After building up my tolerance for a while, I am currently listening to an amazing metal album: Through Silver In Blood by Neurosis. Rated by many as the quintessential slow metal album, it's up till recently been too intense for me. However, this video brought me a new appreciation for the smoldering style of this band. I confess I can in no way recommend this album to the vast majority of music listeners. The length and pacing of the compositions, the theme of raw elemental power, and the properly over the top vocal performance all mean this music is largely inaccessible.
To finally enjoy this album, I have listened to lots of other slow metal, and have learned to focus on the textures of the sound rather than my personal rhythmic or structural expectations. I've also slowly desensitized myself to the more intense metal vocal styles. Artists like Isis and In Flames, where the tone and inflection (if not the actual words) of the lyrics are clear gave me a good starting place, as their singers' performances contained familiar elements of melody and harmony, simply taken to their logical extremes. While the vocals on Through Silver In Blood were not easy for me to listen to at first, I've started to be able to hear what's special about it. Whether through pure vocal control or production magic, the singers create textures just like the guitars: over driven, pushed to their lowest, longest frequencies, and played as hard and loud as possible. When I approached the vocals as an exercise in texture, I "got" the album, and am now noticing why reviewers note this as a masterpiece of metal.
This record brings into relief a small subgenre of metal that few dare to explore. This far corner of rock music has rewarded me with an epic aural landscape, populated with subtlety and mystery, which has left me feeling stronger just for having survived.
