Drew Daniel must have armadillo-thick skin—or, a closet crowded with functional chainmail. On Why Do the Heathen Rage?, his third album of propulsive electronica under the occasional name the Soft Pink Truth, the Matmos member taunts perhaps the most reactive, boundary-buttressing subgenre of them all: black metal, a historic domain of hate crimes, real blood, ideological belligerence and institutionalized aggression. Daniel—a gay electronic producer who moved from San Francisco to Baltimore in 2007—recruited a cast of indie rock pals and heavy metallurgists to cover 10 black metal songs, with relative standards from Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Sarcofago accompanying a sample of more obscure sides.
But guitars appear exactly one time here, blood-curdling tirades maybe three. Instead, Daniel and his collaborators turn these tirades about fucking and killing, desecrating and dying into dance-floor and pop-chart bait, with bludgeoning house tempos, mesmerizing hooks and prismatic synths. Why Do the Heathen Rage? is Daniel’s open invitation to name-calling, a plea to be branded with poser status and homosexual slurs from a scene that’s often been happy to oblige. It’s perhaps the ultimate black metal troll, an album meant to make the truest kvlt heathens, well, rage. The rest of us can simply move.
The Soft Pink Truth began as a sort of dare for Daniel from the producer Matthew Herbert, who challenged the experimentalist to make a house record. Likewise, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, the project’s first output in a decade, began as Daniel’s dare for himself after DJing at Rainbow in the Dark, a monthly “party for gay men, satanists and metal enthusiasts.” Could he pair one obsession with another? Could he take the misanthropic might of black metal and tie it to the communal ecstasy of techno? Could a song like Mayhem’s existentially doomed “Buried by Time and Dust” be rewired for the club? Absolutely.
In Matmos, Daniel has used electronic music to explore audacious concepts, whether that’s meant building a record from samples of surgical procedures to an album-length, detail-laced tribute to the duo’s heroes. Why Do the Heathen Rage? takes a similar tack, funneling far-flung resources into one intimidating concept. These risky reassessments come loaded with guests uniformly and uniquely suited to the challenge. In the prelude, for instance, Antony Hegarty trades lines of a poem about mysticism, androgyny and witchcraft with Daniel. The gossamer ease of the former sits like a specter against the pitch-shifted, Lucifer-deep growl of the latter. That juxtaposition sets the stage for a play between shades of pink and black, a tension that the album—the whole project, really—mines.
“Satanic Black Devotion” calls on both guitarist Owen Gaertner, who toiled through transcriptions of all of these songs for Daniel, and Locrian’s Terrence Hannum, a nominal “metal guy” with a particularly broad view of what that might mean. In four minutes, the cover pinballs between Gaertner’s solemn electric guitar and Daniel’s drum machine punishment, Daniel’s ghoulish chants and Hannum’s pained screams. An “I’ve Got the Power” sample precedes an atmospheric fade into pastel noise. The trio finds its own path through the melodrama of the Sargeist original but leaves room to point out that its self-serious malevolence is worthy of at least one laugh. Solo black metal dudes always have the power.
For similar reasons, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner emerges as the unexpected star of Why Do the Heathen Rage?. Along with Daniel himself, she serves as the paragon of respecting the source material while repurposing it at will, too. In its original form, “Let There Be Ebola Frost” is a rote, mid-tempo march from Finland’s short-lived AN. Its lunging riff and lacerated vocals mostly obscure the extreme essence at the song’s core, as though the band were too shy to confess to their own apocalyptic vision of a “realm of flushed blood.” But Wassner commands this script, delivering worldwide extermination orders without a hint of irony or innocence. “Feel it bleed so quick,” she coos in a moment of graceful comedown, Daniel emptying the beat into a bed of graceful synthesizer sighs. “I don’t feel any kind of compunction.” She summons a sort of schoolyard song at the end, turning a partial acrostic about annihilation into a cheerleading chant. Her turn on Sarcofago’s “Ready to Fuck” turns the fellatio demands of a dude named Antichrist into a subversively demure seduction, full of starts and stops and squeals and background moans from both Wassner and a tamed demon played by Daniel. The take accomplishes what Sarcofago ultimately sought—that is, sex, or the suggestion of it—but reshapes the message by switching the sender.
At such moments, it’s tempting to praise Why Do the Heathen Rage? as an expert, unapologetic sendup of black metal, a massive fuck you to a caste that’s said exactly that to so many others as a matter of stylistic necessity. The cover even depicts dudes in corpsepaint running trains on one another and skinheads getting handjobs from longhairs who wield knives and spike bracelets. And the record ends, too, with a wild-eyed and reckless race through “Grim and Frostbitten Gay Bar,” a cut from the most obscure act included here—Impaled Northern Moonforest, the hyperbolic and hilarious black metal parody launched and dropped by members of Anal Cunt more than a decade ago. In spirit and sound, it’s the most allegiant cover here, a confirmation of a delirious mockery. The killer, one might surmise, has been killed.
That’s too simple for black metal, though, and too simple for techno. Most of all, it’s too reductive for Daniel, an artist whose previous output doesn’t necessarily reflect his pedigree as a fan, a writer, a thinker and a person. (One doesn’t really stumble across AN without a rather serious investment in this stuff.) “It’s about a contradiction or about a double citizenship that I have as somebody that’s a gay dude who’s heard a lot of dance music in gay bars and… loves a lot of sounds, a lot of imagery and a lot of ideas that are totally contemptuous of the ethos of dance floor music,” he told Steel for Brains. He’s not out to destroy black metal so much as to reconsider the source of its unrepentant attitude and redirect it into another form with equal gusto. He’s strip-mined one thing he loves in order to drive another. In doing so, he’s found a wonderful, unexpected kind of combustion.
Yes, that will get him called names, and yes, that will make some faithful truly rage on message boards and (anonymously) in comment threads. But in 1982, above the belligerent stomp of “Black Metal,” Venom’s Cronos sang of “taking our chances with raw energy,” setting at least one cornerstone for the movement that followed. Daniel begins Why Do the Heathen Rage? with a trunk-rattling version of that anthem, launching his own take on black metal primacy by co-opting one of its founding documents. He swaps guitar solos for breakbeats and turns the chorus into an ecstatic, industrial chant. It’s meant to be shouted out with eyes closed and fists up—you know, real, metal power.
