What do you think of when you picture the American Midwest?
-Michael Myers stalking the streets of Haddonfield.
-"In The Ghetto".
-Meat-packing (I meant "Hog Butcher Of The World...", not gay nightclubs, but I think Chicago's got a few of those too)
-Fargo
-"My Kind Of Town".
-The Candyman.
Speaking of the Candyman, if you answered "Billy Corgan" to that question, even if you only uttered his name once, I'm going to appear behind you and murder you.
There's something appealing about the Midwest. Maybe it's the whole "American Gothic" thing (not least the fantastic TV show of the same name), or maybe it's because when I was younger I felt like I could be a (distant) background character in John Hughes' Illinois-based films.
You know the type: The bored, wasted underage kid who works some shitty job, listening to some sub-Motorhead drivel in an abandoned carpark on a sunday night, smoking arguably the shittiest weed in the world but still insisting it was "fucking awesome" to his equally braindead friends (one of whom would invariably end up getting his ugly, acne-scarred overweight girlfriend pregnant on his already cum-stained mattress while his mum hit the bottle and his dad continued not to exist).
If you replaced "Chicago" with "Glenorchy", and "works some shitty job" with, "wags school to go nick tattered vhs horror films from the video shop", you'd basically have my Glory Days.
Essentially, to the Midwest has a mythology about it. If Sergio Leone was never born until 2040, and he still wanted to make movies about the American Legend, I think that he'd skip over the wonderfully gaudy, hallucinatory Old West imagery that he's famous for, and exploit instead the almost romantic drear of scummy overgrown backlots and glaciated Ohio plains. The iconic shots of Monument Valley would be replaced with the claustrophobic, austere rolling hills of West Virginia. Charles Bronson wouldn't be a stoic harmonica-playing ghost-man; he'd be a piss-stunk, matted-hair thrash metal burnout who's carved an upside down cross into his arm with a compass stolen from his high school science lab. Instead of the harmonica he'd play a paint-chipped Flying V with a string missing. Peter Fonda would be Buffalo Bill from The Silence Of The Lambs.
You can sort of see how mythology and geography are related. Certain physical environments breed certain types of attitudes, which in turn breed certain types of myths. I even once read that in London the architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches was specifically designed to strike the Fear of God into the city's denizens by dominating the skyline.
Anyway, one interesting addition to (or perhaps result of) the scummy, mutated Midwestern psyche is the sound of Reverend JR Preston, who's managed to work up a minor reputation for himself, thanks to his one- man black metal acid trip Tjolgtjar, who's output I'll go into at a later date (I'm waiting for his newest record to arrive on my doorstep so I can attack his whole catalogue in one wack). Details on Preston himself are remarkably scarce, but I have managed to work out that he's invented a religion called Tjolgtari, into which a scant twelve members have been inducted, and the creation of the records is supposedly some sort of Mass or ritual. There's also some vague, weed-driven notion of Astral Projection that works its way into the ideology too. I can't make head nor tail of it, and I suspect the whole thing is largely a piss-take on his behalf to freak out zine authors and interviewers.
Another fantastic Preston project which I'll have to review later, is Blood Cult, a Children-of-the-Corn marriage of redneck shenanigans and religious tomfoolery, most evident in their album title, "We Who Walk Behind The Rows". Mostly consisting of deafening thrash and vomitous mid-tempo BM grooves, that record contains lyrics such as
Praising Satan Hunting Deer
Watching Nascar Drinking Beer
Raising Crops For The Devil
This Is Redneck Black Metal!
Excellent!
These aren't Preston's only contributions to the sonic destruction of society, however. The man (or beast) lends his musicianship to a bunch of other groups too. I'm going to detail more of his output at a later date, but I'm about sixty-four paragraphs into this post so I should probably start talking about the record I'm here to review.
XEXYZ - PRIMEVAL MOUNTAIN
Less Darkthrone or Burzum, and more like some NWOBHM band drinking a whole bunch of cough medicine, stripping down to their tighty whities and spewing out some lo-fi psychedelic pagan drone, Xexyz doesn't blast like Norwegian bands did, it just kind of buzzes. If a good Darkthrone riff could blow your windows out, Xexyz just sort of oozes out the speaker and corrodes the floorboards like in Alien.
Xexyz consists of The Reverend, and another creature who goes only by the title of Machine. If you Google the name Xexyz, you're most likely to find a bunch of sites about an old Nintendo game:
You can probably see where I'm going with this. Yes, the main distinguishing feature of Xexyz is that it's entirely NES-themed, with song titles like "Metroid", "Rygar's Quest" and "Nightmare On Elm Street". As far as I can tell they're not being 'ironic' or trying to cash in on any perceived geek-chic niche in the BM market. Simply, for whatever reason, the band decided that the catchy, quirky weirdness of what's effectively incredibly simple pop music could be used to their Satanic advantage.
And sure enough, it completely works. When listening to it, I'm reminded, in a roundabout sort of way, of the 'classic' anarcho-punk record (as much as any slightly pretentious anarcho-punk record could be called classic) Pope Adrian by Rudimentary Peni. That record, reportedly written in a mental health facility, features a constant, eerie tape loop of a single repeated phrase throughout it's entire runtime. Nintendo music, by limitations of the 8-bit hardware, is similarly repetitive by nature.
So in a strange sort of way, it makes sense that Black Metal's hypnotic repetition should combine with the lo-fi, cyclical samples from classic Nintendo game theme music. Hell, plenty of other BM bands have tried to make use of 'proper' synth, usually to add a symphonic or eerie atmosphere to the proceedings. Why shouldn't a couple of (by their own admission) drunk rednecks favour the glitchy nastiness of dirty, pulverised 8-bit oscillations? It adds to the bored, suburban misanthropy that epitomises the sound. Much better this than pretending they're in the frostbitten mountains of Norway when they're blatantly not. I haven't played Nintendo for a long time but I get the feeling there's a lot of chopping and re-arranging where the original tunes are concerned. The bits of music that I recognised have been warped, mutated, and sampled out-of-time, so it's not just a case of a black metal band playing along with old childhoodsongs. The band seems more interested in exploiting the sound of Nintendo music, rather than the music itself.
It's not really fair to say that Preston and co. don't take the music seriously, because they're evidently dedicated to creating some of the most uniquely textured BM around, but I imagine a few people would write this record off as a joke-band, due to the innate silliness of a couple of hicks playing satanic black metal with Nintendo sounds over the top. That's a bit of a shame, because beneath all the psychedelic, pot smoke-shrouded buzz and clutter, there's a really fascinating record. Like all the best Black Metal, it works as background music while you're working, it works when you're getting high, but if you decide to dedicate your full attention to it, it's insanely rewarding.
(Oh, sorry that the promised Napalm Death review didn't show up. My house burnt down and I lost both my original LP and the Dualdisc cd/dvd version. I didn't really want to write it without it being fresh in my head. Bear with me while I get ahold of another copy)
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