Vikinghammers Life in Metal

Long ago at the end of the age of the power derived from flora a sinister sound brewed deep in the minds of the sick and twisted and when the power had grown the sound spewed forth and great evil spread across the land and created the profane art, with this power the gods crashed their fists upon the earth and demanded to be heard and as the sound grew in strength the disenfranchised minds of youth picked up their torches and marched to the beat of Bill Wards drums...

For most of you that know me, know that I'm a massive metal head I'm going to tell you how and why that all came to pass and I might generalise a bit and try and get a bit of the metalhead stigma out of the way.

When I was young, primary school young my parents used to have a radio on pretty much 24/7 which was great but it was also the worst first thing in the morning, before school. I used to listen to all of the old classics they would play on there and I loved them, David Bowie, Tina Turner, The Police that sort of thing but the band that I really remember enjoying the most was Creedence Clearwater Revival, it was something about the music that really sucked me in, John Fogarty's voice and the catchy guitar work most likely. I used to stop what I was doing when I heard CCR playing, I think dad used to have a tape in the shed he would play as well... maybe? I remember hearing Down on the Corner a lot when I was young. Then when I got a bit older maybe 10 or 11 I used to listen to a lot of Triple J which at the time was playing a lot of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden (R.I.P. Chris Cornell), all those sorts of alternative bands, I was addicted to it, I would listen to music every night, tape songs off the radio all that sort of thing, I used to listen to heavier and heavier music and used to stay up late and catch the 3 hours of power on Triple J which was the metal programme they had on every tuesday night which was awesome, bands like Metallica, Slayer, Sepultura were regulars, along with some of the best Australian metal acts at the time like Segression, Sakkuth, Pod People etc. it was truly an awesome time for music. My parents weren't to happy about me listening to stuff that heavy at 12 years old so I never really got any CD's or anything but I was allowed to get the Hottest 100 compilation almost every year which was great, some of the best bands of all time made it on those cd's, I also really wanted to get the Led Zeppelin III album for my birthday, which they had just re-released on CD but I never got it. I used to listen to them day in day out and I was truly addicted. The only outlet I really had for metal though was listening to the 3 hours of power that I stayed up to listen to every week and I would record the best songs and make my own compilation tapes, I must have had about 20 tapes at one stage. Then when I was about 14 my dad and mum became good friends with the people who owned the Caravan Park in my home town and their son who was a few years older than me, had an amazing CD collection, he showed me some of the best bands of the time and which are still some of my favourite bands today, Deftones, Spineshank, Coal Chamber, Tool, etc. which was fucking incredible, I'd never even really seen metal cd's before and he had apple boxes full of them, I was always asking him to burn me off cd's which I know he hated me asking him to do all the time, but eventually he gave in and showed me this new kind of thing where you can put like 300 songs on a CD, he introduced me to MP3's and it changed my life, he burnt off 1 mp3 cd and I listened to it religiously for years, I lost it for a while when we were moving house, I was looking through the draws in my old desk and there it was stuck upright in the back of the drawer I pulled it out and was so stoked I found it again, I managed to copy off most of the songs but the CD was scratched to hell. He probably doesn't know how much that cd meant to me so thanks Dave, for a kid who loved metal but only got to listen to it for 3 hours a week, it really meant the world. I actually still try and find some of the songs from that cd when they pop in to my head.

I got older, got deeper in to highschool and really only got to listen to the mainstream stuff because there were no cd stores nearby and by this time the 3 hours of power had changed names got a new host and become really weak, so I was listening to bands like Pantera, Soulfly and Korn but occasionally someone would bring some true metal to school, someone bought Chaos A.D. to school and was listening to it on the computers in the library which was awesome and another guy was listening to a Cannibal Corpse tape on his walkman one day which blew my mind. As the years went on through school it got kind of boring and I stopped listening to metal almost at all (except for that mp3 cd) wasn't a fan of Limp Bizkit, Slipknot or Korn which were huge for everyone else but not so much for me, I wanted heavier music and also music that I hadn't heard a million times before. There was one other guy who was in the year below me who used to like the same stuff I did, like Acid Bath, Tool and Slayer then there was a few other guys who enjoyed metallica but little else. Highschool was kind of a dead zone for metal for me, it wasn't until I was at the end of my schooling career when Napster had just come out that I really got back in to metal, when I could look stuff up and actually listen to it, experiment and really come in to my own. I found heavier and heavier music, I still listened to a lot of the mainstream stuff because it was the early days of the internet there wasn't much in the way of finding out what music was good and even what bands were out there, but I was just muddling along finding more and more amazing stuff, even genres I had heard of but never really got to listen to like Black Metal and bands like Darkthrone and Immortal which I consider a couple of my all time favourite bands and even to this day Black Metal is still probably my second favourite genre behind Doom metal which is another genre that I found around this time with bands like Electric Wizard and Candlemass, I just ate it all up.

