Metal week guest post - Stephan reviews Download Pt 2

Stephan Burn is a far better and more diligent writer than I will ever be.You can read his Endless Realms blog and find him on Twitter at @onlystephan. He filed this report from the muddy trenches of last weekend's Download festival.

Saturday:

Halestorm were pretty good, and one of the very few female fronted bands over the weekend. I wonder though whether that fact alone made them stand out in my head, because subsequent listens tells me they were outstanding in their field, but not in my headphones.

Black Veil Brides. Oh my, where do I start? This is what happens when a bunch of Hollywood, CA emos take up the metal baton and refuse to put it down again. Precious, affected, thin-skinned perma-victims. The music? Genero-metal.

Gun. One song. You know which one.

Steel Panther. Now, here I am in a bit of quandary and its name is ironic misogyny. Steel Panther stood out to me an incredible amount, not by their music but by their performance, their show that consisted of a very knowing playing up of (glam)rock stereotypes. Take The Darkness, throw away the subtlety (yes, I know), add the “Boobs! LOL!” mentality of a 15 year old boy and you have a band that tries to carefully balance on that razor’s edge of parody. 

They were fun, I was entertained a lot, they were a much-needed antidote to the over-bearing seriousness of the whole festival, but I am constantly reminded of the editor of one or other of the lad’s mags in the late 90s claiming they weren’t sexist, but merely being ironic. I didn’t buy it then either.

Theory of a Deadman? MMRRPP. Kids in Glass Houses? MMRRPP.

Biffy Clyro still haven’t learnt to speak to the crowd, bless them. I wonder if it’s painful, crippling shyness. Their set was dull too, compared to other times I’ve seen them.

You Me At Six, or You Meat 6 as they became due to a typo? MMRRPP.

We caught parts of Metallica from a distance. They were doing what Metallica do as only Metallica can do. Only more so.

Sunday

God I hated this day. We were kicked out of our campervan early on the weakest day of the festival and we ended up lurching from one disappointment to another. By this time I was metalled out, grumpy and wanted to go home and sleep.

Kyuss Lives, I barely registered as happening, though I do recall there was less interaction with the crowd than even Biffy Clyro. A talent they shouldn’t squander.

Black Label Society was METAL. Old men with beards and spikes and leather and a 15 minute guitar solo that actually put me into a coma for a while.

I went to see Ugly Kid Joe with Bryce, not because I’m a fan, but because Penny and Olly were going to see Lamb of God, who they both liked but were too hardcore for me. UKJ did exactly what you’d expect of them. I’m told the LoG Jam was very good though, if you were into that kind of thing.

Dropkick Murphys were fun and again were memorable for being different. When I heard the concept of metal/hardcore Irish battle-hymns, nobody needed to tell me they were from Boston. This bouncy, energetic band could perhaps be described as IRA-core, but, you know, in a good way. On subsequent listens though, post festival? Celtic Diaspora MMRRPP.

Rise Against: MMRRPP.

We caught a few minutes of Sabbath from a distance but weren’t enticed closer. Ozzy frequently called out to the audience that he couldn’t hear them. We nodded sagely and hoped that he’d be able to afford that hearing aid soon.

So that was Download for me. I did enjoy myself, for the most part, my irascible diatribe aside, but I’m unlikely to ever go back. Most of the bits that were fun were hanging out with my friends and the bits of Download that broke the sameness of Download. New bands that I might start listening to more? Probably Halestorm.

Penny will probably end up listening to more Marmozets, Lamb of God and Dropkick Murphy’s.

Bryce, I believe, is preparing his own review as I write this. (He is, and it's here in all its awesomeness - Tim)

Metal week guest post - Stephan reviews Download Pt 1

Stephan Burn is a far better and more diligent writer than I will ever be.You can read his Endless Realms blog and find him on Twitter at @onlystephan. He filed this report from the muddy trenches of last weekend's Download festival.

Download was never going to be a natural fit for me. Not ‘now me’ anyway; maybe when I was younger, but not now. Now I’m about as metal as tofu. Don’t get me wrong, I rock, I roll, I’ve even been known to loll around drunkenly. But moshing? Headbanging? No.

Aside: It actually struck me this morning that some stereotypical metal shares some of the same kind of slightly insecure machismo as stereotypical hip-hop. A similar amount of swaggering around, talking about your ‘bitches’ and how oppressed you are by The Man. No wonder each genre’s acolytes hate each other so much: “No, our blend of repression and oppression is superior to yours, yours is just noise!” I hear them both cry.

