The Cabinet Enters Walhalla

In Norse mythology, Vikings who die in combat cross the Rainbow Bridge into Valhalla, where they join their god Odin and help him prepare for Ragnarok, a final battle that will determine the fate of the world.  Valhalla is often depicted as a white marble palace surround by lush greenery, and it appears in dozens of paintings, songs, video games and various other media.  I know it best from the song “Across the Rainbow Bridge,” in which the Swedish death metal band Amon Amarth imagine a Viking preparing for death as he rides into battle for the last time.

 

This song was playing in my head earlier this week as I entered Walhalla, South Carolina, a town in the upstate founded in 1850 by German immigrants who were clearly inspired by the Norse myths.  Local histories translate “Walhalla” as “Paradise of the Gods” and claim that the founders used the name to signify that they had found a happy home.  But it wasn’t Vikings that brought me to Walhalla, and I didn’t even realize the Norse connection until I saw a sign welcoming me to the town.  I was looking for waterfalls, but what I found was that although no one in Walhalla was preparing for the Final Battle, the town does have a few of its own myths and stories that give modern day visitors some insight into the experiences of the town’s earlier inhabitants.

Cash, my German shepherd, accompanied me on the quest, and the temperature was well over 90°, so we limited ourselves to Issaqueena Falls, the one waterfall that didn’t require a long hike.   The falls are formed by a stream that splits into several falls as it cascades down a tree-lined cliff.  Stories about the falls agree that they were named after a young woman named Issaqueena, but they differ in the details.  The marker posted at the top of the falls claims that Issaqueena was a “Creek maiden” who was kidnapped by the Cherokee.  She later fell in love with Allan Francis, a white trader, and after overhearing the Cherokee’s plans to attack a white settlement, she fled to warn Francis.  She stayed with him and became his wife, but the Cherokee came looking for her, and to escape, she pretended to leap to her death from the falls and hid under a ledge until it was safe to return to Francis.

South Carolina’s tourism website tells basically the same story, but in its version, Issaqueena was “an Indian  maiden” who warned a local fort about an impending attack and then hid near the falls when the Indians came looking for her.  There’s no love story in this version of the myth; Issaqueena is simply a noble woman doing a good deed.  Wikipedia’s version, which doesn’t cite a source, also claims that Issaqueena was a Cherokee, but instead of warning white settlers about an attack, she fell in love with an Oconee brave, whose tribe was at war with the Cherokee.  To protect him from the rest of her tribe, Issaqueena hid her lover under the falls.

Taken together, the three versions are a reminder that despite its name, the early days of Walhalla were not edenic, especially for its original inhabitants.  They seem also to reflect attempts at presenting local history in the best possible light, particularly the first two, which portray Issaqueena as a noble Cherokee doing a good deed by betraying her people in order to help save the virtuous settlers from a violent attack.  Like many myths, the version that appears on the historical marker is just plain weird.  What the hell is a “Creek maiden,” who were the “Creek people,” and how did they fit into the conflict between the Cherokee and the white settlers?  It raises more questions than it answers.  But, unlike the second version, at least it gives Issaqueena a love interest and thus a clear motive in warning the settlers of the impending attack.  The third, however, is by far the most interesting and has the most epic potential because it features two characters with conflicted loyalties.  If I were in a death metal band that hailed from Walhalla, we would have a song that followed this version.  It would be presented from the Oconee brave’s perspective as he’s waiting for his lover to return, fearing that she might be killed for hiding him, reflecting on his decision to become her lover, anticipating meeting her brothers in battle and wondering about his future with Issaqueena. 

More epic material lies in the local stories about Stumphouse Tunnel, a failed attempt to connect Charleston, SC with Knoxville via railroad and a sign that even the town’s earliest inhabitants must have shared my sense that I was in the middle of fucking nowhere when I entered Walhalla.  The problem was that Stumphouse Mountain stood in the way, so the state of South Carolina hired Irish immigrants to carve a tunnel through it.  They completed 4,300 of the tunnel's 5,800 feet before the project ran out of money and was abandoned completely as a result of the Civil War.  The partially finished tunnel is open to tourists and stands as a monument both to the obstacles early Americans faced in building their country and of the pioneering spirit with which they attacked them.

