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Electric Wizards: A Tapestry of Heavy Music, 1968 to the Present
From Black Sabbath to Big Black, a ride through the evolution, diversity, and influence of genre-defying heavy music.
It began with the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” It was distilled to its dark essence by Black Sabbath. And it has flourished into a vibrant modern underground, epitomized by Newcastle’s Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. This is the evolution of heavy music. The voyage is as varied as it is from the lysergic blunt trauma of Blue Cheer to the locked grooves of Funkadelic, the aural frightmares of Faust to the tectonic crush of Sleep, alighting on post-punk, industrial, grunge, stoner rock, and numerous other genres along the way. Ranging from household names to obscure cult heroes and heroines, Electric Wizards demonstrates how each successive phase of heavy music was forged by what came before, outlining a rich and eclectic lineage that extends far beyond the usual boundaries of heavy rock or heavy metal. It extols those who did things differently, who introduced something fresh and exciting into this elemental tradition, whether by design, accident, or sheer chance. In doing so, Electric Wizards weaves an entirely new tapestry of heavy music.
It began with the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” It was distilled to its dark essence by Black Sabbath. And it has flourished into a vibrant modern underground, epitomized by Newcastle’s Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. This is the evolution of heavy music. The voyage is as varied as it is from the lysergic blunt trauma of Blue Cheer to the locked grooves of Funkadelic, the aural frightmares of Faust to the tectonic crush of Sleep, alighting on post-punk, industrial, grunge, stoner rock, and numerous other genres along the way. Ranging from household names to obscure cult heroes and heroines, Electric Wizards demonstrates how each successive phase of heavy music was forged by what came before, outlining a rich and eclectic lineage that extends far beyond the usual boundaries of heavy rock or heavy metal. It extols those who did things differently, who introduced something fresh and exciting into this elemental tradition, whether by design, accident, or sheer chance. In doing so, Electric Wizards weaves an entirely new tapestry of heavy music.
480 pages, Hardcover
Published October 28, 2021
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June 29, 2022
Sometimes, you’re walking through the bookstore, not really feeling anything you see, and then you find a book that feels like it was written just for you. Six months or so ago I was wandering through the basement of the Strand in Manhattan, not feeling inspired by anything I saw, and then suddenly JR Moores’s Electric Wizards: A Tapestry of Heavy Music, 1968 to the Present waved at me. The words “must buy” don’t quite do it justice.
“Heavy music” is key here, and a good choice by Moores, a veteran music journalist from the UK. You might be forgiven for immediately thinking of heavy metal, and indeed that big shaggy genre has been the engine of heaviness in popular music for decades. But as Moores points out, heaviness goes much further than metal. What is heaviness? Moores is wise enough not to include a sentence-long description, though this is unfortunate for us review writers. He rather writes around the concept, using the whole preface to gesture at what he means and doesn’t. Any too-restrictive definition would inevitably constrain what he’s trying to do unnecessarily, although he certainly has strong feelings on what does and does not belong, as do I. He does note that he will primarily be talking about guitar-based music in the book, which is also wise. Crucially, Moores also says “there is little need in who does or does not ‘keep it real.” I absolutely agree with that spirit. It’s always more fun to include than to exclude.
Heavy music is slow, low, and dark. It's lyrical subject matter tends towards the grim and the portentous. It relies on heavy distortion and grinding rhythms to create a sonic style that can be brutal and assaultive. The beauty of it is that each of those attributes can mean a great many different things to different people. For me, a core element is understanding that beloved heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden or Judas Priest aren’t heavy at all in this sense, where a band like Nine Inch Nails certainly is, despite the emphasis on synthesizers in the latter and the skull and bones metal imagery of the former. Iconography has always been integral to heavy music, and I love it (gimme Gwar in their costumes, baby), but fundamentally heaviness is a property of music, not bands.
One very key element of the book is that Moores recognizes that punk is fundamentally unheavy. Punk music has been immensely influential on heavier music, and of course there’s tons of crossover. Some classic punk acts have moments of deep heaviness. (I would say that the first 10 seconds or so of “Anarchy in the UK” is heavy in exactly the way that Moores and I mean.) But punk is defined, among other things, by three elements that are contrary to heaviness: expressly political lyrics, higher-pitched instrumentals and vocals, and speed. And while there are always an immense number of exceptions and exemptions to this stuff, it’s the case that there’s literally nothing heavy about the Ramones and very little heavy about the Clash or Sex Pistols. Metal and punk grew up together, always mutually influencing each other and in conversation with each other, but are very separate impulses. Punk, hardcore, and their various offshoots often access heaviness, but they are not its natural home. This is core to the whole project and the fact that Moores gets it just right is very important, at least to a weirdo like me.
In many ways Electric Wizards is everything I was looking for, a deeply-researched and near-exhaustive chronicle of a lot of music that I love and some I hate, as good of a primer on this broad movement as I can imagine currently exists. He starts with the origin of heaviness in pop music in the Beatles and “Helter Skelter,” which is a little tired and a little cute but not wrong. He then weaves a path through Black Sabbath, the lodestar of the book and the genre, through the major touchstones of heavy metal precursors like Motörhead, through industrial, the hardcore movement, grunge, nü-metal, and more. Along the way, he highlights acts both high-profile and niche, and I learned about several acts that I had never heard of before, which is a thrill. I learned a lot in general - Moores has clearly put in his time in the library, and most of the book is more than adequately sourced. There’s tons of nuggets to be found here, and I got just the combination of big sweeping consideration of trends married to great anecdotes and quotes that I was looking for. Moores also writes well, which really helps along the course of a 423-page book, one that’s meant to be slowly savored.
And also, JR Moores is the normiest normie who ever normied a normie. Moores is very much a Certain Type of Guy, a particular kind of metal fan I’ve known for most of my life, and within that archetype he perfectly fits every stereotype you can think of. He’s a progressive and a hipster, somebody who’s a little embarrassed to love metal (or to be known to love metal), the kind of guy who’s forever telling you “you know if you like these guys, you should be listening to those guys.” His tastes are just eclectic enough, his opinions are just enough steps apart from the perfectly mainstream, his limp social justice politics are just radical enough in the context of genres still dogged by a certain brutish conservatism. (I don’t mind the politics themselves, at all, but rather that Moores is so boring in his presentation of those politics.) This might all seem very arch to you, especially if you don’t have Swans somewhere in your Spotify history. But if you’re like me and you like the music I like I think you’ll know just the Certain Type of Guy I mean, and also be a little tired of Moores’s opinions.
Moores is sure Sabbath is superior to Zeppelin. He hates the Doors, Marilyn Manson, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and hair metal. He’s dismissive of post-Ozzy Sabbath, despite the fact that Ronnie James Dio was the greatest Sabbath singer. He respects AC/DC in a self-defensive way. He idolizes Steve Albini, because of course he does. He regards Britpop as a contrivance of the record labels. Hey, did you know that Alice in Chains is the grunge band that was really heavy? The problem isn’t that these opinions are wrong, but that it’s all so expected, tuned just exactly to the right bearded metal guy dial. I myself am a bearded metal guy, and I like IPAs, but Moores has the taste of someone who only drinks IPAs, you know what I’m saying? I honestly don’t think I was surprised by a single musical opinion Moores expresses, across a book that exceeds 400 pages. It makes the experience less enjoyable for me, even as I’m soaking up so much great history. Surprise me. You’ve got twenty chapters. Surprise me!
A weird omission to me is System of a Down. They were always a little to drama club for me, but for many people they were the keepers of the flame of heaviness during “the nadir,” yet they get no mentions in a book on heavy music that has plenty of time to talk about Muddy Waters. And that’s the other big problem: there’s a really weird sense of inclusion and priority. Stuff that would seem patently out of place in the world of heavy music gets long sections while core, popular acts that helped define sounds are sidelined.
It’s a general problem, but two chapters exemplify it. I 100% agree that “Maggot Brain” is a very heavy song, and that the heavy spirit resides in a good deal of P-Funk’s output. But even the album on which that title track resides is mostly not heavy, and the average funk band just isn’t heavy. Yet funk receives its own chapter, and weirder still, so does krautrock. Krautrock! I think a lot of krautrock is very good, but its an existentially not-heavy genre. It seems clear to me that Moores just likes funk and likes krautrock and found a way to awkwardly wedge them into a book about heavy music. But the text loses a lot in discipline and coherence and gains little insight in the trade. Those chapters simply don’t belong in the book, period, end of story; there would have been plenty of opportunities to gesture at those genres in the flow of a chapter about more music more relevant to heaviness. (But do listen to Maggot Brain, if you never have. Its pleasures are many.)
