Angry Metal Guy

I just reviewed the new Behemoth record on here, and while it was good, there was one thing that had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the record that stood out for me.  I couldn’t really include it as a major critique in the record, but now I can at least mention it… OV.

Ov?  Really?  The first time I saw this stupid thing was with the band Kult Ov Azazel.  And yeah, that was stupid, but I didn’t think much of it because, well, unfortunately intentional misspellings are standard fare in metal.  Katatonia for example or, some of my personal favorites are the misuses of vowels from other languages: Mötley Crüe (I’m not actually sure how to phonetically spell how that sounds, but if you were to pronounce it correctly it would be fucking ridiculous), Mötörhead is another one that thought that the “Ö” (O umlaut) was really cool looking.  But my personal favorite is the band Dååth which pronounces their name “Dath” like, rhymes with bath, but spells it “Doath” like the ‘o’ in the word boat.  And actually, two ‘Å’s, for those of you who don’t know, actually would be an extra long ‘O’ sound, since Å is actually two ‘A’s put together.

Let’s not even talk about nu-metal, which spells EVERYTHING wrong.  Travesties like Limp Bizkit, Korn, and of course Linkin Park, forcing their shared stupidity onto the rest of the world, which actually likes to spell words correctly.  And even can.  So not only are these assholes responsible for irritatingly blending hip hop and metal into a travesty which should despised, but they also encourage stupidity among our youth!

But, I feel like OV takes it to a new level.  How fucking pretentious do you have to be to intentionally misspell a common preposition like “of”?  Do you think it’s stupid to use said preposition?  Then use the fucking possessive/genetive case!  You know like “Metal’s stupid trends” as opposed to “Stupid trends OV metal!”  C’mon, this is ridiculous and unnecessary and it makes me want to start a fire and feed it with babies!  How hard is this stuff?  Not very, in my opinion.  But heck, you know me, I like to spell things correctly.  I even attempt to use proper grammar.

The sad thing is this, as a person who is interested in language, it is obvious to me that one cannot control how language is used.  Every generation and decade brings us new words (för de svenskar som läser: kolla boken: Världens dåligaste språk av Fredrik Lindström—den är skitbra och förklarar jättemycket om ämnet) and language is meant to be played with.  According to some linguists,  no matter what your grammar books say, if you’re an inborn speaker of a language  you physically can’t be wrong about your own language.  So we invent new words, spellings, combinations and we try our hardest to coin new phrases.  Things like “bootylicious” end up in the dictionary (and my spellcheck no longer picks it up) and life continues forward with English as a functional language.

But there is a little language fascist in me that just wants to smack all the jackasses who insist on misspelling words for the sake of being COOL.  Kvlt?  Ov?  Wëll löök hërë yöü möröns.. IT’S STÜPÏD! SÖ STÖP!

What a stupid fucking trend.

You know what’s a stupid metal trend?  The 3.5 minute interlude with stupid soundscapes–these days, the trend is actually always involving the forging of iron or the angryness of trolls somewhere.  I don’t know where this started, so I’m going to blame Ulver.  Yeah, sure, Bergtatt was a great record.  It was really interesting and it had lots of cool stuff going on.  The stupid soundscape interlude, however, wasn’t.  Nope, just some guy running on crushed boxes (OK, maybe it was supposed to sound like snow, but it was definitely crushed boxes).  Vintersorg used it with great stupidity to interrupt one of his songs on Ödemarkens Son with the trickling of water because nothing screams metal like.. TRICKLING FOREST STREAM!!  (RAAAH!) It was used by Agalloch, but that was pretty much just them copying Ulver (actually, wasn’t The Mantel just them copying Ulver? Huh.  How ’bout that shit?).  In any case, in those cases it wasn’t super bad.  Just one or two places.. one could easily get through them without problem.  Just skip it, no biggy.  Right?

Well, the idiocy hit its zenith with Finntroll‘s very “interesting,” but immensely annoying, use of 4 minute interlude tracks  which were apparently of people eating beans around a fire on Visor om Slutet.  What. The. Fuck?  Seriously, what an incredible waste of fucking space, plastic and time.  It is obvious that the band had only 25 minutes worth of acoustic material to record, but instead of just putting out a cute little EP where Finntroll goes “folk” or whatever, they decided to make it.. I dunno… Annoying?  Yeah, pretty much.  Or stupid.  The annoyance that I had with this record, was fortunately tracked–that is, I can skip the crap.  On the other hand Ásmegin did them one worse and putting a fucking crying baby throughout the whole second half of their otherwise AMAZING album Hin Vordende Sod & Sø.  How irritating is that?  Totally irritating.  I mean, I know you guys are trying to be original and interesting.. but stop.  Please, stop.  It hurts my brain.

I’ve been listening to Crimfall‘s newest record, and it’s good.  But seriously, I’ve heard so much of this stuff before and it just makes me want to scream.  Since when did it become necessary and/or OK to put these stupid interlude tracks in everywhere?  Yeah, the album intro with the over the top orchestra or some stupid gore movie quote is now apparently obligatory.. I guess it’s not going anywhere, so I’ll have to live with it.  But can we stop with the “gazing into the past” sounds created in the studio in order to give your record some sort of stupid feel that doesn’t go at all with your over-produced orchestrations?  My god!  Just fucking stop it.  Not only that, if you’re going to include this stupidity for no apparent reason at all, then FOR THE LOVE OF THE METAL GODS: TRACK IT!  Make it different tracks so that I can skip your efforts to take yourself seriously as artists.  Stop it.  Stop. Stop. STOP!

I urge Steven Colbert to put these people on notice.  And I openly condemn this stupid metal trend.  Soundscape interludes: go fuck yourself!