So, why did I go to a festival that was once much more descriptively called Monsters of Rock? Where the headliners were a band playing an entire album that had ceased to have meaning to me by the third listen, and a loose collective that can barely be called anything as cohesive as a band and can barely be recollected by its shambling leader? Sacrifice. Sacrifice, bloody loyalty and some bizarre notion of broadening my horizons. Also, I look good in black.

So there we were: Penny, the aluminium briquette to my tin foil; Bryce and Olly, hard rockers both. There were others, a supporting cast of local friends, Twitter followers and passers-by congratulating me on my pipe, but it was the four of us who looked a muddy field squarely in the eye while kicking it soundly in the shin.

The first impression I had was how very lucky we were to be in a campervan, especially one we didn’t have to pay for. Two campsites were aflood in mud and all suffered from sub-Somme conditions. According to a friend who worked the festival, 2000 people went home before day one was out due to weather and/or tent loss. On Friday night 500 people were put up in the shower rooms due to either having lost their tent or being unable to find it as the fields were unlit.

Then there was the ‘entertainment’. I’ll admit I’ve been spoilt by festivals like Glastonbury where there is non-band entertainment aplenty, partly facilitated by the fact that there is no separation between campsite and the music arena. Download has this balkanisation, but throws a sop to those wanting something to do between 11pm and 11am by providing The Village. Imagine Shyamalan’s blunder, but with more burger vans and a ‘comedy’ tent.

It was not permitted to bring alcoholic drinks into the arena, an inevitable effect of the fragile economics of the modern corporate-sponsored music festival. It meant that we had to queue to buy tokens at £4 each and then queue to trade these vouchers in for weak Tuborg or Magners. We were drinking, yes, but never in any danger of proximity to drunk.

After a page of rambling, you’ll be pleased to hear that I’m going to cover the music now, yes?

Friday:

We skipped the easy choices of Terrorvision and Europe, as we only knew one song apiece by these blasts from the past. Instead we opted for NOFX, the first of many modern metal/rap/rock/pop/punk (MMRRPP) outfits we saw that I enjoyed at the time but have now merged into one indistinguishable mess in my head.

Next up was a wandering expedition which chanced us on new, young band the Marmozets, who Olly liked and Penny loved. There was a lot of shouting, but it seemed heartfelt.

Next, a band I was actually looking forward to! This could well be because, while Chase and Status were a good opener for headliners The Prodigy, they were a controversial choice for Download as a whole. Seemingly they went down okay with the teeming masses, and I enjoyed them immensely in perhaps the least surprising event of the weekend.

Next up was The Prodigy, who did a better set than when I saw them last at Glastonbury, with more energy and revitalised songs. However Penny and I still left them after about an hour. There was nothing wrong with the performance, they were doing okay, but I think I could extrapolate the remaining 40 minutes in my head and doubt I’d have been very far from the truth. Solid, not exhilarating.

Pt 2 later this week - Saturday, Sunday and overall musings

Metal week: How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love Heavy Metal, Sort Of.

If this was going to happen – it should have happened years ago. Decades ago.

I mean, I'm a fantasy and science-fiction-reading role-player of a certain age, for Gaia's sake. By rights, I should have cut my musical teeth – like most of my gamer friends - on thrash, or at least G'nR. Or even Extreme. Should I have been shuffling around moodily, dressed in black and declaring 'We are the noise marines?'

But I spent my Games Workshop years listening to the decidely un-rockist Pet Shop Boys rather than Metallica. After further re-education by the NME at university, I believed that the years between Ace of Spades and Teen Spirit were a dead end of Neanderthalia in spandex.

An friend was able to reconcile me to 70's hard rock – Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple but I couldn't press on beyond Lemmy. Alright, Back In Black, at a push.

I distrusted metal's lack of restraint, its commitment to excess in music and – at least rhetorically- in lifestyle. It was a caricature of maleness. It was in love with death. It took ten minutes to say something punk could say in two.

It wasn't just the music: the iconography of skulls, sex, soldiers and steroids didn't work for a morbidly religious teen who didn't need any more unpleasant visual metaphors in his life, thank you very much. And bar one ill-advised flirtation with an Iron Maiden t-shirt, I've always been a mod rather than a rocker in sartorial terms.

What happened to change this?