Moores also shows his hand by fixating on minor acts while sidelining bigger relevant players. He talks about micro-niche act Lana del Rabies, bizarrely, for two pages in a book that has so much else to do. Moor Mother receives as much attention as Swans, a band that redefined heaviness for a generation of nerds. Look, I like Moor Mother; you all should check out Moor Mother. But I have no idea what Moores thinks he's accomplishing by going on about how Moor Mother is better than Ministry to conclude his chapter on industrial music. Even if it’s “true,” musical tastes being subjective, it inevitably makes Moores seem like he’s grinding a particular axe instead of understanding his book as fundamentally a work of history. Electric Wizards is a book that clearly wants to stand the test of time, and yet it’s easy to imagine how it could fail to age well, given his preciousness about what gets covered.
This problem makes the book seem positively hermetic at the very end, with its insistent fixation on the still-quite-obscure self-described “precious metal” band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. A few other tiny bands are namechecked in those chapters, but the scene they constitute is very small indeed, and it’s a bizarre amount of focus for a decades-spanning book’s final act. It makes me wonder if he didn’t have a previously-published essay on Pigs that he used to fill pages in the book.
Look, it’s inevitable that there are going to be judgment calls when it comes to inclusion and curation. There’s an entire chapter on Melvins, which I think is perfectly appropriate; they’ve done as much as anyone to define guitar-based heavy music and its palette of sounds in the past 30 years. A lot of microgenres spawn from Melvins, and they have been name-checked by dozens of prominent musicians. At the same time, I can’t deny that part of my approval stems simply from my love of that band. If I was, say, someone who came to heavy music through thrash and loved that genre (millions did, thoughI very much didnot), I might not get giving Melvins such a spotlight and paying such short shrift to Megadeth. Metallica appears on maybe 18-20 pages, but the only single album that is considered is Lulu, which seems like deliberate troll shit, and I say that as a Lulu defender. That chapter is immediately followed by another single-band-focused chapter, this one on NapalmDeath. And I think that’s appropriate, more or less, given grindcore’s way of taking metal and hardcore to their greatest extremes. But there’s barely any mention of hair metal at all, and while I would agree that hair metal is existentially unheavy (as well as terrible), a ton of the energy of early metal like Sabbath was eventually pushed into the direction of hair metal, and you just have to do the work of excavating that.
These are all judgment calls, and I don’t think Moores has done a terrible job of picking and choosing. I wish he had been a little more transparent with this process, though. I loved the way he used the underappreciated band TAD as his entryway to talking about grunge. But if you’re writing this book, you just have to write a little bit more about Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins. Even if you don’t think they’re very heavy (and I agree that they aren’t), you have to grapple with the fact that for a huge number of heavy music fans, like me, those bands were the catalyst for journies into heaviness. (How many kids got into Paranoid only after having their minds blown by Nevermind?) The book is about lineages, and the simple fact of the matter is that there will be always be a bigger family tree coming off of Nirvana than off of Wolf Eyes. You have to stay disciplined in your focus to do the job you’ve set out to do.
And I will accept the fact that I am being self-indulgent when I say that the disrespect towards Boris feels incredible to me. Yes, Boris is my favorite band, so I’m biased. But still, they are a massively influential force in heavy music today. You only have to look at their list of collaborators to see that. Moores gives Merzbow his due, which is good, but shouldn’t that prompt him to take a real look at his friends in Boris? Few bands have ever jumped between different heavy genres as fitfully and effectively as Boris, and their almost-total exclusion seems like a real lost opportunity. Alas.
No Pantera? No Bell Witch? Punk isn’t heavy, but riot grrrl is? I would have loved a little digression into lowercase, though I guess that violates the guitar-based directive. And I understand: there’s only so much space in a book. But every weird exclusion makes every weird inclusion look a little bit weirder.
Also, Christ, the relentless return to Sabbath. Holy smokes. Yes, I understand that Sabbath was seminal and influential and I like some (some) of the music. But the obsessive focus on Sabbath not only by Moores but also by many other admirers of metal makes the world of heavy music seem smaller and staler than it really is. I hate sacred cows, especially in music, so when Moores quotes a few musicians as deliberately denying Sabbath’s influence it feels refreshing. There are other bands!
This probably sounds more critical than I mean it. Ultimately, this book does what it says on its cover, beyond my expectations. I was genuinely sad to close it for the last time, as it had become my nighttime ritual to read a chapter before bed and in doing so learn a little music history I didn’t know before. I absolutely recommend this to those who have an interest in the subject, although most of the heavy music fans don’t need my urging and have already ordered it by this point in the review. I wish Moores was a little more logical about what he wanted in the book and didn’t, and I wish he was a little less predictable. Ultimately, though, it was going to take a good-natured bearded British metal hipster to write this kind of immense tome on heavy music, and I am very grateful the book exists. And like Moores I am quite confident that, whatever the trends may be, heavy music will never die.
“Heavy music” is key here, and a good choice by Moores, a veteran music journalist from the UK. You might be forgiven for immediately thinking of heavy metal, and indeed that big shaggy genre has been the engine of heaviness in popular music for decades. But as Moores points out, heaviness goes much further than metal. What is heaviness? Moores is wise enough not to include a sentence-long description, though this is unfortunate for us review writers. He rather writes around the concept, using the whole preface to gesture at what he means and doesn’t. Any too-restrictive definition would inevitably constrain what he’s trying to do unnecessarily, although he certainly has strong feelings on what does and does not belong, as do I. He does note that he will primarily be talking about guitar-based music in the book, which is also wise. Crucially, Moores also says “there is little need in who does or does not ‘keep it real.” I absolutely agree with that spirit. It’s always more fun to include than to exclude.
Heavy music is slow, low, and dark. It's lyrical subject matter tends towards the grim and the portentous. It relies on heavy distortion and grinding rhythms to create a sonic style that can be brutal and assaultive. The beauty of it is that each of those attributes can mean a great many different things to different people. For me, a core element is understanding that beloved heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden or Judas Priest aren’t heavy at all in this sense, where a band like Nine Inch Nails certainly is, despite the emphasis on synthesizers in the latter and the skull and bones metal imagery of the former. Iconography has always been integral to heavy music, and I love it (gimme Gwar in their costumes, baby), but fundamentally heaviness is a property of music, not bands.
One very key element of the book is that Moores recognizes that punk is fundamentally unheavy. Punk music has been immensely influential on heavier music, and of course there’s tons of crossover. Some classic punk acts have moments of deep heaviness. (I would say that the first 10 seconds or so of “Anarchy in the UK” is heavy in exactly the way that Moores and I mean.) But punk is defined, among other things, by three elements that are contrary to heaviness: expressly political lyrics, higher-pitched instrumentals and vocals, and speed. And while there are always an immense number of exceptions and exemptions to this stuff, it’s the case that there’s literally nothing heavy about the Ramones and very little heavy about the Clash or Sex Pistols. Metal and punk grew up together, always mutually influencing each other and in conversation with each other, but are very separate impulses. Punk, hardcore, and their various offshoots often access heaviness, but they are not its natural home. This is core to the whole project and the fact that Moores gets it just right is very important, at least to a weirdo like me.
In many ways Electric Wizards is everything I was looking for, a deeply-researched and near-exhaustive chronicle of a lot of music that I love and some I hate, as good of a primer on this broad movement as I can imagine currently exists. He starts with the origin of heaviness in pop music in the Beatles and “Helter Skelter,” which is a little tired and a little cute but not wrong. He then weaves a path through Black Sabbath, the lodestar of the book and the genre, through the major touchstones of heavy metal precursors like Motörhead, through industrial, the hardcore movement, grunge, nü-metal, and more. Along the way, he highlights acts both high-profile and niche, and I learned about several acts that I had never heard of before, which is a thrill. I learned a lot in general - Moores has clearly put in his time in the library, and most of the book is more than adequately sourced. There’s tons of nuggets to be found here, and I got just the combination of big sweeping consideration of trends married to great anecdotes and quotes that I was looking for. Moores also writes well, which really helps along the course of a 423-page book, one that’s meant to be slowly savored.
And also, JR Moores is the normiest normie who ever normied a normie. Moores is very much a Certain Type of Guy, a particular kind of metal fan I’ve known for most of my life, and within that archetype he perfectly fits every stereotype you can think of. He’s a progressive and a hipster, somebody who’s a little embarrassed to love metal (or to be known to love metal), the kind of guy who’s forever telling you “you know if you like these guys, you should be listening to those guys.” His tastes are just eclectic enough, his opinions are just enough steps apart from the perfectly mainstream, his limp social justice politics are just radical enough in the context of genres still dogged by a certain brutish conservatism. (I don’t mind the politics themselves, at all, but rather that Moores is so boring in his presentation of those politics.) This might all seem very arch to you, especially if you don’t have Swans somewhere in your Spotify history. But if you’re like me and you like the music I like I think you’ll know just the Certain Type of Guy I mean, and also be a little tired of Moores’s opinions.