It wasn't until I was about 21 when one of my best mates introduced me to another guy Mick who was like me, listening to every heavy band he could get his hands on and we used to just hang out and listen to metal for hours while we drank beer and talked shit, this was the real growth period, we would constantly be showing each other new bands we had found or showing each other stuff we'd heard years ago, it was true metal appreciation. So much so that we formed a band with a guy who played guitar, me on vocals and Mick on drums, the other guy wanted to play punk sort of stuff but we managed to get in a few metal songs here and there and even write a few original ones, we left that band because I didn't really like the guy and we weren't playing the music we really wanted to, but another friend of ours Bunyip had just started learning guitar and his new neighbour was a massive metal head, so we would head around there and get on the piss, listen to music, play some music until the neighbour came and told us to shut up or we were to drunk to move. This period lasted years and was great, we had some amazing parties and some epic jams, then when Bunyip was good enough we started a band with him and we got pretty good, we were writing original music, probably not what we thought we would be playing, it was stoner, kyuss like stuff which we still really enjoyed, we had a few gigs here and there but we always had a revolving door of musicians, we had 3 different bass players, 3 drummers, 4 guitarists, Me and Bunyip were the only mainstays in the band, me on vocals and Bunyip playing guitar or Drums, so in the end it got to hard to keep retraining musicians so we gave up, I still miss it to this day. This all ended when I was about 28 and I didn't really do much else other than join a few groups on facebook and post some metal which is where I met my future wife then when I was about 31 myself, Mick the drummer and my fiance and future Wife decided to start a Metal website called The Metalithic which was doing really well there for a while and I was writing review after review and really enjoying it, we were interviewing really huge names in the industry and had some of the latest news but it got to a point where I had to focus my time on something that was going to make some money so about a year ago I decided to give it up and now my time is dedicated to video games, I still listen to metal any chance I get (I'm listening to Drudkh at the moment) and am thinking about starting up The Metalithic again as a YouTube Channel but am yet to pull the trigger on that...

So there you go that's how I became a metal head now for the WHY am I a metal head.

There are a few explanations as to why I am a metal head in the last chapter but that's not really what I mean. Metal for me and for most metal heads is more than just mere music, it is a passion beyond measure and beyond compare. The music has more substance, more emotion and more talent than any other genre and if you ask any true metal head they'll tell you the same. Most people listen to metal and say they can't understand it, or it's just noise or crap and that's because they don't want to give it the time it deserves, but for some people I understand it's just not for them, there are genres that I don't understand and don't like, I have given them some time but it's just not for me and that's fair enough, same goes for non metal heads. I'm not saying if you listen to metal you will fall in love with it, but you should at least try it out see how it goes, but that being said you have to jump in to something casual, you can't just go from nothing to Inquisition or Extermination Dismemberment and expect to have it rock your world that will take some warming up to. Start with something like Metallica or Black Sabbath and once you've got the hang of that move up the chain of brutality. Metal offers something that not really any other genres offer and that's variety, there are so many sub genres of metal that you'll almost find something that will suit your tastes, I like other sub genres more than others but I'll listen to them all depending on what mood I am in at the time. I've been known to go from orchestral power metal straight in to brutal death metal one after the other and I've also been known to stick with a single genre for months, depends on how I'm feeling.

Metal heads do get a bad rap, we're all labeled as satanists or mental when in actual fact some of the nicest people I know are metal heads and when you're at a gig there's no fights or people being dickheads it's just people enjoying themselves and enjoying the music we all love. The majority of the time metal heads also listen to other genres as well, I like my rock and I've been known to listen to indie music and even occasionally pop music, all it really takes for me to listen is a catchy tune and some actual talent which I can respect in (some) pop singers. It's something that is often misconstrued and can be rude, I have been genuinely offended by people calling me a satanist or saying one of my favourite bands is shit and because it's a metal bands it's acceptable, but when I fire back I get told off... I guess it's a whole other thing, it doesn't happen often anymore but when I was in a band and you get told one of the biggest influences on you is shit or absolute crap it's hard not to take offence.

Anyway I think that's enough ranting and raving for now, I might make a regular blog with bands everyone should check out or something like that but for now...

Stay Brutal,

Vikinghammer out.