I just went through my blog posts and thought, it might be interesting to stick to the old Nihilist / Entombed times once more. Especially the activities of Nicke Andersson are very special and worth it to write a few lines about.
I think Nicke's career proofs very much that every hard style of Metal music is a form of musical expression, no more no less. People who declare Metal in any form being kind of diabolic or in any other way unmoral or unethical are just wrong and particularly prejudiced by their very own feeling of what is wrong or right! Unfortunately these people seem not to detect that there are always many forms of artistical expression. Some of these forms might not be very tasteful or whatsoever. Let's stick to that thought concerning the image of a band for a while, before we go back to Nicke Andersson!
Of course there are forms of Metal Music which play with the image of Satanism or Antichristianism. At least, the Devil, Hell and death itself are regular subjects in Rock'n'roll music anyway. And it was (and is) a medium for provokation, of course! But these statements of these bands are basically politically motivated, dealing with the social (and maybe religous) situation which is wrong from the musicians point of view. Or they simply are phantasies which are regularly relatively exagerated and therefore being considered as a form of satire.
Satanic bands I am talking about here clearly operate with religious symbols in a way that does not show clearly it's somehow phantastic or satirical meaning. There are a few bands who might want to arouse the impression that they are "really" satanic or something like that in any way. This happens mainly in the genre of Black Metal. At this point, it may be a problem for some fans to separate reality from the image of a specific band. And this of course can cause a real problem. I don't like that approach to Metal very much either and maybe I am going to write about that later. Furthermore it would be a good question how 'metal' that approach really is. But I would never going that far to claim that these bands are unethical and should be forbidden or something like that. I simply consider that being silly and nonessential an sometimes dangerous. It has nothing to do with Metal music at all. Here, the music seems to start being kind of unimportant. It is just some sort of posing to me.
Cannibal Corpse is certainly one of the best example for exquisit death metal. And they are also a good example for the misunderstanding of a public image, a band can create. See for yourself, they are a class of its own, not only from a technical point of view, but primarly concerning their way of musical expression:
Unfortunatly, they are banned in many countries because of their album covers and / or lyrics. This judgement is of course mainly done by people who know nothing about Metal music at all. Of course one might find these covers pubertal or obscene. But this has no relation to the abilities of the musicians which are simply brilliant. Beside of that, the lyrics of Cannibal corpse can be understood in many ways:
And after all, of course the music does sound very brutal and it is meant to sound like this. Also, the band looks very brutal when they are playing live on stage. This is meant to look like this too! Because this is a fucking death metal band and that's it. Or should it look like this?
As you can see: All acting of the band supports the brutality of the music that is played. And the lyrics are just part of that form of expression. Everything else would look like a parody. Besides their mostly impressive technical and musical abilites, Cannibal Corpse are doing some horror entertainment, nothing more. Here some words of bassplayer Alex Webster on that subject (in the middle of the interview!):
Now let's go back to Nicke Andersson. As I wrote before, he seems not to concentrate on anything about image or whatsoever. He just plays music. He is a good examples for what musicians really want: playin' music. This is the most important thing to Metal musicians too! It is the mainly goal to develop oneself on the instrument and in the abilities of writing and playing a song live and in the studio! Simply playing music! That's what it is all about! Clearly, not every musician has the abilities to form one band after another while being relatively successful at any time! So they choose a genre of music they are mostly interested in. In our case: METAL! Because of his impressive abilities, Nicke does his music in an great variety of styles.
First of all, he was a founder of Nihilist and Entombed where he used to play drums. You find videos referring to this in one of my previous blogs.
Around 1997 he decided to concentrate on his new project: THE HELLACOPTERS. There he did the guitarjob and the vocals. And as you can see in a merely complete different manner than before. The songwriting is excellent:
Well..it is still Rock'n'Roll of course. But with a completely different attitude. The Hellacopter broke up in 2007. Since 2005, Nicke had returned to his roots so to say and formed 'Death Breath'. Here an example of a song of that band. The video reffers strongly to the classic horror movies which were made during the late 60s, especially to 'Night of the living dead'! Here it is again: The Horror Entertainment! And also the band is very classic in their style.
Nicke Andersson plays drums again in that band! It seemed that he wanted to play Death Metal again.
Well, that's all for now folks! Up the irons! The beast is alive!
Thanx for reading!
Gun
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