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  • The Still, Sad Music of Humanity in Doom Metal's Romanticizing Machine
  • Atene Mendelyte (bio)

The still, sad music of humanity,Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power

—William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

This essay was inspired by Ronald Bogue's pioneering Deleuzian reading of the three types of metal music—death, doom, and black. The scholar avoids the traps of oversimplification obvious in previous (mostly sociological) studies of such music that tend to concentrate on the threat of inducing violent behaviour. Such a stance by now has become a cliché and has little analytical value. I see a great potential in further developing this type of Deleuzian listening as it can offer a better understanding of metal music. It needs to be mentioned that there have been other analyses hinting at a more positive potential of metal music, such as musicologist Robert Walser's against the grain observation that metal music "creates communal attachments, enacts collective empowerment, and works to assuage entirely reasonable anxieties"1 or Nicola Masciandaro's experimental attempt to merge the discourses of black metal and theory.2 The essay collection edited by Niall W. R. Scott and Imke Von Helden The Metal Void: First Gatherings (2010)3 includes many varied explorations of metal music. The journal Glossator has a number of interesting articles on black metal, and another online journal Helvete is entirely dedicated to black metal theory. But such a surge of analytical readings tends to cluster around black and death metal while doom metal remains on the outskirts of scholarly interest. What is then lacking, I suggest, is a close(r) attention paid to individual doom metal practices.

This is where my approach differs from Bogue's, since, unlike him, I think that each type of metal practice has to be understood on its own terms instead of comparing them based on a more transcendental or general basis. The practice that will be scrutinized in this essay is that of the [End Page 469] legendary British doom metal band My Dying Bride since, as mentioned above, doom metal, in comparison to death and black metal, has received by far the least interest in academia and non-academia alike. Even in Bogue's illuminating essay it remains the least explored subgenre, which is a direct consequence of the basis chosen for comparison; if one specifically discusses musical intensities and avoids focusing on the connection between lyrics and voice, one is bound to conclude that doom metal is both less technical, less virtuoso than death metal and less visceral than black metal. The lack of interest and doom metal's underdog status follow from that. But the center of gravity in doom metal is precisely the relation between lyrics, vocal modalities, and musical accompaniment, which makes it an entirely different kind of assemblage from the other types of metal. Moreover, I wish to argue, it is exactly where the greatest and most interesting musical thought potential lies. The machinic assemblage produced by My Dying Bride's practice is of a peculiar sort. I shall be referring to it as "the romanticizing machine" because it brings to fruition the principal logic of British Romantic poetry and European Romantic music. The processual aspect of the given title is pivotal as well, since the machine works by combining musical, textual, conceptual, affective, temporal, dramatic, and other elements and repurposing them for the sake of drawing its own plane of immanence and consistency, engaging in its musical world-making.

Musical Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

My Dying Bride strives to create a total poetic experience. The band provides atmospheric musical plateaus that work to produce a mood, an affective space rather than a metric, rhythmic, musically progressive experience. The lyrics are highly poetic, often spoken in a narrative voice. Vocal delivery is used in a multiplicity of its modalities: sung vocals, death metal grunts, spoken word, whispers. Speech itself is modulated; it can either be a narrative voice, as in the closing lines of "Hail Odysseus," or a more poetically expressive voice, as in most songs on A Map of All Our Failures (Peaceville Records, 2012). The voice is made to exude despair, sadness, and other strong feelings via emphatic intonation...

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