2006 is still in the early stages of decomposition, and I’m still itching to make a Top Ten metal albums’ list. Problem is, I can’t think of enough releases from last year that deserve to be on it. Not an issue, perhaps, for the lover of technical musicianship, collage aesthetic, and/or fashionable inflection of noise. But I need the old ways; the 4/4 gallop and twang, the turbine-like power-chord-cycles, the symmetry, the fist-clenching choruses based on progressions officially fixed in steel since 1979. Not just to hold on to the past, but to partake in its rebirth, keep it perpetually bursting out of the present’s chest cavity… as it were.

“Traditional metal” appears to have been on the rise in 2006, but most of it was comically bad, or just unremarkable for a variety of reasons. Hipsters and neo-hardcore kids getting attuned to the retro-metal trend of several years ago, outfitting it with new bad haircuts and putrid misuse of irony. A legion of very young denim-vested thrashers suddenly appearing as if by magic, earnestly recreating an idealized version of underground metal 1987, perhaps inspired by the bad-ass with the Slayer t-shirt in “Saved by the Bell” reruns. The past is indeed alive, and composting in very strange, smelly ways on TV, in wallets, in design studios.

However, a few bands have done the unthinkable; they’ve curdled sentimentality into venomous, hard-driving music that can still inspire movement. “Forward mass retain” to quote one deranged fan’s insight into the nature of heavy speed. Praise the gods, there’s still steel worth proselytizing about.

Midnight is a band from Ohio, composed of one guy named Athenar, plus his posse of Midnight Mistresses. Some of the best hard rock songs wrought in the past several years can be found on the Midnight retrospective CD, Complete and Total F@#cking Midnight. The back cover features the same pentagram design as the first Bathory, the original one-man metal project. Sounds to me like Athenar owes more to Venom, Motorhead, Hellhammer, and some of the tougher moments of early 80s Judas Priest, but that’s a non-issue. His metal’s a fury of enraged Mongoloid vocals, punky rhythms, larger-than-life distorted guitars and some of the finest pentatonic, proto-shred solos in the kingdom. All the instrumental tones are very lo-fi but huge sounding, and the songs stick to simple formulae, delivered with a weird mix of total confidence and near-hysteria.

Sounds like the writing and recording processes are almost one-and-the-same for Midnight. You might call the results “gestural;” one guy utterly possessed by the power of rock, playing the first patterns skimmed from the surface of his mind, with what I estimate to be roughly a zillion percent conviction. It’s not as easy as it sounds. For one thing, a lesser guitar player/drummer could never make it. And Athenar’s level of confidence with the chosen song-format is also rare, indispensable for the Midnight spontaneity to work. In the face of current media-tech deluge, Midnight is an antagonistic new format for the spirit of pure heavy metal rock’n’roll, uninhibited by a detrimental excess of thought or leisure time in which to wonder, “hmmm, maybe this would sound better with poly-rhythms and an onomatopoeic bassoon?” Listen to “White Hot Fire,” know that the future and the past are one, and that it’s time for violence tonite.

Japan’s Terror Squad is another band that sounds as if it’s about to burst into flames from an excess of crazed enthusiasm. For a band whose only discernable influences are actually from 1987 (most notably Killing Technology by Voivod), they have an uncanny way of sounding at the forefront of contemporary heavy music, in danger of plain falling off the horizon line at times, if the truth be told. The ‘Squad has no problem mangling any notions of “good form,” only criteria being that they perform instrumentally challenging thrash-based metal with an extremely live sound (i.e. retention of errors, few “unrealistic” production values or theatrical elements). Compared to the Midnight CD, Terror Squad’s Chaosdragon Rising is very modern-sounding in its use of precise syncopated rhythms, complex song structures, dissonant chords, atonal noise, hyperactive shredding, a saxophone, basically everything that had critics pooping themselves over certain “noisecore” acts a few years ago.

The guitar player, Lord of Nightmare, is responsible for most of Terror Squad’s references to the past, and most other things anomalous and breathtaking in their music. He plays a lot of high-pitched, one-finger power chords of the type found in Motorhead’s classic material, drops in melodies from classic rock radio and ugly diminished Voivod-isms in equal measure, and solos just like nothing on Earth, with bum notes left in for character. In “We Bite (Requiem for Restless Souls),” vocalist Sonicriot capitalizes on the element of surprise, illustrating just how effective relentless screaming can be, sans the use of any prefigured “scary” or “angry” typecast. The song is a microcosm for the vast tracts of form crested upon by this band’s intensity, going from beat ‘em up style-speedcore to bleats of avant-noise in the Boredoms vein, diminishing to a whisper then erupting into anthemic arena rock, replete with enervating and undoubtedly sincere catch phrases, and a blitz of shred guitar. Never forget, your fire burn…

Catch phrases like that never sound as good in type, which brings us to Dawnbringer. Anybody familiar with sole composer Chris Black’s music journalism knows that he’s a great writer, and there’s a singular literary bent to Dawnbringer’s new album, In Sickness and In Dreams. To my knowledge, the album is an unprecedented exercise in form. 14 short song-sketches blending seamlessly into one dark image. 24 minutes, 34 seconds of continuous narrative sound. There’s a lot more continuity here than the average “A.D.D.-core” fan might enjoy. Funny though, that Black’s use of repetitive patterns, the “oompa-oompa” drumbeat and variations on The Metal Chord Sequence (non-initiates, think the “Eye of the Tiger” intro), channels more densely packed information than any tech-core doodle within earshot. I hear the whole thing was conceived as sheet music, which is evident from the ornate punctuation binding each musical phrase to the whole.

Sonically the album is like a well-engineered digital home demo, a good depiction of events but rarely arresting in itself. Instrumental performances are always subordinate to composition. One gets the sense that this is an album to “read” as much as listen to, for the lyrical narrative, and also in the sense that listening can be a form of reading, interpreting sound patterns from different contexts to reconstruct a story. Dawnbringer meets with a fair amount of indifference, but to a small circle, the name is practically shorthand for “the best modern metal.”

The ideal listener grew up on a specific blend of sub-genres, from which Dawnbringer emerges as a knot of cultivated idiosyncrasies. Depending in your fluency in Iron Maiden, NWOBHM, 80s German speed, the melodic extremes of early-mid 90s Scandinavia, the minimalist side of contemporary USBM, and the peculiarities of latter day Motorhead and Riot, each familiar trope and bit of punctuation can stand for a variable amount of symbolic worth. The content of In Sickness and In Dreams can increase by powers of ten, it can twist into life and act out any number of weird Modernist novella plots centered on betrayal, isolation, longing, and dread. Conversely the album can sound underdeveloped and easily dismissed, but I assure you, that’s your own fault. This is a vessel for hellish concentration manifested into epic form that’s worlds apart from any contemporary heavy music product. No single track can do justice to the whole, but “Under No Flag” strikes close to the heart.

So heed my warning, before we reach the thick of carnage in 2007. The future’s already here, it sounds like “Overkill,” “Aces High,” and “Skald Au Satans Sol” burning down the runway for an ascent through blackened skies.

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