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Extreme Metal & Nature Poetry: Why Scream at Beauty?

Introduction: A Lyrical History of Extreme Metal
Extreme metal, as the term is understood within its community, refers to a collection of particularly inaccessible and abrasive subgenres of heavy metal music. Black and death metal are the most well-known of the extreme genres, with common features including fast, heavily downtuned guitar riffs, rapid-fire “blast beat” drumming and inhuman-sounding growls or screeches as vocals. Lyrically, extreme metal is often perceived as gratuitously violent and concerned solely with provocation; and with some of the subculture’s most influential bands producing songs titled “Regurgitated Guts” and “Chainsaw Gutsfuck”, many understandably regard the style as the musical equivalent of a slasher film.

Extreme metal, however, does not restrict itself solely to themes of violence and gore. While such lyrics do undeniably make up a significant portion of the style’s total output, the genre is much more of a canvas than one might expect, allowing a multitude of bands to break the mold and convey new ideas and unique themes through their music. The variety in the genre’s lyrics is near-endless, ranging anywhere from Caladan Brood drawing on contemporary fantasy to Perilaxe Occlusion writing about CGI rendering techniques.

The earliest well-known example of nature poetry in extreme metal comes from Amorphis – released in 1994, their sophomore album Tales from the Thousand Lakes quotes The Kalevala, an 1835 collection of Finnish folk songs that frequently contrast beautiful landscapes with feelings of melancholy and despair. Kalevala could not be considered Romantic poetry by contemporary or modern standards (and, in truth, only loosely falls under “nature poetry”), but Amorphis used its lyrics in combination with mystical synths, melodious guitarwork and a more atmospheric sound than had ever been heard before in their genre, and this would lay the foundation for a new type of extreme metal. A multitude of bands and styles have since emerged around the concept of combining the harsh music of black and death metal with lyrics evoking the majesty and might of the natural world, and in this essay I plan to analyse certain prominent and interesting examples.

“This is how the lucky feel
How the blessed think
Like the daybreak in spring
The sun on a spring morning.”

I: Jani Lindström and the Romantics
In spite of his transience and relative obscurity, Jani Lindström is one of my favourite writers in the metal scene. He is best known for his lyrical and vocal contributions to Evanescent, Everfading, the debut album of Finnish death metal group Fall of the Leafe. Musically, the band were heavily inspired by Tales from the Thousand Lakes - their first album mixed death metal with Nordic folk melodies and Lindström’s lyrics occupied a similar poetic niche, though one more influenced by the English Romantic movement than traditional Finnish song.

Lindström’s most obvious source of poetic inspiration is without a doubt John Keats. Not only does he write in a very similar antiquated English dialect, he also explores similar themes of divinity and nature as they relate to the human condition, with heavy melancholic overtones. The use of resplendent and celestial imagery to express and exaggerate worldly emotions was a cornerstone of the Romantic movement, and in this respect Lindström perhaps runs furthest of all – The Celestial Keeper details a wish to escape earthly sorrows and become like the gods, framed by an experience of staring into the “shocking brilliance, starbright” of the sky. The realisation of our smallness in the face of the cosmos is an intimately human one, but the song’s speaker rails against it, lamenting their own powerlessness to overcome “all the sorrows of substance”. In the grandiose manner of Romanticism, this leads to an ending that can only be interpreted as suicide:

“The passing of my heart is at hand
Into the vaults of the nightly sky
To dance with the four winds and the gods and goddesses of the stars

Lovesick and compelled to leave these lands
I bid farewell, let thee well die
For I join immortal ornaments of the heavens above
As a new day dawns on mortal lands”

The reason harsh vocals pair so perfectly with this subject matter should, by now, be obvious; screams are perhaps the rawest, most powerful expression of emotion available to a person, and Lindström’s delivery of his words evokes pure, uncompromising despair. In the context of a man so overcome by the woes of the world that even the gods and stars cannot provide consolation, the choice is perfect.

II: John Haughm, Poet of the Pantheists

“Here at the edge of this world
Here I gaze at a pantheon of oak, a citadel of stone
If this grand panorama before me is what you call God
Then God is not dead.”

Agalloch’s The Mantle might well be the least “extreme” extreme metal album ever made. Screamed vocals are the only persistent staple of black metal to be found, and though electric guitars do have a presence, the album spends as much time on contemplative folk and minimalist ambient sections as it does on the black metal riffing one might expect. Lyrically, The Mantle is rooted in frontman John Haughm’s misanthropic, pantheist worldview; pantheism can be defined as belief not in a personified, conscious god such as the one of the Abrahamic religions, but that the natural world that surrounds us is God. Much of the album’s emphasis falls on the insignificance of mankind in such a place.

An interesting feature of Fall of the Leafe’s first album is its embrace of imperfection; its music is often tortuous and chaotic in structure, twisting through different atmospheres and soundscapes. The vocals are equally messy, with my favourite example occurring at the end of The Garden by the Shoreless Sea: As he screams the song’s final line (“I lie released of mourn and sorrow…”), Lindström’s voice seems to give out entirely on the last word, becoming more of a choking cry than any sort of lyrical delivery. Such imperfections are often left in metal tracks to accentuate the humanity of the musicians – we are flawed creatures doomed to forever seek an unattainable perfection, and on an album filled with grief, hate and despair, the embrace of such defects could not be more fitting.

Agalloch are not like this. In stark contrast, every facet of The Mantle feels meticulously crafted and deliberate, from the flawlessly executed guitarwork and rhythmic drums to the remarkably controlled screams. Where Lindström’s vocals felt intensely personal, Haughm’s are the exact opposite - how often have you heard screams described as “inhuman”? Agalloch intend to scrub any reminder of humanity from their music in order to drive home their message of our insignificance before the might of nature. The long instrumental segments scattered across the album serve the same purpose, evoking the purity of a natural world yet untainted by man.

Much like the aforementioned Fall of the Leafe song, In the Shadow of our Pale Companion ends with a suicide. But this one does not arise from overwhelming despair; like the rest of the album, it is purposeful and calculated. It is the death of a misanthrope, a man who has carefully considered the state of the world and his place in it, before coming to the inevitable conclusion that there is none. To him, our destruction of nature is an irredeemable crime, and as such his end – his return to the earth – is nothing more than the righting of an ancient wrong. It is, in his own words, “what had to be done.”

“Life is a clay urn on the mantle
And I am the ashes on the floor
We are the wounds and the great cold death of the Earth.”