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by Colin JoyceSometimes metal is a compelling form of transgressive art. At its best it’s shocking and endearing in all the right ways – playfully tousling the hair of those not hip to its darker charms and puking virginal blood on the doorsteps of those who turn up their noses at it. But sometimes it can be regressive, a club that’s notoriously hostile to interlopers; relentlessly mocking those who cop the aesthetics without the traditionalist cred to back it up, or instantly shutting down those who challenge the form or prod at its borders.
Case in point: Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, driving force behind much-maligned black metal group Liturgy. His manifesto trumpeting the form’s transcendental power was received by conservative black metal fans as pretentious, bourgeois academia not suitable for a genre meant simply to satisfy the church-burning malcontents who invented it.
The sophomore full-length from Richmond, Va.’s Inter Arma isn’t so outspoken about their art, but Sky Burial represents as potent a threat to the institutionalization of the genre as Hunt-Hendrix, or any of their similarly boundary-pushing US metal peers. “Survival Fires” opens the record with doomy guitar thunderclouds while vocalist Mike Paparo unleashes funereal growls and the whole thing spirals into a Sleep-sized monument to the end times.
If Sky Burial continued in this vein for the rest of its near 70 minutes, it might be easy enough for the balding dudes in Bathory tee-shirts to swallow, but from there, Inter Arma’s musicians play stylistic hopscotch, often all within the same track; from Pink Floyd spaceouts, to weighty, proggy complexity, to the impenetrable darkness of Om-flavored doom metal and the ethereal ascension of modern US black metal. It’s an impeccable patchwork of moods and textures, one that emphasizes the diversity and bounty offered across metal’s dark spectrum. So, up with metal, down with the modern metal industrial complex.
And long live Inter Arma. (Relapse Records)
