The metal circus is coming to town!

This is my review for A New Dimension of Might by Trail of Tears, which I originally made for Encyclopaedia Metallum, AKA the Metal Archives. The original page can be found here

I don’t know why there isn’t a review for this album yet. Seriously, it blows my mind that such a small amount of people would get a chance to enjoy it yet. Metal purists may not have the taste for such a piece of work, since it is a black/gothic metal album with electrogothic elements. However, said elements work together to an advantage along with the traditional Beauty and the Beast vocal style (though Ronny, the growler, does quite a bit of clean singing himself, and he is a stronger presence than the clean female vocalist Catherine throughout the album).

The opener is the track “Ecstatic.” It basically is the start of a wonderful showcase of talents between the choir that is used throughout the entire album, and the female and male vocalists. The emotionlessness of the choir and their use of the same notes, strangely, fits nicely with the more emotive side of this album like a piece of the puzzle that adds a bit more colour to an already colourful image. And by “colourful image,” I mean something that is different than what you’d hear with a lot of extreme gothic metal combo bands, though it is not rare: the electrogothic and odd circus-like elements added to the music, which is put together in perfect harmony with the metal elements. Seriously, if there was a metal circus, A New Dimension of Might would probably be the soundtrack. Look out, Cirque de Soleil! (Could you imagine metalheads headbanging at a circus? Anyway, back to the music).

We’ll skip over to the tracks “Denial and Pride,” “The Call of Lust,” and, “Splendid Coma Visions,” because they show the strongest relation between the music and the vocals used. Devious, full of a lustful energy that gothic music is known to have (which the second title fits with well), and memorable, there’s not much left to be desired here. I couldn’t help but accidentally shout “die!” along to the constant electronically modified growls of “die!” several times that were placed in one section, to my mother’s horror (let’s just say she started thinking I was crazy for a moment there). However, let it be known that much of all of the growls aren’t modified, and only modified in very sparse amounts and in tasteful places, where it would belong.

Next, the Faith No More cover at the end, “Caffeine,” or as I have it, “Pista 10” (don’t know why there was that name change). If you’re a Mike Patton fan and even the experimentation above wouldn’t satisfy you, you might at least want to check out this cover. It shows that even a serious band like Trail of Tears can have a bit of fun with their music and still make it feel like a perfect fit even when they didn’t write the song themselves. Ronny does a great job with clean vocals in this track, and Catherine supports him well with backup vocals. It felt like a Faith No More song, but at the same time, and I know this is really fucking cliché, they “made it their own,” and it ended the album so perfectly. Patton would be proud.

Lastly, the tracks in between “Ecstatic” and “Denial and Pride” were quite exceptionally good, but they didn’t stand out to me as much as the ones listed. It’s a worthy album to purchase. 87% is a really high rating, coming from me, and I wouldn’t mind if anyone else reviewed this album with a higher rating, so long as they do it with good reason.

Drawn to the Dark

A whisper sounds in the night as you exit the Publix at which you work the last shift. Your feet sound like the rolling thunder on the pavement as your heartbeat starts to grow. The trees rattle and the wind howls. You wish you were at home, safe under your blankets with the lights on, but your car seems so far away, and why have your legs turned to jelly? You are uneasy. With every step, you are drawn further into paranoia and blind, naked fear. You start to notice everything wrong with the scene: how the doors of your car are just so slightly ajar, how your head feels like a lead weight, the splotches of dark red blood staining the dry, reedy grass. The bent, rusted tricycle leaning up against the tree to your left, creaking helplessly in the wind. The mirthless, cold, high pitched laughter, ringing in your ears long after it fades away, still coming at you on all sides.

If you are anything like me, this sort of thing is exactly the kind of literature that quenches your thirst. That little blurb I wrote up there is a teaser of what would usually keep you interested. That sense of claustrophobia, of anxiety. Of fright, and especially of high-flying ecstasy. You probably also enjoyed the movie The Ruins, in which a group of innocent, if horny and sometimes jealous, young adults are left stranded atop an abandoned archaeological dig in Mexico, where they end up slowly tortured and bloodied, one by one. You found immense enjoyment in such movies as Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hellraiser. You probably read HP Lovecraft and Stephen King. You find yourself fascinated by the strangest and most outrageous news tales. The darker, the better. No matter how perverse or twisted. You are repelled, but at the same time you are fascinated. You want to know more. You want to know why, every single little detail, every minute speck. Every reason behind the madness in the world.