The tunnel called to mind Western films about the completion of the transcontinental railroad, particularly John Ford’s silent The Iron Horse and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, both of which highlight what some would gain and what others would lose from the coming of the railroad and the ruthlessness with which the railroad barons pursued their goals.  It’s also a reminder that although these films focus on the American West, similar struggles played out in the Southeast.  

While my trip to Walhalla involved crossing Blue Ridge Boulevard rather than the Rainbow Bridge and there was no sign of Odin, Thor, or Viking warriors, it did remind me that my home state has its own myths and history that deserve a closer look than I’ve given them in the past.

The Cabinet's Metal Album of the Week: Kreator - Phantom Antichrist

I know this probably places me within a very small minority of metalheads, but I don’t like thrash metal.  I don’t like Testament or Anthrax; I like a few Megadeth songs, but I don’t particularly like the band; and while I can appreciate Metallica for being an important influence on dozens of metal bands and for helping metal receive more mainstream attention, I’ve never really liked them either.  (Claims that Metallica are the best heavy metal band of all time are ridiculous as it’s an objective fact that this honor belongs to Iron Maiden.)  One very notable exception is Slayer, whose Seasons in the Abyss is one of the reasons I’m a metalhead today. 

I don’t really know why I dislike thrash except that most of it just sounds angry, and I like my metal to be evil (the more references to Satan the better) or to have a horror/science fiction/fantasy theme.  This would explain why Slayer is the one thrash band I do like.  However, it might simply be that I haven’t explored enough beyond the biggest thrash bands to find ones I like.  After all, if my exposure to death metal was confined to Cannibal Corpse, one of its biggest bands, I wouldn’t like this subgenre either.

Whatever the case, Phantom Antichrist, the new album from German thrash metal band Kreator, has given me a good reason to give thrash a closer listen.  It’s another rare instance of the music on a metal album being as good as its cover, which pictures the antichrist as a puppeteer controlling the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  The album displays the speed, aggression, and squealing guitar solos you would expect from a thrash metal album, but it also features the kinds of melodic choruses more at home on power metal albums, making it hard to resist throwing up the metal horns and singing, “Phantom. Antichrist!” and “Death to the world!”  These melodies help it stand out from other thrash albums I’ve heard, as do the unique and powerful vocals, which, to my ears at least, sound like a demon singing, as opposed to the generic vocals I typically associate with thrash that just sound like some guy trying to sing fast enough to keep up with the music. 

  

As its title suggests, the songs on Phantom Antichrist are about the collapse of civilization and the destruction of the world.  Non-metalheads often wonder why anyone would want to listen to songs about death and destruction, and the answer, of course, is the same reason one would want to watch science fiction, fantasy and horror movies: pure escapism.  Most of the time, I don’t want to hear realistic lyrics that might have an emotional impact.  Obviously, I don’t want “berserkers [to] start a blood-chain of attacks/Against religion and all nations’ flags,” just as I don’t want a cross-dressing madman in a dead skin mask to massacre people with a chainsaw.  But in a perverse way, silly lyrics about destroying the world offer a temporary escape from life’s harsh realities.  Hearing a blues song about some guy who lost his job would only remind me of how much of a dumbass I was for leaving a good job I enjoyed to pursue a career I thought I would enjoy more.  I’m too busy headbanging to think about this fact when I hear a demon singing about the coming of the antichrist while his band mates wail on their guitars. 

Let’s be honest here; after dealing with the frustrations of a typical week, who hasn’t wanted to sing along with a song whose chorus says, “Death to the world!”?

Next week:  Asphyx – Deathhammer

The Cabinet’s Metal Album of the Week: Candlemass – Psalms for the Dead

I’m terrible at describing music, and I’m particularly bad at explaining why an album is “good” or  “bad,” but I’m going to try anyway in what will be one of the revived Cabinet’s weekly columns.  I’ll start with the latest album, and purportedly the last, from the Swedish doom metal band Candlemass, Psalms for the Dead.