Moores is sure Sabbath is superior to Zeppelin. He hates the Doors, Marilyn Manson, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and hair metal. He’s dismissive of post-Ozzy Sabbath, despite the fact that Ronnie James Dio was the greatest Sabbath singer. He respects AC/DC in a self-defensive way. He idolizes Steve Albini, because of course he does. He regards Britpop as a contrivance of the record labels. Hey, did you know that Alice in Chains is the grunge band that was really heavy? The problem isn’t that these opinions are wrong, but that it’s all so expected, tuned just exactly to the right bearded metal guy dial. I myself am a bearded metal guy, and I like IPAs, but Moores has the taste of someone who only drinks IPAs, you know what I’m saying? I honestly don’t think I was surprised by a single musical opinion Moores expresses, across a book that exceeds 400 pages. It makes the experience less enjoyable for me, even as I’m soaking up so much great history. Surprise me. You’ve got twenty chapters. Surprise me!
A weird omission to me is System of a Down. They were always a little to drama club for me, but for many people they were the keepers of the flame of heaviness during “the nadir,” yet they get no mentions in a book on heavy music that has plenty of time to talk about Muddy Waters. And that’s the other big problem: there’s a really weird sense of inclusion and priority. Stuff that would seem patently out of place in the world of heavy music gets long sections while core, popular acts that helped define sounds are sidelined.
It’s a general problem, but two chapters exemplify it. I 100% agree that “Maggot Brain” is a very heavy song, and that the heavy spirit resides in a good deal of P-Funk’s output. But even the album on which that title track resides is mostly not heavy, and the average funk band just isn’t heavy. Yet funk receives its own chapter, and weirder still, so does krautrock. Krautrock! I think a lot of krautrock is very good, but its an existentially not-heavy genre. It seems clear to me that Moores just likes funk and likes krautrock and found a way to awkwardly wedge them into a book about heavy music. But the text loses a lot in discipline and coherence and gains little insight in the trade. Those chapters simply don’t belong in the book, period, end of story; there would have been plenty of opportunities to gesture at those genres in the flow of a chapter about more music more relevant to heaviness. (But do listen to Maggot Brain, if you never have. Its pleasures are many.)
Moores also shows his hand by fixating on minor acts while sidelining bigger relevant players. He talks about micro-niche act Lana del Rabies, bizarrely, for two pages in a book that has so much else to do. Moor Mother receives as much attention as Swans, a band that redefined heaviness for a generation of nerds. Look, I like Moor Mother; you all should check out Moor Mother. But I have no idea what Moores thinks he's accomplishing by going on about how Moor Mother is better than Ministry to conclude his chapter on industrial music. Even if it’s “true,” musical tastes being subjective, it inevitably makes Moores seem like he’s grinding a particular axe instead of understanding his book as fundamentally a work of history. Electric Wizards is a book that clearly wants to stand the test of time, and yet it’s easy to imagine how it could fail to age well, given his preciousness about what gets covered.
This problem makes the book seem positively hermetic at the very end, with its insistent fixation on the still-quite-obscure self-described “precious metal” band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. A few other tiny bands are namechecked in those chapters, but the scene they constitute is very small indeed, and it’s a bizarre amount of focus for a decades-spanning book’s final act. It makes me wonder if he didn’t have a previously-published essay on Pigs that he used to fill pages in the book.
Look, it’s inevitable that there are going to be judgment calls when it comes to inclusion and curation. There’s an entire chapter on Melvins, which I think is perfectly appropriate; they’ve done as much as anyone to define guitar-based heavy music and its palette of sounds in the past 30 years. A lot of microgenres spawn from Melvins, and they have been name-checked by dozens of prominent musicians. At the same time, I can’t deny that part of my approval stems simply from my love of that band. If I was, say, someone who came to heavy music through thrash and loved that genre (millions did, thoughI very much didnot), I might not get giving Melvins such a spotlight and paying such short shrift to Megadeth. Metallica appears on maybe 18-20 pages, but the only single album that is considered is Lulu, which seems like deliberate troll shit, and I say that as a Lulu defender. That chapter is immediately followed by another single-band-focused chapter, this one on NapalmDeath. And I think that’s appropriate, more or less, given grindcore’s way of taking metal and hardcore to their greatest extremes. But there’s barely any mention of hair metal at all, and while I would agree that hair metal is existentially unheavy (as well as terrible), a ton of the energy of early metal like Sabbath was eventually pushed into the direction of hair metal, and you just have to do the work of excavating that.
These are all judgment calls, and I don’t think Moores has done a terrible job of picking and choosing. I wish he had been a little more transparent with this process, though. I loved the way he used the underappreciated band TAD as his entryway to talking about grunge. But if you’re writing this book, you just have to write a little bit more about Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins. Even if you don’t think they’re very heavy (and I agree that they aren’t), you have to grapple with the fact that for a huge number of heavy music fans, like me, those bands were the catalyst for journies into heaviness. (How many kids got into Paranoid only after having their minds blown by Nevermind?) The book is about lineages, and the simple fact of the matter is that there will be always be a bigger family tree coming off of Nirvana than off of Wolf Eyes. You have to stay disciplined in your focus to do the job you’ve set out to do.
And I will accept the fact that I am being self-indulgent when I say that the disrespect towards Boris feels incredible to me. Yes, Boris is my favorite band, so I’m biased. But still, they are a massively influential force in heavy music today. You only have to look at their list of collaborators to see that. Moores gives Merzbow his due, which is good, but shouldn’t that prompt him to take a real look at his friends in Boris? Few bands have ever jumped between different heavy genres as fitfully and effectively as Boris, and their almost-total exclusion seems like a real lost opportunity. Alas.
No Pantera? No Bell Witch? Punk isn’t heavy, but riot grrrl is? I would have loved a little digression into lowercase, though I guess that violates the guitar-based directive. And I understand: there’s only so much space in a book. But every weird exclusion makes every weird inclusion look a little bit weirder.
Also, Christ, the relentless return to Sabbath. Holy smokes. Yes, I understand that Sabbath was seminal and influential and I like some (some) of the music. But the obsessive focus on Sabbath not only by Moores but also by many other admirers of metal makes the world of heavy music seem smaller and staler than it really is. I hate sacred cows, especially in music, so when Moores quotes a few musicians as deliberately denying Sabbath’s influence it feels refreshing. There are other bands!
This probably sounds more critical than I mean it. Ultimately, this book does what it says on its cover, beyond my expectations. I was genuinely sad to close it for the last time, as it had become my nighttime ritual to read a chapter before bed and in doing so learn a little music history I didn’t know before. I absolutely recommend this to those who have an interest in the subject, although most of the heavy music fans don’t need my urging and have already ordered it by this point in the review. I wish Moores was a little more logical about what he wanted in the book and didn’t, and I wish he was a little less predictable. Ultimately, though, it was going to take a good-natured bearded British metal hipster to write this kind of immense tome on heavy music, and I am very grateful the book exists. And like Moores I am quite confident that, whatever the trends may be, heavy music will never die.
January 9, 2022
For over fifteen years I’ve been expecting a book to turn up on heavy music, particularly the long suffering, under-represented heavy music that loosely lounges under the umbrella of stoner doom psych. This is not quite that book. What I was looking for apparently came out back in February 11, 2020, when Doomed to Fail: The Incredibly Loud History of Doom, Sludge, and Post-Metal by J.J. Anselmi was published. My bad, I’ll get to that one next. JR Moores is a regular contributor to The Quietus (Columfortably Numb column) and The Wire. Which is why I assumed he would colossally fuck this project up. Why? Titles from two albums by lesser known Midwestern noise rock bands Killdozer and Cows come to mind — Intellectuals Are the Shoeshine Boys of the Ruling Elite (1984) and Effete & Impudent Snobs (1990). The Quietus and The Wire are fine publications with good writers who cover a wide array of music. They are also gatekeepers that have generally excluded the majority of the music that was, or more importantly, should have been covered by this book.
Moores is no dum-dum. He cleverly used the word “tapestry” in his title instead of “history,” in order to excuse himself from needing to cover anything he has disdain for. Which is basically anything remotely related to heavy metal aside from reluctant godfathers Black Sabbath. Thankfully, he rightfully recognizes Sabbath as the center of it all, calling out their influence repeatedly, even titling certain chapters “Sabbath Phase I-IV.” While he gives underrated proto-metal band Budgie some space, he completely skips over early architects Deep Purple and Uriah Heep. That’s no biggie to me, since they’re exhaustively covered in dozens of books on heavy metal. So I kind of agree with Moores in that respect — metal generally has been thoroughly covered elsewhere. Instead, he starts with The Beatles, as one does, specifically “Helter Skelter.” He goes deep on that single track, and it’s unreleased extended version, in a way that he mostly fails to do in the rest of the book. It’s somewhat understandable, as there’s already been plenty of brilliant analysis to spark ideas, most importantly Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. He then begins to skip around the timeline in order to weave his own particular tapestry, going back to Link Wray’s “Rumble,” and obscure San Francisco band The Maze, The Groundhogs, Pink Fairies, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly and Blue Cheer. There’s another dozen minor proto-metal bands that could have been added, but it’s hard to say they were influential. So far so good, though Moores missed the opportunity to explore how exactly bands suddenly got so much heavier in 1968. A large part was due to the collaboration between musicians like Hendrix, Page and Townshend and amplifier makers like Jim Marshall. While Moores points out that there is a major difference between loud and heavy, no one can be heavy without the proper technology.