For instance, this: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/07/31/greyhound-transcanada.html. A man decapitates a passenger sitting next to him on a grayhound bus. Surely this is a heinous act, so why do I find myself curious as to the circumstances? Why am I so morbidly fascinated? I mean, it's fucked up. It's really fucked up. It's an atrocity, plain and simple, but it's also fascinating. As I stated above, I want to know more, because the human psyche is an incredible thing. What possessed this man to do what he did, and how much of a danger is something like this to humanity? And then, being the demented creative mind that I am, I ask, how can I exploit this in a story?

Why are we drawn to the dark? It is certainly not normal or socially acceptable. We are certainly not raised that way. They talk against horror movies and darker literature in Sunday School. Don't read it or else your soul will go to the devil. You know. From birth, we're taught to fear the bogeyman and the grim reaper and other such creatures of the night. We're told innumerable bed time stories telling of why they should be feared, and it becomes imprinted into us to condemn these things and avoid them. We keep night lights on as young children. We don't look under the bed, or in the closet. When we see a dark room, we turn on a light.

Once we grow out of that sort of blind, obedient fear, we become curious. While it obviously varies from person to person, I would pinpoint this stage at around the latter half of the single-digit-number age years. You started to make more friends around that time, and with your friends you traipsed around the neighborhood like you were the kings of the world. Cops and robbers, capture the flag, hide and seek, all of it. But what about when you grew bored? The curiosity of a child is something boundless and wild. Did you ever take your closest group of friends and venture into places that you were told were dangerous? Did you go down into the woods and stay there, defiantly waiting to prove that you could stand up to the ghosties and goblins that lay within? Did you ever say Bloody Mary three times in a row in front of a mirror in the dark? Did you ever tell ghost stories sitting around in your friend's room, with the lights off and the curtains closed?

Now, some kids grow out of that eventually. They go on to become successful lawyers and doctors, or maybe they don't, and maybe they only amount to a janitor or a secretary in an office. Maybe they go home at night after a long day cleaning the shitty toilets and the spilled urine on the tile floors and the trash, and all other manner of discarded waste, to see their children sitting on the couch, munching Doritos and watching a television program so tastefully dubbed MASTERS OF HORROR MARATHON. They turn the TV off, exclaiming in disgust that those movies weren't good for the childrens' psyches. They send them to bed, where the creepy-crawlies sniff and scratch up to the surface to take them in their nightmares.

These nightmares? They come from those who are naturally drawn to the dark. They come from those who never grew out of the curiosity that blossomed in them as a child. We are drawn to the dark. Who really knows why? It varies from person to person, from sick mind to sicker mind. We aren't scared by what lurks under the bed or behind that dark corner, or in the attic, so we set out to find something that does scare us. We are like journeymen on an expedition, except instead of the tip of some faraway mountain, we search for something that can remind us what it feels like to be really, truly scared. We want to feel that old thrill, like we're going down a huge roller coaster - think Islands of Adventure, perhaps. We like that frozen chill running down our backs. We see talent and gusto in those who can scare us, because it is not an easy feat - and those of us with good taste, we appreciate that talent, and thus is born our lust for good horror stories. Those of us who write or direct, we make more horror stories not only to scare the uninitiated "normal" folk, but to impress those like us. Those who are also drawn to the dark.

In the end, a lot of the stuff that "normal" people find revolting and disgusting is just really damned cool, no other way around it. It's an acquired taste, but so are all cool things in life. It's a form of escapism, except it's for people who don't want to escape via dragons and dwarves or spaceships and aliens. Real life is trying and oftentimes droll and drab. You all come home at night, and we all turn out the lights. You all brush your teeth after the credits start rolling on Fresh Prince or Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and you all tuck yourselves into bed. But are you drawn to the dark?