At some point in the last few years, metal seems to have succeeded in clawing back the credibility which a lot of mainstream music journalists and fans have always wanted to deny it. There's no denying that the genre has been through some fallow periods in the past - it seemed to spend most of the seventies obsessed with elves and tight leather trousers, and most of the late nineties channelling directionless, pointless adolescent rage - but now it wants to pick itself up, dust itself down, and pretend that nothing untoward ever happened. On the one hand, bands like Boris, Isis and Mastodon have been reaching out to indie kids with their own distinctive brands of arty, experimental prog-metal. Meanwhile a whole bunch of other groups have tried to strip heavy music back to basics, cutting away the cringe-worthy lyrics, flabby soloing and po-faced instrumental virtuosity and focusing on the brutal riffs. There's no clear dividing line between the two camps (although one could say that while the bands in the first camp want to create art, those in the second are more interested in getting drunk and jumping around), and both of them have succeeded in legitimising a form of music that non-metal music magazines previously regarded as something of an embarrassment. In a sense, one could see this new compilation by the folk who run London-based club night New Heavy Sounds as a belated celebration of this legitimacy. It's a collection of heavy, riff-based music featuring metal bands who have toured with indie groups, punk bands trying out metal sounds, and progressive rock groups disguised as metallers, all of whom have turned their amps up to eleven.
Continue reading: Various Artists, New Heavy Sounds Volume One Album Review
