So, metal talk. The reformed Angel Corpse is about to embark on a ‘hot’ national tour with Watain and Nachtmystium. Ares Kingdom has run into a swath of well-deserved accolades for their Return to Dust debut. The stars of Pete Helmkamp, Chuck Keller, and Mike Miller appear to be simultaneously on the rise. Very nice, but in my opinion, nothing these former band-mates have done lately rivals the work that united them during the ‘80s and ‘90s. I’m talking about Order from Chaos, the maligned, mind-warping power trio from Kansas City.
It seems as if a lot of nowadays metal bands want to be OFC, whether they know it or not. Standards for heaviness have been eroded; it’s hard to say which tempos qualify as really fast, downtuned isn’t all that low, gross, violent things are merely cute, and the impact of complex time signatures has just about refined itself out of existence. One alternative is to crank the gain to previously unrealized levels and learn the rudiments of playing together as an organic, interactive band (as opposed to the rigid model inherited from Judas Priest, Metallica etc.), seizing on savage grooves in a series written to engage and disorient at once. Epic songwriting and sound-construction bounded by a spontaneous live group performance standard, for the sake of unmediated enervation.
That was Order from Chaos, and the other side of moderns wanting to be OFC is the pervasive longing for at least the appearance of kvlt status. OFC was a fucking cult. A couple different labels released their debut album Stillbirth Machine throughout the ‘90s, with varying degrees of consent from the band. By Keller’s account, the recording session was a botched job, but it’s yielded some of the most abrasive guitar tones on Earth. The rhythm tracks buzz continuously like seething insects, and the solos just jab their needle-like way through the mix without warning, red hot disruptions so fucked sounding that you’re left momentarily unable to compute the sound as music. OFC abstracted their noise long before the practice caught on in metal circles, like an early industrial band with normal rock instrumentation.
Early Sodom and Voivod’s inability to stay in time has been re-conceived here as an agitation device, a sophisticated means of shifting gears in the hands of a young troupe none too far from flying apart themselves. Their take on thrash is groovy and not so fast, but it drags you and stomps you in different directions, really rubbing its irregularity in your face. Layers of planned and unplanned percussive disorganization on offer, feverish, predatory intelligence shot through with blood freezing panic. Fuck, they quote Nietzsche themselves, so I might as well say it; this inhumanity, this metal for mettle’s sake, creates the opportunity to go beyond good and evil. Beyond emotions even, to the site of pure biological reaction, gut response to big dangerous objects hurtling around in the dark, smashing each other to bits at an undetermined distance.
But the lucid sneer of cold command at the heart of this storm, the vocal performance, is what really turns OFC’s urge-unto-disorientation into something glorious. Pete Helmkamp kicks ass at growling, and I insist that his vocal presence is the main reason that people care about AngelCorpse as much as they do. Again, giant insects come to mind. The normal timbre of a human speaking/singing voice has been completely excised from the guy’s vocal chords. He sounds shredded, but far from taking the incoherent screaming approach, Helmkamp enunciates every diction-elevated syllable like a stage actor, cajoling, stretching, pausing for theatrical effect, like Bruce Dickinson reborn in fallout contaminated Hell. And he’s populated Stillbirth Machine with some of the most ridiculously quotable fragments of metalspeak, ever. “I am an alien from another world, sent to communicate a message,” he spits at the beginning of “Stillbirth Machine.” “…And I saw eternity the other night, the unvanquished black splendour of “The Edge of Forever.” Then there’s my personal favorite: “Fundamental! Dysfunctional. Monumental…Incredible!” That brilliant associative chain dribbles out of Helmkamp’s pie hole in mini epic, “Iconoclasm Conquest.” Between those lines there’s a tangled maze of grammar, alluding to ancestral consciousness, class struggle and various systems, but only really addressing the process of fashioning order from chaos.
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