I was surprised to see how much time Moores spent on AC/DC. I love AC/DC, but I never necessarily thought they pushed the envelope of heavy forward. Rather, they developed their own unique, economical version of boogie rock that used space in a way that increased the impact of their simple riffs. He also spends quite a bit of time on French PhD student of postmodernist philosophy, Richard Pinhas, and his and his band Heldon. I’ve long been a fan of his groundbreaking mix of progressive electronic, kosmische, art rock and prog. Great band, not particularly heavy. Nyl’s self-titled 1976 debut is an interesting mention that I hadn’t heard before. Pretty cool, not that heavy. Christian Vander’s Magma and his Zeuhl universe complete with made up language is fascinating, but certainly no heavier than say, UK proggers Van Der Graaf Generator, who are passed over. He even goes into how The Slit’s second album of global dub, Return of the Giant Slits (1981) is an underrated masterpiece, which it may be, but isn’t remotely heavy. These are the first of numerous detours that I wouldn’t have minded as much if Moores didn’t completely drop the ball in the end. I’ll get to that later.
Next we go to Japan for the elusive Les Rallizes Dénudés, who never recorded any official studio albums, so we have to rely on live bootlegs, and the massively brilliant Flower Travellin’ Band, who covered not only “Black Sabbath,” but King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” on their debut album Anything (1970). Back in Detroit, The Stooges, MC5 and Alice Cooper get their brief obligatory mentions, but he goes deeper into Funkadelic, and how a gig where they borrowed Vanilla Fudge’s amps and experienced a revelation at the power they missed out on previously. Case in point the importance of amplification technology.
After a meander through The Pop Group, P.i.L., Crass and Minor Threat, we end up spending some time with Motörhead. Lemmy’s bass-driven style that he forged while in Hawkwind, taking John Entwistle’s guitar-style playing and making it exponentially more distorted and nasty, is definitely worth a chapter. Industrial music though? Meh, if you must. Sure, it’s important to cover Killing Joke, SPK, Einstürzende Neubauten, Skinny Puppy and Legendary Pink Dots, as they lead to Ministry and even better, the mighty Godflesh. But the amount of words wasted on Nine Inch Nails, and even Marilyn Manson, was completely unnecessary. Moores clearly is not a fan anyway, so it was extra pointless, and all the more maddening when he could have spent the time on more relevant artists.
I was surprised by how thoroughly noise rock was covered. The Butthole Surfers, The Jesus Lizard, Unsane and Helmet are definitely important, but I didn’t expect mentions of Scratch Acid, Cows, Blind Idiot God, High Rise, and Cherubs, music I listened to a lot at the time, but hadn’t thought about a lot in 30 years. Another pleasant surprise was Melvins getting credit that has been well overdue. I noted their importance in my Stoner Rock Primer from a decade ago, but it’s nice to see them properly worshipped in book form. Some of the best quotes can be found here.
When Dylan Carlson of Earth first heard Gluey Porch Treatments, he was so impressed that it threw him into the pits of despair. He decided that there was no reason for any other bands to exist because they’d never make anything as good as Melvins.
This lesson was learned by Tool guitarist Adam Jones when grilling Osborne over the song ‘Boris’: It’s from Bullhead [1991], which is a very innovative and phenomenal record. I remember listening to the lyrics and being like, ‘This is the purest, most meaningful and heaviest shit I’ve heard in a long time.’ Later on, after I befriended Buzz, I said, ‘That song really means a lot to me.’ And he says, ‘Oh, that song’s about my cat.’ So it’s good to not get too analytical about this stuff.
Melvins have influenced everybody from cult grindcore groups like Pig Destroyer to drone metal pioneers Earth, Sunn O))) and Japan’s Boris, the latter being named after the opening track from Bullhead, plus just about every grunge, alt-rock and noise rock band that ever formed.
Cobain is not the only one to have been on the receiving end of Osborne’s wrath. He appears to hate most fellow musicians, repeatedly asserting that ‘rock people are whore-mongering drug addicts, who can’t even make good music.’
Reluctantly, Moores touches on early grindcore and death metal pioneers Napalm Death, but emphasizes that they got much of their inspiration from “vintage Japanese punk groups such as GISM, Kuro and Crow.” It seems weird to talk about them without any mention any other bands from that scene, but that’s well covered in Albert Mudrian’s Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore. Too bad it’s not available digitally.
Dinosaur Jr. get some attention as one of the heaviest indie bands in 1987 with the classic You’re Living All Over Me, and kind of a sneak preview of grunge, which Moores prefers to largely skip over in favor of one particular band, Tad, arguably the heaviest of the batch. I’ll buy that, having seen them back in ’89. I revisited their albums while reading this section, and ya, they’re heavy, though the songs really don’t hold up. Steve Albini gets his own chapter, which is strange. Sure, Big Black, Rapeman, Shellac and his recording work with The Jesus Lizard is worth mentioning, but not necessarily the slobbering love fest we get here. While his work with certain artists — The Pixies, Slint, Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Mclusky, Joanna Newsom, Neurosis — is of consistently high quality, I really don’t think he had much influence in terms of their relative heavyness. So another unnecessary detour.
Next up is “zzzzzzzz. . . snore . . . zzz . . snort.” What were we talking about? Oh, drone. Yes, Earth and Sunn O))) are worth mentioning, though Boris deserved much more than a passing mention. Is this MFer going to skip over Sleep, Monster Magnet and Kyuss? I feel like he was tempted to, but no, they’re dutifully covered, wrapped up with this nice nugget, “You don’t have to be on board with Sleep’s weed worship to appreciate Dopesmoker. What you must subscribe to is the beauty, strength and capacity of The Riff.” Doom metal bears only passing mention: “England’s Witchfinder General, Sweden’s Candlemass and, in America, the unholy trinity of Saint Vitus, Trouble and Pentagram.” The Obsessed doesn’t even get a mention, which is absurd, given how important Scott “Wino” Weinrich is in terms of entire body of heavy work that includes The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, Place Of Skulls, Shrinebuilder, and Premonition 13. The Hidden Hand’s Mother Teacher Destroyer (Southern Lord, 2004) is probably the heaviest album he’s done. No mention of any of those important bands, but somehow Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Anathema are worth mentioning despite “going flouncy.” *Face in palm* At least the deliciously misanthropic Electric Wizard do get the attention they deserve, focusing on the groundbreaking Dopethrone (2000). No surprise, as they are right there in the title, but still, I was nervous. Predictably, no mention is made of fellow UK pioneers Acrimony or Orange Goblin.
In the Kyuss section, Josh Homme comes off as a bit of a lyin’ ass dick, poo-pooing any influence of Black Sabbath, even though it’s clearly in the band’s DNA, along with Black Flag. “Kyuss’s low-tuned riffs and basslines can clearly be traced back to Sabbath. Towards the end of their career, Kyuss even covered Sabbath’s ‘Into the Void’. This would have been hard for Homme to pull off if he’d never actually heard it.”
Metal was thin and bassless at the time; hockey stick guitars and anal staccato stylisms. Metallica and Megadeth records sounded like grasshoppers beating on tin thimbles to me. Kyuss was the antithesis of all of that. Low and loose, like a big fat ass. Even bigger than my fat ass.
Fu Manchu were succinctly summarized thusly:
Fellow outdoor types to emerge from the same scene included Fu Manchu, through whose ranks Brant Bjork and Scott Reeder also passed. They were a hardcore band at first before the desert imposed itself fully on their group mindset. A contender for the most joyful and Tiggerish of all the desert rockers, Fu Manchu’s vocalist Scott Hill prefers to focus on good-time ZZ Top-style subject-matter such as weird beards and outer space. He seems determined to do for various forms of American transportation what Kraftwerk did for the Autobahn, be it the skateboard, Chevrolet, custom van or dune buggy. The band have an infectious energy carried over from their punk origins, arrive bearing planet-sized riffs and are a dab hand with a catchy yell-along chorus.
