Nine Awesome Bands You Should Be Familiar With If You Want to Talk Music With Me

Every time I meet new people I inevitably am questioned about my musical tastes, what music I play, who the bands on my jacket are, etc. By no small margin do the people I meet have no fucking clue what I am talking about when I respond. 'Oh punk, you mean like Blink 182?' or 'Oh metal, like Metallica?' at which point I die a little inside and narrow my vision at them, quietly finish my drink and hate humanity a little more.

I mean, I am sorry I don't listen to more mainstream or popular music. I really am. I would like to be able to play beer pong with some brahs and listen to Nickelback without feeling the need to kick the speakers in. I would love to be able to talk about how the latest Fleet Foxes album is so overrated, I can't believe Pitchfork gave it that score with hipsters while drinking Pabst tallboys. Hell, I would even settle for being able to listen to the radio in the car with someone without changing it to NPR.

And here's the thing, I'll be the first person to admit that the music I listen to is horrible. It's dissonant, complicated, violent, and inaccessible. Subjects include death, the fall of humanity, existential angst, nuclear war, corruption, poverty, drug use, Satanism, and drowning kittens. All that nonsense aside though, I love it. Call it an acquired taste or just trying to be different, but I'll be listening to blackened crusty metal until I die.

So if you want to talk music with me, or see patches on my jacket or hear a gawdawful racket coming out of my speakers, here's a crash course.

Carcass - first off, Carcass is hands down the reason I grew to love extreme metal. Swansong, while a huge deviation from the typical Carcass sounds, got me hooked. That album is one of the most solid metal albums ever produced, a true 'something for everyone' piece. Catchy riffs, rock and roll structure, bluesy guitar, all while keeping it heavy and fast. Heartwork is Carcass' agreed magnum opus, combining grind and punk with melodic death metal (which Carcass pioneered). It set the tone for the next 10 years of death metal, giving rise to the Swedish Death Metal movement, which birthed Opeth, At the Gates, and Entombed.

Necrotism: Decanting the Insalubrious, however, is my favorite Carcass work to date. It took the heaviness and aesthetic of goregrind (which Carcass also pioneered), the speed and ferociousness of anarcho-punk, and the technicality and precision of death metal - blended it all together in a maelstorm of awesomeness. Spliced intros of autopsy audio set the tone for the visceral splattering of neck snapping riffs, dizzying tempo changes, dripping vocals, and neo-classical guitar work.

Pick this up or you could wind up in the morgue.

Electric Wizard - From the first self titled album, there was no doubt Electric Wizard would be taking Sabbath style doom, loading it up in their pipe, and hitting that shit until the walls started to bleed. The hits just kept on coming, with Come My Fanatics... - heavier, darker, and more drugged up. Dopethrone, with it's cover of the Devil hitting a bong, visually encapsulates the sound they bring on this album. Considered the high point of their career, the beginning is strong with heavy, groove based riffs and memorable desolate lyrics. The middle is a return to the droning, repetition, and heaviness of earlier albums. The end of Dopethrone, with the title track and Mind Transferal, bring heavy distortion and the sludgy haze that make the Wizards the masters of stoner doom.

We Live, while a solid album, trades catchy riffs and memorable structures for droning guitars, feedback, and almost below perceptibility bass, slowing things down for all the burnouts. Let Us Prey departs from the bass heavy distortion of previous albums, but there is still plenty of each going on. The use of more psychedelic guitars and a return to groove, along with some a healthy dose of high frequency experimentation paves the way for the best Electric Wizard album to date - Witchcult Today. Acid guitar solos and warmer sounds mingle with the uncompromising drone and heaviness that is trademark Electric Wizard.

Turn on, turn up, tune out.

Discharge - coming out of the UK 82' movement (giving punk some balls with faster and angrier sounds) they pioneered and mastered the d-beat. Using simple song structures and shouted lyrics typical of punk, they added metal guitar solos and heavy distortion for darker sounds. They were too metal for the punks, too punk for the metal-heads. Fast, aggressive, and simple, they influenced thrash metal, hardcore, crust punk, and every genre spin off from the above. Best album - Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing.

