogma about the end of days and the Antichrist and all that kind of stuff.  It is also a very smart way to undermine the legitimacy of a President, as well.  If you can convince people that the President isn’t really a representative of the people, than it’s not so difficult to convince them that it revolt is the right thing to do.  Of course, I’m not saying that Dave Mustaine himself is interested in destabilizing a government or anything like that.  No, I just think that Mr. Mustaine wants to believe.  But that he’s so brazen about it in interviews and stuff just really amazes me.

Anyway, people of Roadrunner Records: let me interview Dave Mustaine!  Please, please, please let me interview Dave Mustaine!