Monster Magnet get a nicely done section. It would then have made sense to make at least some mention of the massive stoner/desert/fuzz explosion that happened in the late 90s, and continues to grow today, to the point where festivals like Roadburn, Duna Jam and Desertfest have steadily grown and spread. In Sweden, a large scene exploded starting with Lowrider, Dozer, Spiritual Beggars, Terra Firma, Mammoth Volume, Sgt. Sunshine, Dungen, Witchcraft, Truckfighters, Graveyard, Horisont and many more. Germany’s Colour Haze put out an increasingly impressive run of albums, ran the Elektrohasch label, put Duna Jam on the map, and inspired a slew of other bands like Rotor, My Sleeping Karma, Hypnos 69, The Machine, Argentinia’s Los Natas, the Dutch Sungrazer and Danish Papir and Causa Sui (the only of these bands given a mention in this book). Tortona, Italy’s Ufomammut formed in 1999 and forged their own brand of cosmic space doom sludge, peaking with Eve (2010). A massively important band at least equal to Neurosis and YOB, and by far my favorite of the cosmic doomsters. While the book makes a few mentions of Finland’s Circle, an equally eclectic, and even more prolific and consistently amazing band is Norway’s Motorpsycho. Perhaps Moores would have gotten tumescent enough to pay them mind if he knew Albini recorded their album Child of the Future (2009).
I get that vast number of bands is overwhelming and exhausting. Multiple sites have popped up to exclusively cover the music like The Obelisk and Stoner Hive. Every single band doesn’t belong in this book, but Lowrider, Dozer, Witchcraft, Truckfighters, Colour Haze, Ufomammut and Motorpsycho absolutely do, along with at the very least American bands Elder and Wo Fat. So what do we get to read about instead of these amazing bands? Shoegaze. Manic Street Preachers. Smashing Pumpkins. Therapy? Nu metal. Deftones. Limp Bizkit. For fuck’s sake!
In the end, we get Quietus and Wire-approved noise, post-rock and post-metal bands like Liars, Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Cut Hands, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Isis, Jesu, Pelican, Blown Out, Hey Colossus, and Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. That last band, with just three decent but inconsistent albums under their belt, is somehow presented as climactic conclusion of the book. Seriously dude? Fuck that shit!
I feel cheated, can you tell? Can I get a refund? Once again, an entire thriving, vital subculture of heavy music is ignored and swept under the rug. To not even acknowledge their existence in a book like this is just a huge failure.
Okay, so Moores’ tapestry is a bit shit and full of holes. If we ignore the fact that he ignores the last 20 years of the most important stoner doom psych bands, it’s an enjoyable book. Economic writing, some funny quotes, a few new obscure bands to check out. On to Doomed to Fail, which undoubtedly will also fail to mention Ufomammut.
Moores is no dum-dum. He cleverly used the word “tapestry” in his title instead of “history,” in order to excuse himself from needing to cover anything he has disdain for. Which is basically anything remotely related to heavy metal aside from reluctant godfathers Black Sabbath. Thankfully, he rightfully recognizes Sabbath as the center of it all, calling out their influence repeatedly, even titling certain chapters “Sabbath Phase I-IV.” While he gives underrated proto-metal band Budgie some space, he completely skips over early architects Deep Purple and Uriah Heep. That’s no biggie to me, since they’re exhaustively covered in dozens of books on heavy metal. So I kind of agree with Moores in that respect — metal generally has been thoroughly covered elsewhere. Instead, he starts with The Beatles, as one does, specifically “Helter Skelter.” He goes deep on that single track, and it’s unreleased extended version, in a way that he mostly fails to do in the rest of the book. It’s somewhat understandable, as there’s already been plenty of brilliant analysis to spark ideas, most importantly Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. He then begins to skip around the timeline in order to weave his own particular tapestry, going back to Link Wray’s “Rumble,” and obscure San Francisco band The Maze, The Groundhogs, Pink Fairies, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly and Blue Cheer. There’s another dozen minor proto-metal bands that could have been added, but it’s hard to say they were influential. So far so good, though Moores missed the opportunity to explore how exactly bands suddenly got so much heavier in 1968. A large part was due to the collaboration between musicians like Hendrix, Page and Townshend and amplifier makers like Jim Marshall. While Moores points out that there is a major difference between loud and heavy, no one can be heavy without the proper technology.
I was surprised to see how much time Moores spent on AC/DC. I love AC/DC, but I never necessarily thought they pushed the envelope of heavy forward. Rather, they developed their own unique, economical version of boogie rock that used space in a way that increased the impact of their simple riffs. He also spends quite a bit of time on French PhD student of postmodernist philosophy, Richard Pinhas, and his and his band Heldon. I’ve long been a fan of his groundbreaking mix of progressive electronic, kosmische, art rock and prog. Great band, not particularly heavy. Nyl’s self-titled 1976 debut is an interesting mention that I hadn’t heard before. Pretty cool, not that heavy. Christian Vander’s Magma and his Zeuhl universe complete with made up language is fascinating, but certainly no heavier than say, UK proggers Van Der Graaf Generator, who are passed over. He even goes into how The Slit’s second album of global dub, Return of the Giant Slits (1981) is an underrated masterpiece, which it may be, but isn’t remotely heavy. These are the first of numerous detours that I wouldn’t have minded as much if Moores didn’t completely drop the ball in the end. I’ll get to that later.
Next we go to Japan for the elusive Les Rallizes Dénudés, who never recorded any official studio albums, so we have to rely on live bootlegs, and the massively brilliant Flower Travellin’ Band, who covered not only “Black Sabbath,” but King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” on their debut album Anything (1970). Back in Detroit, The Stooges, MC5 and Alice Cooper get their brief obligatory mentions, but he goes deeper into Funkadelic, and how a gig where they borrowed Vanilla Fudge’s amps and experienced a revelation at the power they missed out on previously. Case in point the importance of amplification technology.
After a meander through The Pop Group, P.i.L., Crass and Minor Threat, we end up spending some time with Motörhead. Lemmy’s bass-driven style that he forged while in Hawkwind, taking John Entwistle’s guitar-style playing and making it exponentially more distorted and nasty, is definitely worth a chapter. Industrial music though? Meh, if you must. Sure, it’s important to cover Killing Joke, SPK, Einstürzende Neubauten, Skinny Puppy and Legendary Pink Dots, as they lead to Ministry and even better, the mighty Godflesh. But the amount of words wasted on Nine Inch Nails, and even Marilyn Manson, was completely unnecessary. Moores clearly is not a fan anyway, so it was extra pointless, and all the more maddening when he could have spent the time on more relevant artists.
I was surprised by how thoroughly noise rock was covered. The Butthole Surfers, The Jesus Lizard, Unsane and Helmet are definitely important, but I didn’t expect mentions of Scratch Acid, Cows, Blind Idiot God, High Rise, and Cherubs, music I listened to a lot at the time, but hadn’t thought about a lot in 30 years. Another pleasant surprise was Melvins getting credit that has been well overdue. I noted their importance in my Stoner Rock Primer from a decade ago, but it’s nice to see them properly worshipped in book form. Some of the best quotes can be found here.
When Dylan Carlson of Earth first heard Gluey Porch Treatments, he was so impressed that it threw him into the pits of despair. He decided that there was no reason for any other bands to exist because they’d never make anything as good as Melvins.
This lesson was learned by Tool guitarist Adam Jones when grilling Osborne over the song ‘Boris’: It’s from Bullhead [1991], which is a very innovative and phenomenal record. I remember listening to the lyrics and being like, ‘This is the purest, most meaningful and heaviest shit I’ve heard in a long time.’ Later on, after I befriended Buzz, I said, ‘That song really means a lot to me.’ And he says, ‘Oh, that song’s about my cat.’ So it’s good to not get too analytical about this stuff.
Melvins have influenced everybody from cult grindcore groups like Pig Destroyer to drone metal pioneers Earth, Sunn O))) and Japan’s Boris, the latter being named after the opening track from Bullhead, plus just about every grunge, alt-rock and noise rock band that ever formed.
Cobain is not the only one to have been on the receiving end of Osborne’s wrath. He appears to hate most fellow musicians, repeatedly asserting that ‘rock people are whore-mongering drug addicts, who can’t even make good music.’
Reluctantly, Moores touches on early grindcore and death metal pioneers Napalm Death, but emphasizes that they got much of their inspiration from “vintage Japanese punk groups such as GISM, Kuro and Crow.” It seems weird to talk about them without any mention any other bands from that scene, but that’s well covered in Albert Mudrian’s Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore. Too bad it’s not available digitally.
Dinosaur Jr. get some attention as one of the heaviest indie bands in 1987 with the classic You’re Living All Over Me, and kind of a sneak preview of grunge, which Moores prefers to largely skip over in favor of one particular band, Tad, arguably the heaviest of the batch. I’ll buy that, having seen them back in ’89. I revisited their albums while reading this section, and ya, they’re heavy, though the songs really don’t hold up. Steve Albini gets his own chapter, which is strange. Sure, Big Black, Rapeman, Shellac and his recording work with The Jesus Lizard is worth mentioning, but not necessarily the slobbering love fest we get here. While his work with certain artists — The Pixies, Slint, Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Mclusky, Joanna Newsom, Neurosis — is of consistently high quality, I really don’t think he had much influence in terms of their relative heavyness. So another unnecessary detour.
