On the morning of Sunday, January 9, the tattoo artist Jef Whitehead was arrested in Chicago on charges of sexual assault and domestic violence. According to the Chicago Tribune, Whitehead-- a specialist in colorful and morbid depictions of demons and reapers-- was working as a guest at Taylor Street Tattoo following an international inking tour. After midnight, he got in a fight with his girlfriend and, as a Tribune reporter wrote, allegedly "used the tools of his trade to sexually assault his girlfriend after he slammed her head against a floor and choked her." Whitehead posted bail and, 10 months later, has yet to go to trial.
For more than a decade, Whitehead, under the name Wrest, has been pressing the bounds of black metal, adding psychedelic textures and hints of mid-tempo punk to fairly brutal marathons. By himself as Leviathan and the great Lurker of Chalice, and with the misfiring supergroup Twilight, Whitehead made weird, unexpected moves within United States Black Metal long before the form broke into indie rock circles or The New Yorker's pages. He's long been heavy on horror and violence, too, with song titles like "A Bouquet of Blood for Skull", "I Miss Watching You Die" and, notably, "The History of Rape". He often wrote and spoke of suicide and, in 2004, told an interviewer that being alive at least allowed him "to voice anti-human disgust." Still, his arrest was surprising and a big deal; for the last 10 months, questions about him have become boilerplate in extreme metal interviews.
The inevitable summary of Whitehead's January arrest isn't meant to romanticize the actions of the occasionally violent black metal scene, or to give him the Burzum-sized brand of black metal authenticity. It's not meant to scorn Whitehead, either, as he has yet to be convicted of anything. Rather, as Whitehead admitted in a rare interview with Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy in September, the incident and subsequent fallout served as the inspiration for his most recent album, the unashamedly titled True Traitor, True Whore. "The true harlot has been revealed,” Whitehead wrote in the email interview. "[True Traitor, True Whore] is most definitely an expression of what I've been thru in the past year... Everyone's met one by now, I'd imagine-- not too cryptic."
At the risk of sounding dismissive, True Traitor, True Whore sounds like the work of a one-time innovator who's since been preoccupied. Sure, as on with almost all Whitehead releases, the multi-instrumentalist starts from a rigorous base of black metal and floods that sound with extrinsic influences. "True Whorror" sprints with a near-grindcore jolt, while "Shed This Skin" intersperses black-metal blurs with moments of funeral doom and glimpses of thrash heroics. On "Harlot Rises", an acoustic-guitar breakdown clashes with sound effects that mimic industrial 1980s drums. There are drones and noise, post-rock climbs, and smoldering comedowns, too. But True Traitor often circles back or collapses on itself, with many of these eight songs eventually devolving at various points into messy psychedelic maelstroms that, compositionally, Whitehead doesn't seem good enough to redirect. On "Contrary Pulse", he builds tension by slowing the song's tempo, allowing its more aggressive elements to claw against its dirge-like undercarriage. It's an intriguing setup, but he never capitalizes on that unease, eventually letting the song escape into a web of meandering guitar. What starts with a roar ends, then, with an unsatisfying whimper. Leviathan's best work has been about pushing momentum from one extreme to another; on True Traitor, that sense of movement is generally squandered, as Whitehead struggles and frequently fails to make his many strains of interest cohere.
What's more, for a sub-genre that's not only itself full of interesting ideas but that's also recently spawned compelling sounds in other niches, True Traitor feels redundant. Leviathan has done brutal black metal better than this (see 2006's too-brief The Blind Wound), and he's previously been much more convincing when tying that ferocity to outside sounds (see 2008's great Massive Conspiracy Against All Life). At various points here, Whitehead sounds like a less developed Locrian, a smaller Wolves in the Throne Room or a less intricate Absu. Thematically, True Traitor, True Whore is a work of pure juvenilia, comprised of songs with puns for titles that would be more understandable coming from the pen of a pimply 13-year-old boy aggravated by the rage of puberty. There's opener "True Whorror", the chaser "Her Circle Is the Noose", and the mid-album "Every Orifice Yawning Her Price". Not only are those titles ripe for parody (and prosecutors), but they're also repetitive, another symptom of the unimaginative core at work throughout Traitor. Leviathan's 2004 album, Tentacles of Whorror, already cashed in on a lot of these jokes; it was a much better album, too.
Since January, some critics and listeners have advocated for a yimakh shemo approach to Whitehead, meaning that-- if the charges against him are true-- his work should be ignored, his musical legacy ruined by the deplorable thing he might have done. Without Wrest, though, it's impossible to imagine black metal's current stateside currency or creativity. He's made some remarkable records that have rightfully had a widespread effect on many of the bands that followed him. True Traitor, True Whore isn't ultimately dismissible because of what Whitehead allegedly did in January; rather, it is dismissible because it does not improve what he certainly did for the decade-plus prior, which was to help map new territory in a field that has since raced forward independently-- and ahead, it seems-- of him.
