When I was in college, it seemed like I had all the time in the world to just sit and listen to music. I would lay on the futon in my microscopic dorm room, blaring a wide array of metal, rock, hip hop, punk and classic country for seemingly hours on end. Sure, I was going to classes and working multiple jobs, but there was always at least a day or two where I could stay up until the wee hours listening, or find a long break between classes to relax with an album or two. I’d stare at the artwork, read the lyrics, the liner notes and sometimes even the thank yous while the music washed over me out of big-ass speakers, or pumped directly into my ears via headphones (until I accidentally crushed them in a drunken incident that needn’t be recounted here). I could lose myself totally in the worlds my favorite artists created, whether it was the mean streets and dope beats of Ice Cube’s The Predator or the reverbed-to-Hell midnight treble-scapes of Darkthrone’s Under a Funeral Moon.
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Dethroned Emperor #27 (Prosthetic Records Enters the Realm of Black Metal w/ 1349 and Ov Hell)
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One of the things that has always fascinated me is the absorbtion of extreme music into the American mainstream. It happened to death and thrash metal long ago, when bands like Metallica and Megadeth exploded, Earache Records releases got distributed through Columbia and Morbid Angel signed with Giant. Styles that were once reviled by the populace at large somehow found their way into the bins at Best Buy. Some styles have taken much longer to achieve this, particularly black metal. One could argue that Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir (and possibly Satyricon) have long been commercially acceptable black metal bands here in the states, but I would argue that those bands strayed very, very far from their BM roots in order to become accepted and “marketable”. It has only been in recent years that traditional black metal bands have come to sign with more “mainstream” metal labels here in the USA, and a perfect example of this is California-based Prosthetic Records releasing the new albums from 1349 and Ov Hell.
