33 rebellions per minute
2001
Katatonia, LAST FAIR DEAL GONE DOWN
Heavy metal, as I’ve grown up knowing it in the United States, is crucially a minority taste. It is music for misfits, even now as the music industry relies on it to compensate for the flagging sales of Britney and N’Sync, of R.E.M. and Radiohead. I’ve been waking up to WFNX’s “modern rock” radio each morning since I joined my girlfriend Cindy here in Brookline (MA), and while I’m surprisingly content about that fact – I’m enjoying Tool’s knotty introversion, Linkin Park’s mastery of dynamics, Puddle Of Mud’s insertion of fond giddy lust into a morose genre, the happy non-metal intrusions of Blink 182 or Sum 41 or Stroke 9, the fact that the morning DJs are often as funny as they think they are – I’m nonetheless learning how harsh the metal genre has become. Gold and platinum bands from Limp Bizkit to Saliva to Slipknot to Incubus to the Disturbed to Rage Against The Machine release singles with literally no concessions to broader audiences: unmelodic, screaming, with rhythm parts that sound like looped field recordings of a garbage disposal’s temper tantrum. These songs are not necessarily bad (though “bad” sums up _my_ viewpoint eight times outta ten), but they do exude an attitude of fuck you if you don’t like it. When a U.S. metal band does want to appeal to normal people, the acoustic strums of Staind’s “Outside” or the open soundscapes and echoing melodies of Limp Bizkit’s “My Way or the Highway” are bait-and-switches as blatant as Styx’s “Babe” or Metallica’s “the Unforgiven”. Their main drive, as I hear it, remains anger.
In Scandinavia, things are different. Metal is respectable. Growling progressive-metal authors of suite-length bludgeonings, like Iced Earth and Amorphis, sometimes win the Norwegian or Finnish equivalents of the Grammies. That five healthy-looking, clean-cut young Swedish men should choose to call themselves Katatonia, learn pentatonic guitar solos, and smash lots of loud cymbals is not a cause for alarm. That Jonas Renske should sing in a refined tenor that could clearly adapt well to opera, if he only wanted to put on a show, would be a problem on WFNX; nothing I’ve read about Katatonia implies that their fans find him odd.
It is true that the band do not play happy music. Renske sings about feelings of rejection. He sings about drinking to chase sadness, then looking around and getting depressed at how many people around him are drinking to chase sadness. He sings about restlessness and the urge to “burn down my house and make something happen”. He sings literately enough (indeed “my brother is halfway through a book I’ve lent him”), so while one hopes the violent memories of “We Must Bury You” are merely in character, he’s convincingly a moody guy. But if metal doesn’t quite stretch, even in Scandinavia, to songs about kissing or kitty cats or coffee and donuts, there’s something oddly unforceful going on here. “Sweet Nurse” is more likely to be metaphorical than about the medical profession, but “my sweet nurse/ you have so little time/ that you would rather put me to sleep/ than sit by my side” puts the understanding right in with the anger. “Passing Bird”’s anger is at what a girl does to herself -- “She’s got black hair and she’s got a black dress/ she’s pretending that her life is a mess” – and ends up amounting to almost a The Power Of Non-Suicidal Thinking sermon: “I live because I need more light/ I hope I can change today/ she would never think of changing”. “She stops me in the street and asks me to follow/ I would if I could/ if I wouldn’t mind breaking her”.
And when did the world make room for heavy metal bands that refuse to break anyone? The oddity of LAST FAIR DEAL GONE DOWN is of listening to guitar parts, drum kits, booming choruses designed by the rules of angry music, and hearing them restrained, gauzy, even sadly pretty. The keyboard parts, halfway from synthesized strings to abstracted shimmer, would fit fine in the supporting roles of many progressive metal bands, but here they either are, or seem, louder than the whammy-bar solos. Renske could almost certainly sing shrilly without sounding ridiculous, or (again) benefit from opera training, but instead his voice is as vague in intention as it is clear in tone, like he wasn’t sure which room of the studio his microphone was in when he recorded his parts. The effect, despite the ingredients, is more like listening to Live or mid-90’s Radiohead; but even at that Katatonia’s strength is closer to those bands’ atmospheric buildups (“the Dam At Otter’s Creek” or “Planet Telex”) than to their grungy abrasions (“White, Discussion” or “Just”). We hear fast complicated guitar parts, we hear all the cymbals that other metal bands would accompany with twin bass drums, we hear the majestic struggles towards crescendo , and… it’s all kinda nice. We hear what sounds like five smart productive boys who might’ve fulfilled all sorts of wordly potential if it wasn’t always so goddamn cold outside.
I like LAST FAIR DEAL because it’s grand and interestingly grim and pretty. Because not all towers need to be enemy towers. Because any form of music worth liking – including heavy metal – is worth liking, at least occasionally, when you’re not pissed off at anyone.
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