Amebix - early crust band, combined the fast pace of Motorhead with gloomier noise from Killing Joke and Swans. A short lived band, but highly influential on the development of black metal and crust punk. Unlike most punk bands at the time they wrote about brotherhood, riding motorcycles, the consequences of nuclear war, and humanity's fear of death. One of my favorite songs of all time is by them - check it out. True fact - after Amebix, the lead singer Rob 'The Baron' Miller became a self taught swordsmith. He lives on a tiny island up in Scotland making custom swords. Badass.

Taake - black metal at it's finest. Coming from Bergen, Norway (home of black metal) they write about fog and what archetypes it takes in our collective literature and mythos. While black metal is kind of hokey and suffers from taking itself too seriously, Hoest (the head honcho of Taake) has always brought seriousness and solemnity to his albums. I had the privilege of seeing Taake and Behexen (another black metal favourite) play when I visited Bergen a couple years ago - one of the best shows I have seen hands down. I got the feeling watching Taake perform that they would be playing black metal even if they didn't come from the home of it, that the black metal sound is just who they are. Taake takes the ambient noise and doom fields of black metal and blends them perfectly with the fast, aggressive early black metal sound, never skimping on production and meticulous writing.

Hoest, rockin' with the cock out.

Origin - masters of technical death metal. Listening to them is an aural onslaught of technical brutality. When I first heard these guys back in high school, I thought, "There is no way that is a guy drumming that fast, it has to be a drum machine." I saw them a couple months later and the drummer was the fastest, most precise, and honed human being ever to sit behind a kit. He probably is a robot. The bass shreds, the guitars are doing non stop sweep arpeggios that would make Yngwie Malmsteen cry, and the vocals are inhuman. Check it out for yourself - though the band looks more at home playing WoW than being in the best death metal band ever. Orgin - Finite

Origin is what I think the beginning of the Universe sounded like.

Portishead - easily the most depressing music I own. Trip-hop before it was called such, Portishead combined fusion jazz samples, noise samplings, and hip hop beats together with haunting vocals about loneliness, isolation, and self hatred. Surprisingly, Portishead is my feel good music - it's been the soundtrack for countless breakups and depressive periods, due in part to the solidarity I have with the lyrics and how fucking chill it is. Life may suck and relationships may be pitfalls, but don't get angry and upset. I don't have a favorite album, everything they have put out is solid.

Skitsystem - Swedish d-beat/crust/hardcore, the epitome of what I love in music. Fast, brutal, heavy, and aggressive as fuck. Members from Swedish death metal legends At the Gates got together and started a kang (the Swedish term for Discharge influenced hardcore) band. I think their logo sums it up, combining the sheer awesomeness of wolves, skulls, and swords. Also they get points for singing in Swedish, which has the highest umlaut density of any language - and as everyone knows, umlauts are fucking metal.

One chain mail clad babe/greasy barbarian short of a Manowar album.

Orange Goblin - I was first acquainted with Orange Goblin in high school, but only with their later more punk/thrash influenced stuff - which is good, but pales in comparison with their first three albums: The Big Black, Frequencies from Planet 10, and Time Travelling Blues. I've listened these Orange Goblin album for hours both sober, stoned, and tripping - I still can't decide which one is the best as they are all cosmically good. The overall Orange Goblin sound has a distinct Motorhead-esque 'living fast/riding hard' mentality and sound, but brings a lot of funk breakdowns and psychedelic rock into the mix. Tracks like 'Diesel' showcase the hard hammering biker riffs a la Motorhead, while 'Shine' lures the listener through a groovy psychedelic lullaby into a black hole of astral heaviness. If it sounds like I am stoned when I describe their music, it's because it's the most apt vocabulary for its description.

Orange Goblin is the soundtrack for psychedelic drugs.