Next up is “zzzzzzzz. . . snore . . . zzz . . snort.” What were we talking about? Oh, drone. Yes, Earth and Sunn O))) are worth mentioning, though Boris deserved much more than a passing mention. Is this MFer going to skip over Sleep, Monster Magnet and Kyuss? I feel like he was tempted to, but no, they’re dutifully covered, wrapped up with this nice nugget, “You don’t have to be on board with Sleep’s weed worship to appreciate Dopesmoker. What you must subscribe to is the beauty, strength and capacity of The Riff.” Doom metal bears only passing mention: “England’s Witchfinder General, Sweden’s Candlemass and, in America, the unholy trinity of Saint Vitus, Trouble and Pentagram.” The Obsessed doesn’t even get a mention, which is absurd, given how important Scott “Wino” Weinrich is in terms of entire body of heavy work that includes The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, Place Of Skulls, Shrinebuilder, and Premonition 13. The Hidden Hand’s Mother Teacher Destroyer (Southern Lord, 2004) is probably the heaviest album he’s done. No mention of any of those important bands, but somehow Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Anathema are worth mentioning despite “going flouncy.” *Face in palm* At least the deliciously misanthropic Electric Wizard do get the attention they deserve, focusing on the groundbreaking Dopethrone (2000). No surprise, as they are right there in the title, but still, I was nervous. Predictably, no mention is made of fellow UK pioneers Acrimony or Orange Goblin.
In the Kyuss section, Josh Homme comes off as a bit of a lyin’ ass dick, poo-pooing any influence of Black Sabbath, even though it’s clearly in the band’s DNA, along with Black Flag. “Kyuss’s low-tuned riffs and basslines can clearly be traced back to Sabbath. Towards the end of their career, Kyuss even covered Sabbath’s ‘Into the Void’. This would have been hard for Homme to pull off if he’d never actually heard it.”
Metal was thin and bassless at the time; hockey stick guitars and anal staccato stylisms. Metallica and Megadeth records sounded like grasshoppers beating on tin thimbles to me. Kyuss was the antithesis of all of that. Low and loose, like a big fat ass. Even bigger than my fat ass.
Fu Manchu were succinctly summarized thusly:
Fellow outdoor types to emerge from the same scene included Fu Manchu, through whose ranks Brant Bjork and Scott Reeder also passed. They were a hardcore band at first before the desert imposed itself fully on their group mindset. A contender for the most joyful and Tiggerish of all the desert rockers, Fu Manchu’s vocalist Scott Hill prefers to focus on good-time ZZ Top-style subject-matter such as weird beards and outer space. He seems determined to do for various forms of American transportation what Kraftwerk did for the Autobahn, be it the skateboard, Chevrolet, custom van or dune buggy. The band have an infectious energy carried over from their punk origins, arrive bearing planet-sized riffs and are a dab hand with a catchy yell-along chorus.
Monster Magnet get a nicely done section. It would then have made sense to make at least some mention of the massive stoner/desert/fuzz explosion that happened in the late 90s, and continues to grow today, to the point where festivals like Roadburn, Duna Jam and Desertfest have steadily grown and spread. In Sweden, a large scene exploded starting with Lowrider, Dozer, Spiritual Beggars, Terra Firma, Mammoth Volume, Sgt. Sunshine, Dungen, Witchcraft, Truckfighters, Graveyard, Horisont and many more. Germany’s Colour Haze put out an increasingly impressive run of albums, ran the Elektrohasch label, put Duna Jam on the map, and inspired a slew of other bands like Rotor, My Sleeping Karma, Hypnos 69, The Machine, Argentinia’s Los Natas, the Dutch Sungrazer and Danish Papir and Causa Sui (the only of these bands given a mention in this book). Tortona, Italy’s Ufomammut formed in 1999 and forged their own brand of cosmic space doom sludge, peaking with Eve (2010). A massively important band at least equal to Neurosis and YOB, and by far my favorite of the cosmic doomsters. While the book makes a few mentions of Finland’s Circle, an equally eclectic, and even more prolific and consistently amazing band is Norway’s Motorpsycho. Perhaps Moores would have gotten tumescent enough to pay them mind if he knew Albini recorded their album Child of the Future (2009).
I get that vast number of bands is overwhelming and exhausting. Multiple sites have popped up to exclusively cover the music like The Obelisk and Stoner Hive. Every single band doesn’t belong in this book, but Lowrider, Dozer, Witchcraft, Truckfighters, Colour Haze, Ufomammut and Motorpsycho absolutely do, along with at the very least American bands Elder and Wo Fat. So what do we get to read about instead of these amazing bands? Shoegaze. Manic Street Preachers. Smashing Pumpkins. Therapy? Nu metal. Deftones. Limp Bizkit. For fuck’s sake!
In the end, we get Quietus and Wire-approved noise, post-rock and post-metal bands like Liars, Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Cut Hands, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Isis, Jesu, Pelican, Blown Out, Hey Colossus, and Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. That last band, with just three decent but inconsistent albums under their belt, is somehow presented as climactic conclusion of the book. Seriously dude? Fuck that shit!
I feel cheated, can you tell? Can I get a refund? Once again, an entire thriving, vital subculture of heavy music is ignored and swept under the rug. To not even acknowledge their existence in a book like this is just a huge failure.
Okay, so Moores’ tapestry is a bit shit and full of holes. If we ignore the fact that he ignores the last 20 years of the most important stoner doom psych bands, it’s an enjoyable book. Economic writing, some funny quotes, a few new obscure bands to check out. On to Doomed to Fail, which undoubtedly will also fail to mention Ufomammut.
January 4, 2022
This is not a quite a cultural history of heavy metal music, but rather of heaviness-as-a-musical-concept. It isn't strictly reserved to heavy metal. JR Moores discusses grunge, noise rock, industrial music and even remote (but pertinent) genres such as fun. It isn't meant to be comprehensive, but rather to attempt explaining how heaviness came to be and evolved over the years.
It is original, enlightening and it put words on ideas and feelings that were on the tip of metalheads' tongues for decades. I knew a lot of the historical stuff already (especially the times I lived through), but it's not 'what' that matters in Electric Wizards. It's 'how' and 'why'. The unexpectedly moving part of this book is JR Moores retracing the origins of most heavy artists to similar backgrounds (industrial towns, professional dead ends, dissatisfaction with reality, etc.) Being a metalhead since first listening to Slayer when I was nine years old, I never played an instrument myself but it felt oddly comforting to see so straightforwardly outlined the commonalities I had with them felt like something I needed to hear.
The revisionist stuff grated me a little. For example, the only two Metallica records Moores discussed were LuLu & St. Anger. Who are you kidding, dude? You are not going to convince anyone these albums are good (and no, I don't like the Sunn O))) album with Scott Walker either) The Marilyn Manson part felt a little shoehorned also. I don't doubt that he belongs in prison but if you want to include him in a history book you should paint a complete picture. The guy changed the landscape in his own way.
A-N-Y-W-A-Y. I'm somewhat nit-picking here. This is 100% worth your time one way or another. I have a list of about 20 bands I'm going to run through this week.
It is original, enlightening and it put words on ideas and feelings that were on the tip of metalheads' tongues for decades. I knew a lot of the historical stuff already (especially the times I lived through), but it's not 'what' that matters in Electric Wizards. It's 'how' and 'why'. The unexpectedly moving part of this book is JR Moores retracing the origins of most heavy artists to similar backgrounds (industrial towns, professional dead ends, dissatisfaction with reality, etc.) Being a metalhead since first listening to Slayer when I was nine years old, I never played an instrument myself but it felt oddly comforting to see so straightforwardly outlined the commonalities I had with them felt like something I needed to hear.
The revisionist stuff grated me a little. For example, the only two Metallica records Moores discussed were LuLu & St. Anger. Who are you kidding, dude? You are not going to convince anyone these albums are good (and no, I don't like the Sunn O))) album with Scott Walker either) The Marilyn Manson part felt a little shoehorned also. I don't doubt that he belongs in prison but if you want to include him in a history book you should paint a complete picture. The guy changed the landscape in his own way.
A-N-Y-W-A-Y. I'm somewhat nit-picking here. This is 100% worth your time one way or another. I have a list of about 20 bands I'm going to run through this week.
November 27, 2023
The thing about a book like this is that no matter how much you enjoy it you're always going to find some little thing to complain about. For me, it was the omission of the Japanese band MONO. They are a one of the most beautifully dynamic and massively heavy bands around and they are 12 albums into their career! Anyway, that was fun! It's a great read for anyone interested in heavy music.