Appropriately enough, in the beginning there was Ozzy. The Best of Black Sabbath found its way into my record collection some time in the mid Noughties. And stuck out like a sore thumb – at least initially.

I didn't like Dio and thought Tony Iommi took too many solos, but I loved the riffs and the jazz-inflected drumming. And Ozzy didn't go AIEEEEEEEEEE! or URGGGGGGG!, he sang his own peculiar blues, shrill and baleful. Sabbath might have been hamming it up something rotten, but there's a strange, paradoxically sincere intensity to their best songs of universal or personal catastophe.

Having established a small redoubt, a … oh why not … a lonely fortress of metal … in my record collection, things stayed that way for quite some time. But Sabbath had planted a seed – which under the right conditions – moving to Birmingham, official Home of Metal, say would ripen in blackened soil.

That's another thing about the genre – the cliches of writing about it are almost impossible to resist. We'll put my powers of trope-avoidance to the test in the next week as we accept the self-imposed gauntlet of writing A Week Of Metal (thunder booms, lightening strikes, lamentations of the lost, thunk of head on desk in shame)

I'll be looking at some of the bands that have belatedly reconciled me to The Metal like Baroness, Comets On Fire, Sunn O))), The Sword and Wolves In The Throne Room. I'll be reviewing Terroriser magazine with an eye to how metal culture perceives (and writes about) itself.

If I'm feeling particularly brave I'll tell you why I still don't really like Metallica.

Review: Sheri Tepper, The Waters Rising

Talking horse. Talking horse. Talking freaking horse. TALKING FREAKING IN A YOGHURT POT TALKING HORSE! In serious science fiction? NO! NO! NO!

I paraphrase. Maybe even exaggerate slightly. But this is more or less how Grand Old Man of British SF Christopher Priest reacted to the inclusion of The Waters Rising on the shortlist for this year's Arthur C Clarke award.

And he's right. It does have a talking horse. And I'd like a whole menagerie of speechifying chipmunks, otters, octopi, dogs and dolphins to be taken into consideration as well.

Yet this shouldn't make Sheri Tepper shortlista non grata. The Waters Rising is SF with a heavy twist of magic realism, which is a looooong way from the disciplined, almost self-parodically English approach of Priest and probably goes some way to explaining his dismissal of it. 

Now, I love The Prestige, but I carry a major literary torch for Sheri Tepper. I confess, this is partly due to fond memories of The True Game and a D&D adventure a friend ran in our teenage years based on the setting. Mainly, though, it's that extraordinary run of form she hit around the turn of the nineties turning out beautiful far future fables like Grass, A Plague of Angels and Raising The Stones. Not just great books in their own right, they didn't shy away from addressing issues like animal rights, ecology, patriarchal religion and - above all - gender roles and sexual equality. 

Tepper is - or at least should be - a major touchstone for progressive writers in SF.

Nothing she's written since then has quite hit the same heights for me, but The Waters Rising - a sequel of sorts to the post-apocalyptic fairy tale A Plague of Angels - comes closer than a lot of her work since then. Despite its title, it's not a novel about climate change, the rising sea levels being caused by another McGuffin. It is however most emphatically a story about man's relationship with technology and the natural world.

There are a lot of convenient coincidences, sudden developments of psychic powers and hand-waving techno-fixes in The Waters Rising which make sense only if the book is regarded as a fable. Or if Tepper has decided that she's reached a stage in her career where she can do what she likes and the editor can go hang. Neither possibility is of course mutually exclusive... and the occasional detours into soapbox-ing (not so much author tracts as author parables) suggest that the latter is true at least some of the time.

Tepper also indulges her fondness for the twee, there is limited (but bad) poetry, and there are characters called The Great Bear of Zol. This is the author unrestrained. But the fantasy elements of the book are not just window-dressing - they allow her to present the moral conflict  of the book (to master the world or to change with it) in a suitably epic way. This is also the author knowing exactly what she's doing.

This is a genuinely odd, frequently unique and occasionally very good book. I defy anyone to find another book as engaging as this in which humans metamorphose into squid.

Yep, I said it. Squid.

I also can't think of another SF work which has made me think so profoundly about ecological debt. The idea that our actions as a species are accumulating such a moral debt that it would take a radical act of forgiveness to erase it has stuck with me. The Waters Rising being as much a myth as a work of SF, its resolution allows this debt to be both met and erased in an unexpected way.

Fairy tale logic, people!

