GAYLETTER

My first exposure to black metal was in a smoke-smothered garage in the suburbs of North Carolina. Gangly teenagers were bent over guitars and a drum set, creating walls of sound that instantly made me shrink to the back of an agitated crowd of headbangers quickly swarming into a mosh pit. Waves of heat from the crowd seemed to move in sync with the hellish sound of the music being played, which, at the time, I didn’t even consider as such — it was just noise, loud noise, offering nothing more than a headache and an encroaching sense of dread. Is this the point? I wondered. Sixteen years old, still in the closet, and perpetually worried about how others were perceiving me, I immediately shut down. Both the music and its audience were completely inaccessible to me. Even the friend who brought me there seemed to be enjoying himself, nodding along to some phantom beat I couldn’t locate. A new question struck me: how could I possibly fit into all of this? And, more pointedly, did I even want to?

That sense of intimidation triggered by sawing guitars and screaming vocals is still the most common grievance thrown at black metal. It’s not unlike the way people perceive any genre of music that doesn’t fit neatly into ‘comfortable listening’: too discordant and too unapproachable are complaints given to everything from noise to new classical. With metal, however, those preconceptions have turned it into one of the most misunderstood and gratuitously loathed genres of music since, well, ever.

As it turns out, my experience in that garage isn’t uncommon, and it’s something Drew Daniel, one half of electronic music duo Matmos and the savant behind queer-focused experimental project The Soft Pink Truth, is looking to dismantle. SPT’s latest release, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, is a cover album of ten metal songs filtered through the glittery sounds of house and techno. By turning typically skull-crushing anthems by the likes of Venom, Sargeist, Sarcófago, Hellhammer and more into energetic floor fillers, Daniel does more than just recontextualize the songs — he turns them into remarkably catchy dance tracks that seem like they could attract a mosh pit of metalheads thrashing in a cramped garage just as easily as a throng of sweaty boys dancing in a club.

Why Do the Heathen Rage? is a raucous, fascinating listen from start to finish. The record is packed with guests, from Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner to the always amazing Antony, who provides an eerie, androgynous spoken-word invocation on the opening track. Daniel also samples everything from Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ and SNAP!’s ‘The Power‘ to sex moans lifted directly from bareback gay porn. If that sounds like a ballsy profanation of the black metal songs Daniel is covering, that’s because it is — in a recent interview with Pitchfork, he described the record as a ‘queer critique of the shitty ideological disaster area that is black metal,’ a brilliant inversion of a genre that has a gross track record for rampant violence, racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

While Why Do the Heathen Rage? is obviously still rife with the doomsday lyrical content of the songs Daniel is covering, when reappropriated into disco-infused techno, it all mostly just comes off as an awesomely aggressive night out at some grungy industrial club. If you need further proof that this is something you need to check out, just take a look at the album art, a portrait of a massive, gay, sadomasochistic orgy/massacre on a field of sex toys and dead bodies, rendered by artist Mavado Charon. It’s crazy and fucked up and hardcore and delightfully subversive — everything that makes Why Do the Heathen Rage? such an engrossing listen in the first place.

Why Do the Heathen Rage? is available via Thrill Jockey now. Listen to ‘Ready to Fuck’ below:

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