Before buying this album, I knew nothing about Candlemass and very little about doom metal, but I was already interested because, as any true metalhead knows, with a handful of very notable exceptions, all the metal that matters comes from Sweden.  If I were still in high school and just discovering metal, the name of the band and the album cover alone would have been enough to peak my interest, but ten minutes sampling metal on iTunes is more than enough time to learn a lesson that those of us who grew to musical maturity in the pre-MP3 age learned the hard way:  there’s often an inverse relationship between the coolness of a metal band’s name and album covers and the quality of its music.  After reading very positive reviews of Psalms for the Dead in Metal Hammer  and Decibel magazines and then sampling the album several times, I was glad to learn that this rule doesn’t apply to Candlemass.

Listening to Psalms a few dozen times has confirmed my earlier impression of doom metal:  it sounds like doom.  I know this description isn’t very useful, but if you’re familiar with the subgenre, I think you’ll agree that it’s apt.  However, a much more useful way of describing doom metal is simply to point out that in addition to inventing metal Black Sabbath also invented doom metal or that the brand of metal Sabbath invented was doom.  Chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve heard Sabbath, so you know what doom metal sounds like.  In case you haven’t, the best I can do (other than telling you to check out Black Sabbath and Paranoid immediately) is to explain that it relies on slow, heavy guitar riffs and that the vocals are more melodic and less grunty, screechy, or screamy than you probably expect from heavy metal.

Psalms consists of nine songs that the band’s website describes as being about “the presence and absence of time. . . about leaving, goodbyes and farewells . . . inner demons and false.”  Not surprisingly, the music portraying these dark themes is suitably doom-laden, with slow, heavy guitar riffs, deep, bellowing drums, and the occasional keyboard accompaniment adding a touch of eeriness throughout the album.  The songs gain variety from melodic choruses that periodically punctuate the doom.  I seem to remember reading the vocals described as a bit “Dio-ish,” and this is a good way to characterize the vocals, which are sung, rather than growled or screamed, at a pitch that’s somewhere between James Hetfield’s and King Diamond’s.

There’s not a bad song on the album, and two that stand out are “The Sound of Dying Demons” and “Waterwitch,” both of which sound scary enough to make me think twice before playing them while I’m alone in the dark.  “Dying Demons” is about an inability to escape inner demons, and its layered sounds invoke impressions of being surrounded by demons.  It opens with a ritualistic drumbeat that leads into a slow, droning guitar riff that’s soon accompanied by thunder and faint sounds of howling demons.  Melodic vocals singing of hopes that demons are gone and noting that “you thought the voices were dead” are followed by a demonic whisper claiming, “You didn’t listen!”  “Waterwitch” personifies time or death as a witch that’s stealing our lives.  Thick, doomy basslines underlie the vocals as they describe the witch whose victims can’t be saved by angels’ tears.  Slow, grooving riffs with a slight waa effect add to the sense of dread.

Part of the reason I like this album so much is that it adds variety to my metal collection.  It’s heavy and very dark while also being melodic and thus enables me to give my ears a periodic break from the brutality of bands like Skeletonwitch and Goatwhore.  It’s also nice to have choruses that I can sing along to while running.

Psalms is my only exposure to Candlemass, so I can’t compare it to their other albums, but I’ll definitely be checking them out in the near future.  The band have claimed that although they will continue playing live shows, this will be their last album.  If it does end up being their last, they will have ended with a shot of doom that’s likely to give metalheads nightmares for years.

Next week:  Kreator – Phantom Antichrist.     

The Cabinet Explores the Old West: The Wild Bunch

Dozens of Westerns feature wandering gunslingers struggling to adjust to the fact that as the American West becomes more settled and less lawless it no longer has a place for them. Some of the best known examples are Shane, The Searchers, and The Magnificent Seven, all of which are great Westerns, but none of them deal with this theme as effectively as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. What sets it apart is Peckinpah's willingness to depict the bloodshed that accompanies this struggle and follow it to its logical conlusion.

