Black Boned Angel: metal as worship
Music
The persistence of METAL
by Philip Matthews
You can relax – it’s okay to like heavy metal again
Already this year, we’ve been visited by Slayer and Mastodon, Isis, Tool, Lamb of God, Nile and Decapitated, Dragonforce and – for two nights this week – a version of Guns N’Roses with Skid Row as opening act. In August, the second-best line-up of Black Sabbath – the one fronted by Ronnie James Dio after they sacked Ozzy Osbourne – tours as Heaven and Hell.
So, are we in the middle of a heavy- metal renaissance? Campbell Kneale thinks so. Over the past decade, the Lower Hutt-based Kneale has made an international reputation for experimental noise music, recorded in his shed and released under the name Birchville Cat Motel. The tradition that Birchville sits in usually cites Sonic Youth as a predecessor with 60s minimalist drone composers Tony Conrad and La Monte Young as guiding influences. It’s art music, obscure and uncommercial, as serious as jazz. But a few years ago, something drew Kneale back towards his first love: heavy metal.
Kneale’s story is a typical one. At the age of 12 or 13, he had a “total epiphany” when he heard Iron Maiden. “My musical life was changed within a minute and a half.”
For a few more years, music began and ended with metal. But by his mid-teens, he was shamed out of it: girls didn’t like guys who listened to metal. He opened his ears to punk, indie, even the Smiths.
“There was this doofus factor about metal that was too hard to live with.” On one hand, there were its delinquent connotations and on the other, there was the absurd unreality of American hair metal in the 80s. Wearing make-up, dating porn stars, living in LA mansions: how could this have any meaning to a teenager in suburban New Zealand? Kneale sees that hollow, decadent era as comparable to where hip-hop is now – “It’s incredibly popular but it’s never had less to say.”
When he rediscovered metal after many years off, he treated it as a scholarly exercise, starting at the beginning with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, skipping forward through Iron Maiden and Metallica, avoiding the worst hair metal rubbish – “WASP or whatever”.
And what did he find? “That sense of power, that grand scale, that happens with extreme rock music – I realised I missed that playing minimal, experimental noise music.” He wanted to make minimalist music that had metal’s power, music that had aggression and grandeur while still drawing on the noise and feedback and drones that had shaped Birchville. So, one day in his shed, he gave birth to Black Boned Angel.
The best description of Black Boned Angel is avant-garde metal: it’s as slow-moving as a glacier, dark, droning, instrumental. It’s music that aspires to the quality of sculpture – it doesn’t so much move forward as fill up space.
“It’s slow like Black Sabbath played at 16rpm,” Kneale says. “Slow is heavier than fast. Fast is about velocity and intensity. But it’s not heavy. Slow is heavy.”
He made his first Black Boned Angel recording in an afternoon. He titled it Supereclipse. Not intending to release it, he ran off 50 copies for friends but a US independent label heard it and picked it up. The entirely provisional band name – Black Boned Angel comes from a song by Godflesh – had to stick.
A second record, which Kneale thinks is better – Bliss and Void Inseparable – followed last year. Overseas reviewers immediately categorised Kneale’s act as doom metal. The most famous purveyors of doom right now are the American duo Sunn O))). Bearded, dressed in black robes, playing metal’s Satanic associations for heavy atmosphere rather than comic-book shocks, Sunn O))) have been feted by tastemakers as various as Jarvis Cocker – who selected them, and Motorhead, to play at the Meltdown festival in London this month, alongside the reformed Iggy and the Stooges and rehabilitated acid casualty Roky Erickson – and the New York Times Magazine, which ran a long feature on Sunn O))) last year.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of Sunn O))) for people who don’t usually listen to metal. There’s no poodle-haired singer, there’s no drummer – there’s only the distorted, chasm-deep guitar sound of early Black Sabbath stretching out for eternity.
Light the incense and pass the black candles. But Sunn O))) would be the first to admit that they aren’t as original as metal dabblers might suspect. They owe their sound – but not their look – to Seattle band Earth, the project of Dylan Carlson, a former drug buddy of Kurt Cobain. Carlson perfected the endless chord on the classic Earth 2 before disappearing into years of addiction. His recent re-emergence is one of rock music’s good news stories. But then, Earth is also a homage: Carlson named his act after the original name of Black Sabbath.
So, all roads lead to Ozzy – heavy metal is a parallel universe where Black Sabbath are more important than the Beatles. Sunn O))) and Earth owe them. So do the critically favoured Japanese bands Boris and Acid Mothers Temple – the latter’s recent Starless and Bible Black Sabbath didn’t just invoke the band name, it riffed on Sabbath cover art.
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