March 2, 2024
Don't get me wrong, I liked this book. But I can't in good conscience really rate it better or endorse it. No chapter on black metal. No chapter on death metal. Come on now. I know, I know, this is supposedly about "heavy" music, and there's lots of good stuff here, interesting bands. But a lot of crap too, way too much crap. I won't list everything, a lot of other reviewers have made the points and qualms and they're valid, and you just know the author is like "Oh, ACTUAL metal? EW, no thank you! Metal is not cool." Like that's too spicy a meatball.
I think I'm gonna write a book about dub reggae and NOT talk about King Tubby or Lee Scratch Perry, but WILL have a chapter on Norwegian black metal and pontificate on Darkthrone at length. It will make plenty of sense. This is this book, just reversed.
All jokes aside, like I said earlier, I get what he's trying to do. But trust me, Monolithic Undertow did this WAY better and with a much more interesting (read: BETTER) range of artists and musics. And not one goddamn mention of Pigs^7.
I think I'm gonna write a book about dub reggae and NOT talk about King Tubby or Lee Scratch Perry, but WILL have a chapter on Norwegian black metal and pontificate on Darkthrone at length. It will make plenty of sense. This is this book, just reversed.
All jokes aside, like I said earlier, I get what he's trying to do. But trust me, Monolithic Undertow did this WAY better and with a much more interesting (read: BETTER) range of artists and musics. And not one goddamn mention of Pigs^7.
January 29, 2024
The premise of the book sounded promising. As a music fan I always enjoy learning more about it's history.
I did learn about some of the lesser rock bands of eras that I listen to, which I appreciate.
However, I didn't appreciate the multiple paragraphs per chapter where he would just dump on popular bands.
Victims including: Pink Floyd, The Doors, Metallica, Television, Blondie, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Free, Judas Priest, Nirvana, U2, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, Blur.
You could turn his mentioning of Steve Albini into a drinking game. We get it, you love his work. And discrediting legendary producers like Brian Eno.
This guy is literally the early 2000s hipster who thinks all mainstream music is awful and every obscure band was the best.
And the diatribe about geopolitics in the last chapter was nauseating.
Book wasn't for me but I'm a completist, so had to see it through. Would not recommend.
I did learn about some of the lesser rock bands of eras that I listen to, which I appreciate.
However, I didn't appreciate the multiple paragraphs per chapter where he would just dump on popular bands.
Victims including: Pink Floyd, The Doors, Metallica, Television, Blondie, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Free, Judas Priest, Nirvana, U2, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, Blur.
You could turn his mentioning of Steve Albini into a drinking game. We get it, you love his work. And discrediting legendary producers like Brian Eno.
This guy is literally the early 2000s hipster who thinks all mainstream music is awful and every obscure band was the best.
And the diatribe about geopolitics in the last chapter was nauseating.
Book wasn't for me but I'm a completist, so had to see it through. Would not recommend.
November 24, 2021
Halfway through, but I'll update this rating once I'm done if needed, I had to comment about the severe lack of doom metal in a book on the heaviness of music. Half a chapter on the butthole surfers of all things, but when it comes to doom the author seems to skip from sabbath straight to the Melvins and sleep? Skipping straight through like 2 entire generations of doom. Where's Pentagram? Trouble? Candlemass? Saint vitus? Rather disappointing to exclude the grandaddys of doom in a book about being heavy.
April 11, 2023
cartea asta merita un pupic de somn usor cel putin odata pe saptamana!
foarte bine scrisa ,amuzanta ati inteles ideea
am mai citit carti legate de sperctrul muzicii ,dar nu au lovit ca asta (viitoarele carti despre muzica ar trebui sa le fie frica ,la ce asteptari exista acum
foarte bine scrisa ,amuzanta ati inteles ideea
am mai citit carti legate de sperctrul muzicii ,dar nu au lovit ca asta (viitoarele carti despre muzica ar trebui sa le fie frica ,la ce asteptari exista acum
March 23, 2023
Whilst I think J.R. Moores ultimately succeeds in achieving his goal - to chronicle the history and current state of heavy music as a ‘spiritual’ sound rather than something physical - it would have very much benefited from taking a much less subjective stance. There are some glaring omissions in terms of coverage, namely the big 4 of doom, which should be excused because it is very much stated in the introduction that this is his book (fair enough). More annoying is how much time Moores spends harping on about bands and music he doesn’t like, particularly in the later chapters. I get it, Limp Bizkit suck, but I derived very little from these lengthy sections compared to those championing both legendary classics like Sabbath, to newer, more underground bands such as Wolf Eyes. Still, worth a read and an essential item for lovers of ‘heavy’ music.
March 24, 2023
Nearly on a par with ‘monolithic undertow’ but still a five star read. Lots of new bands to unearth and old bands back catalogues to delve into. What makes a band heavy and why!!?? If you have any interest in any heavy music then take a look!
December 28, 2022
There's a certain comfort when listening to favourite records, or reading about favourite bands. Stories you know and how they influence the music and other subsequent artists that follow suit. J.R. Moore's Electric Wizards is like listening to your favourite record with really really really high-quality headphones and hearing things you previously hadn't noticed before. With a sustained and easy transition from one artist to the next and how they relate, far exceeds any sort of algorithmic playlists "curated" by Spotify.
Crank it to 11.
Crank it to 11.
April 2, 2023
3.5 stars,would be higher, as I really appreciate his take on heavy music I a different take than your standard thrash/hair metal/grunge/nu metal take, going through funk and punk and noise-rock. I don't like that he occasionally spends a paragraph or two arbitrarily shitting on band he doesn't like.
December 29, 2022
A subject I am definitely interested in, but the book lacks focus. With a book titled “Electric Wizards” I’m expecting a bit more about the genre that the band Electric Wizard occupies: i.e. stoner & doom metal. This book goes off into tangents about krautrock, noise rock, shoe gaze, a bunch of other genres without really tying back why those relate to the history of heavy music. It seemed like a lot of this book was just an excuse for the author to talk about bands and artists he really likes. Which, fine. But why are you taking unnecessary potshots at RHCP? Why do you have an entire section talking about how nu-metal sucks when most of us already know this? Why is Liz Buckingham not mentioned once in a book named after the band she is in? The author wrote an entire section on female representation in heavy music, but didn’t mention that the guitarist in the band Electric Wizard is a woman. As much as this topic interests me, the author seemed unfocused. But I suppose I should have expected that from someone writing about stoner metal.
September 9, 2022
Simultaneously offering something for everyone and next to nothing for anyone, I read the whole thing and I'm still not sure I understand what Moores means by heavy nor with the really questionable thesis that all that is heavy stems forth from the Beatles Shelter Skelter. Unless you are a true heavy music nut and/or doing research, this book is mostly unnecessary. It's not terrible but it's certainly not great music writing either.
August 8, 2022
Facciamo che in un'ipotetica storia della musica heavy, ma non nel senso di heavy metal, nel senso di heavy come si intendeva una volta, qualunque cosa si voglia intendere con questo termine, ci mettiamo un bel po' dei tuoi gruppi preferiti, anche quelli che di solito rimangono un po' in ombra rispetto ai soliti nomi, di quelli che tu hai sempre considerato tra i migliori e ti sei sempre chiesto perchè sono così poco conosciuti. Proviamo a raccontare una storia che parta un po' dal blues di Muddy Waters e Howlin' Wolf ma soprattutto, gira che ti rigira si comincia sempre da lì, dai Beatles di Helter Skelter, poi andiamo a toccare gruppi storici degli anni '60/'70 più (Black Sabbath, i veri protagonisti del libro) o meno (gli stratosferici Heldon di Richard Pinhas) conosciuti, già che ci siamo passiamo anche dal P-funk di George Clinton e tracciamo una storia della musica heavy come la intendiamo noi, anche se un capitolo sui Napalm Death non può mancare, fino ad arrivare più o meno ai giorni nostri andando a chiudere con gli Hey Colossus, altro gruppo che si meriterebbe sempre più attenzione di quanta non ne abbia già. Che ne dici? Di roba ce n'è tantissima, certo non è che si possa approfondire più di tanto, sennò altro che 432 pagine, però ti assicuro che verrà data molta importanza a Melvins, Steve Albini, Cows (anche se Shannon Selberg nella traduzione italiana suona il corno, e non il bugle), Swans (anche se Jarboe nella traduzione italiana cambia sesso), Tad, Sleep, Electric Wizards per forza e persino Merzbow e Wolf Eyes. Ma alla fine, dietro l'angolo ci sono sempre i Black Sabbath. Ok, molta roba già la conosci, del resto è la musica che hai sempre ascoltato, però l'idea è carina eh, vedrai che ti divertirai parecchio.