Dark Shadows mini-review

If anyone's earned the right to pastiche Tim Burton, it's probably Tim Burton. And Dark Shadows is good fun - playful, sparky dialogue, atmospherically shot and with a good-if-not-great cast.

But it does feel a bit like Burton doing 'one for the studio'. What you'd expect from one of his films - Depp, Bonham Carter, families, monsters, families of monsters, Gothic camp - are all there in a slightly too predictable fashion. And the film has an episodic structure - a legacy of its TV show origins? - which moves the film on too quickly from one plot point to the next to give it intelligence or emotional heft. 

As my companion remarked, it would have worked much better as a mini-series, giving it room to breathe.

Cream tea, Nick Berry and anomie on the Yorkshire Moors

It was as if I'd stepped into a pageant of the rural past when we left the car park at Goathland. There were Morris dancers on the village green and a Ford Anglia parked outside the souvenir shop. The tea-room played second-string sixties hits. Steam trains ran on the railway line thronged by spotters and snappers.

History was repeating itself as the worst possible kind of kitsch.

Goathland is also well on its way to becoming Aidenfield, home of TV retro-fest Heartbeat, which is mainly filmed there. Every shop is full of souvenirs and the pub proclaims its dual identity as the Aidenfield Arms. Nick Berry's face stares out of tea-towels in windows like a benign Big Brother. 

 

Why does a village deny its own identity to become a living fiction? The obvious answer here is money. There are plenty of pretty (if austere) villages in the moors like Goathland, but Aidenfield is its unique selling point. And the absence of any actual services and shops for the residents underlines the point that this is less a functioning community, more a rural tourism retail centre.

It suits Goathland to sink beneath its fictional alter ego.

So what? What does it matter if indulging ourselves in an imaginary Sixties provides a momentary distraction for middle-class tourists and a living in a hard-pressed Moors village?

Channeling my outer hard-headed economist (I've not managed to locate an inner economist, but count several among my good friends), I'd suggest the Aidenfielding of the countryside is a false solution to a viable rural society. If we're serious about jobs, about food security, about villages that work as places of local commerce and community, then we have to offer more than cream teas and Heartbeat paraphenalia, even if there's no dishonour in the tourist trade.

On a more personal note, I also find something distubing about the senility of cultural memory on display in Goathland/Aidenfield, itself a debased version of the slick sixties nostalgia peddled by Heartbeat. In Heartbeatland, we can gloss over the social conflict and politics of the period, never mind the present, and return to an imagined era when everyone knew their place. When threat, change or conflict is resolved or reconciled with the whole by the end of each episode. Where everyone is white – I saw not a single exception in my visit, and the souvenir shop sold gollywogs. 

Yep. Gollywogs. There are no words...

And what does it say about us that we're seduced by this imagined village? Nostalgia has always been with us, but it needs to be offset by a vision of the future, a prospect of hope, in order for us be psycho-culturally viable and equal to the challenges of the present. I bear Goathland no ill will, but as a microcosm of the way we live now, it feels like part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young of superheroes - Avengers Assemble

Marvel Studios have finally delivered a film with a decent script, a reasonably coherent plot, some decent performances and a proper sense of spectacle. True, it did take them five atttempts to manage all of these at once. But we've set the controls for praise not burial, so let's continue in this vein.

It's safe to assume the 200% increase in genuinely funny one-liners compared to the previous films is due to the presence of Joss Whedon at the controls. RDJ and Mark Ruffalo (taking over the Bruce Banner role from Edward Norton) are well served by this film (or vice versa). For diffferent reasons, so is Scarlett Johanssen (Black Widow), supplying Whedon's deep-seated need to have a badass female martial artist in anything he does. Ever.

Neither Chris Hemsworth or Chris Evans have to carry the film and are much the better for it. Tom Hiddleston continues his evil Withnail schtick as Loki to good effect (We must have some booze! We demand to have some booze! And the total subjugation of humanity!). Samuel L Jackson is entertainingly hammy, but can someone give him a decent screen role again?

The aliens were from H R Giger via Michael Bay, and the battle for New York was – even for someone like me who prefers his action slow motion and stylised rather than a whirlwind of CGI chaos – was very well done.

I was grateful that Avengers Assemble was not yet another origin story, nor was it crushed by the need to explore a metaphor with mind-numbing literality. Instead, it could concentrate on its core business of smart-ass remarks and diorama-drama and was all the better for it.