The Wild Bunch is probably the bloodiest Western ever made, and one of the bloodiest movies ever made. Its first line, spoken by William Holden's character Pike, sets the tone: "If they move, kill 'em." He's referring to the customers and employees of a bank that the Bunch are in the process of robbing. As Pike and his men begin filling their bags of loot, they realize that the building is surrounded by the hired guns of a railroad baron who is tired of having his money stolen. A parade of temperance activists also happens to be marching past the bank, and the Bunch escape by using them as human shields and leaving piles of bullet-ridden bodies in their wake. The result is an opening scene that graphically illustrates why the gunslingers can't live in a west that's no longer wild.

It also prefigures the even greater violence of the film's final scene. Having just been paid for stealing sixteen crates of weapons and delivering them to a rogue Mexican general, the Bunch are enjoying themselves with booze and whores and trying to forget about the fact that the general has taken one member of the gang prisoner and is torturing him. Knowing that the four of them are no match for the general and his dozens of men, Pike and his gang, nevertheless, march through the village and demand their friend's release. The general agrees, but then slits the prisoner's throat as he releases him. Pike responds by filling the general full of lead and thus initiates the final shoot out that ends  with the deaths of the Bunch, the general and all of his men.

A YouTube video entitled "The Wild Bunch Kill Count" indicates that at least 142 people are killed in the movie, and a fair response to the film is revulsion at its senseless violence. However, the violence isn't simply exploitative. It's a way of illustrating the gunslingers' resistance to the fact that their time is passing and of bringing their lives to a logical conclusion. In the Magnificent Seven, Steven McQueen's character states, "We deal in lead," and while this statement is true of the film's gunslingers, it's even truer of those in The Wild Bunch. They deal in lead, and Peckinpah shows us that this means shedding a lot of blood. While it's understood that the characters in The Magnificent Seven live by their guns, we only see them using these guns  to defend a village from a gang of bandits. They are portrayed as heroes rather than outlaws. It's only through dialogue that we are encouraged also to view them as hired guns whose time is passing. Moreover, by violently killing all of his characters, Peckinpah states that they must die in order for the wild west to be tamed. They deal in lead, and they die in lead. In contrast, John Sturges, director of the The Magnificent Seven, fails to bring his film's premise to its logical conclusion. It ends with the main characters, played by McQueen and Yul Brenner, riding away from the village as if, after pronouncing themselves as having no home, no prospects, and no other way of making a living, they can simply be absorbed into the new west that is emerging around them. 

Shane and The Searchers suffer from similar flaws.  The dark past of Shane's title character is revealed through dialogue but only hinted at through his behavior.  Like the Magnificent Seven, his onscreen violence is heroic:  he uses his shooting skills to defend farmers from greedy landowners, and then rides off into the sunset, alone, but still alive.  In The Searchers, John Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, spends years trying to find his niece who has been kidnapped by Apaches, not to rescue her, but to kill her.  Taken from her family as a young girl, she is now, in Ethan's words, more Apache than white.  However, when he finally tracks down Cicatriz, the chief who has made the kidnapped niece his wife, Ethan instead acts heroically and returns his niece to her family.  John Ford, the film's director, thus adds a level of nuance to Wayne's character that's often missing from Westerns.  However, like the gunslingers in Shane and The Magnificent Seven, Ethan never sheds blood on screen in a way that would cause viewers to see him as a hardened killer. No temperance marchers die by his gun.

One could, of course, argue that the endings of The Magnificent Seven, Shane, and The Searchers are actually more powerful because their gunslingers do survive and must continue wandering the West alone after having made friends, acted heroically to save them and been reminded of the kind of lives they will never have because they deal in lead.  There is something to this argument. In death The Wild Bunch are freed from their curse of wandering as outcasts in a world that has no place for them while the other gunslingers must continue living in outcasts.  However, this argument would be more compelling if they had been portrayed on film as hardened killers.  These are movies, not plays or novels, and if their directors want us to believe their characters have condemned themselves to lives of violence, they must show us.  The fact that they don't suggests that only Peckinpah had the balls to follow his film's theme where it led him.