January 6, 2025
Este libro no es, como se podría asumir equívocamente a partir del título, una retrospectiva de música del género heavy metal. No llegaría a encajar tampoco en una crónica de grupos influenciados por Black Sabbath (como mucho hay un capítulo y medio dedicado al doom metal). Ni tan siquiera intenta hacer una cronografía de aquellos grupos que hoy en día se podrían catalogar dentro del cajón de sastre del 'noise'. Qué es entonces 'heavy music'? pues un concepto/etiqueta que se ha inventado el autor como excusa para hablar de aquellas bandas que él ha considerado suficientemente remarcables y guays para estar incluidas en su libro, no hay más criterio (o al menos no se molesta en explicárnoslo).
Le concedo al libro que está escrito con gracia y que la mayoría de los grupos de los que habla son también de mi interés, pero en general habría agradecido algún tipo de discurso que cohesionase los diferentes capítulos más allá de los gustos personales del autor. Tampoco me convence demasiado el tono en que el libro pretende sentar cátedra sobre qué estilos/grupos deben tenerse en cuenta y entran en la respetabilidad, y cuáles no. Es decir, otra vez ya el consabido mensaje de que llegar al mainstream en general es malo (excepto si eres Sonic Youth o Fugazi) y la importancia de la autenticidad y algún que otro prejuicio innecesario más.
Le concedo al libro que está escrito con gracia y que la mayoría de los grupos de los que habla son también de mi interés, pero en general habría agradecido algún tipo de discurso que cohesionase los diferentes capítulos más allá de los gustos personales del autor. Tampoco me convence demasiado el tono en que el libro pretende sentar cátedra sobre qué estilos/grupos deben tenerse en cuenta y entran en la respetabilidad, y cuáles no. Es decir, otra vez ya el consabido mensaje de que llegar al mainstream en general es malo (excepto si eres Sonic Youth o Fugazi) y la importancia de la autenticidad y algún que otro prejuicio innecesario más.
January 15, 2022
My break from reviewing horror fiction continues with JR Moore’s truly wonderful ELECTRIC WIZARDS: A TAPESTRY OF HEAVY MUSIC FROM 1968 TO THE PRESENT. This stunner refuses to play by the music biography rules and name-checks a host of bands who often operate outside the limelight but have nevertheless contributed something special to alternative or non-mainstream music you are unlikely to hear on the radio. JR and I have incredibly similar tastes and some of my favourites personal featured include Napalm Death (have their own chapter!), Godflesh, The Fall, Ministry, Mogwai, Part Chimp, ACDC, Bardo Pond, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Fugazi, The Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Hey Colossus, My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, Neil Young, The Wedding Present, The Slits, The Stooges, Swans, Tad, Aphex Twin, Boredoms, Buzzcocks, The Dickies, Dead Kennedys, Groop Dogdrill, Extreme Noise Terror, Husker Du, Helmet, Motorhead, Mission of Burma, Mudhoney, PigsX7, Ramones, Revolting Cocks, Lou Reed, Slayer, Slint, Wire, and last but not least The Velvet Underground. It goes without saying that most of these bands are best experience LIVE AND LOUD! And if you’re inclined to these types of bands this is an amazing read which had me digging into sounds I had not listened to in a while.
January 20, 2023
L'equivoco è che musica "heavy" non significa musica "heavy metal". Questo è stato un mio errore, quindi mi son sciroppato un libro su un genere che mi interessa marginalmente, ma mi son trovato comunque 400 pagine di name dropping, di genre dropping ("shoegazing","astral jazz", sul serio?) e pagine e pagine di panegirici su gruppi che fanno canzoni lentissime sempre più lunghe, venti minuti proprio il minimo.
Avevo letto un libro sul metal, più ironico e leggero, in cui a un certo punto si prendevano in giro i gruppi death/grind/brutal che facevano a gara a chi era più "estremo" di velocità, grugniti, temi scabrosi: ecco, qui non c'è traccia di quest'ironia nei confronti di questi gruppi che fanno a gara a chi è più lento e fa canzoni più lunghe. Ho comunque provato ad ascoltare qualcosa, e male non mi ha fatto, qualche spunto interessante c'è stato.
Avevo letto un libro sul metal, più ironico e leggero, in cui a un certo punto si prendevano in giro i gruppi death/grind/brutal che facevano a gara a chi era più "estremo" di velocità, grugniti, temi scabrosi: ecco, qui non c'è traccia di quest'ironia nei confronti di questi gruppi che fanno a gara a chi è più lento e fa canzoni più lunghe. Ho comunque provato ad ascoltare qualcosa, e male non mi ha fatto, qualche spunto interessante c'è stato.
April 16, 2024
This is a very niche view of ‘music that is heavy’ that doesn’t bother to look at Metal other than to glance briefly in its direction before turning away swiftly. Moores treats Metal like an annoying cousin at a wedding who is best ignored.
This failure to recognise the role played in all that is loud is at times laughable. There’s a section dedicated to Napalm Death with the suggestion they invented loud and fast which is ignorantly oblivious to the multitude of Slayer albums already in circulation by this point, and the hero worship of The Melvins is a little tiresome.
Other than that though there are interesting sections and the material is mostly well written, although never ‘enthrallingly funny’ as claimed by the cover.
This failure to recognise the role played in all that is loud is at times laughable. There’s a section dedicated to Napalm Death with the suggestion they invented loud and fast which is ignorantly oblivious to the multitude of Slayer albums already in circulation by this point, and the hero worship of The Melvins is a little tiresome.
Other than that though there are interesting sections and the material is mostly well written, although never ‘enthrallingly funny’ as claimed by the cover.
January 11, 2022
I thought this was a pretty decent overview of the history of heavy music, even if there are some pretty significant omissions (nothing at all on black metal or death metal?) and overreliance on certain figures (Steve Alibi, did Moores get paid per mention?) and bands (I like Pigsx7 but they aren't the only current band pushing heavy music forward). Once you accept the terms aren't going to be your own personal list, there is still plenty to admire here - I appreciate the attention paid to Melvins, Tad and others who haven't gotten as much love as they deserve. If you like heavy music, I'm sure you will find stuff you like and get inspired to check out a few new bands while at it.
January 11, 2024
The thing to appreciate most about this book is its expanded definition of heavy music, as it allows a survey into a broad array of artists who at first seem abstract from each other but really are connected in spirit and sound. Sometimes, chapters suffer from a messy structure, and on some occasions, the humorous tone tips into "other genres bad," but not to any huge detriment or in any prolonged way. A great read for anyone interested, and the love of Pigsx7 is always good to see (also didnt realise the Newcastle scene went so hard)
February 19, 2024
JR Moores’s Electric Wizards is an excellent survey of “heavy” music from The Beatles’s “Helter Skelter” to Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. The tone is sincere and provocative yet light thanks to Moores’s sense of humor, which never threatens to overwhelm the book. I’m tempted to listen to the entirety of Moores’s “selected discography.” Half the artists he lists are either brand-new to me (e.g., Baby Grandmothers, Hey Colossus) or artists I’ve spent little time with (e.g., Cows, Sister Rosetta Tharpe).
January 22, 2022
Fantastic read, focusing on a pretty wide swath of different kinds of “heavy” music: punk, psychedelic, noise, metal, doom, stoner rock, etc. This read like a tour of my music collection, and I’m excited to check out a few bands mentioned here that have slipped through the cracks for me (Dopethrone, Budgie, Earth, Napalm Death). Bonus points here for a whole chapter on Steve Albini and some always welcome quotes from Andrew Falkous too. Highly recommend.
August 1, 2023
A fantastic read about heavy music that appropriately focuses less on "heavy metal" and more on "heavy" as a concept, vibe, and execution. True to the title, this book is less an exhaustive history of heavy music, but rather a tapestry of the subject matter as it has been experienced by J.R. Moores over the years, weaving writings on a plethora of heavy bands that are criminally overlooked amongst the sea of books in the music history/analysis field, and he does so with much thorough research, thoughtfulness, and witty humor. I highly recommend this book if you're into this sort of thing.
September 4, 2022
3.5 stars. Some glaring omissions, some overstated (take a shot every time Moores mentions Steve Albini.) The parts about the music you like are enjoyable (unless you’re a fan of Limp Bizkit, in which I’m guilty), while the parts you care less for can feel like a slog. Still, you’ll likely find new things to check out and learn some factoids about the bands you’ve been listening to for years.
December 9, 2022
Well researched and interesting book for everybody into music in general I'd say. Loved the author's style of writing as well. I didn't read the last 80 pages or so as it's all about modern day bands for which I just have no interest but that shouldn't take away anything from the rest of the book. Definitely worth reading.
April 16, 2022
I loved it
March 6, 2023
Finally, heavy music's sacred texts.
A gospel of what it means to be "heavy". Something I couldn't accurately put into words before but this definitely helps.
A gospel of what it means to be "heavy". Something I couldn't accurately put into words before but this definitely helps.
March 15, 2023
Good overview of heavy music beginning with Helter Skelter by The Beatles and continuing to the present. There’s a lot of albums within these pages you might discover something new.
September 3, 2023
Lost count of the number of bands and artists I had to save for listening while reading this.
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