BLACK METAL

In the early years of the Eighties, a new form of music took life in Europe, guided by the rules of Heavy Metal but more involved in controversial ideologies and graphics, in the vein of Black Widow and Black Sabbath. The first band coming out the silence was Venom whose first album Welcome To Hell gave birth to the genre in 1981 and the second one Black Metal defined the name of the kind of music that will have the biggest following in the middle Nineties.

Fast drumming, low pitched vocals and lyrics concerning the power of Satan and his followers, trademark of Venom's musical style, will soon become essential for the newborn metal root. Also important are bands like Bathory and Celtic Frost whose influence worldwide is still nowadays recognizable.

In the USA the foundations were laid by the Possessed, whose debut Seven Churches was, and still is acclaimed as a masterpiece of the Black Metal scene. But Black Metal was not just followed in its 'musical' form. The controversial mixing of violent sounds and images always concerning the black half of humanity, never came out of taste for the followers, and some years later, album's like Samael's Worship Him, literally made the genre come out of the 'commercial fog'. These was the middle Eighties, and the Black Metal music began to be one of the most followed in the heavy metal genre, thanks also to the big boom of death metal in that period. The new stream of black metal youngsters, especially in the extreme north of Europe, caused a real collapse in the public opinion because of the antichristian attitude, and most of all real crimes like burnt churches and several murders like the one of Mayhem's guitarist Euronymous by the hands of another Black Metal cult personality named Vårg Vikernes better known as Burzum.

Obviously all this, made a big work of advertising for the genre, that, for a period has been treated in first pages of newspapers worldwide, seen like the real danger for a violent youth ready to explode.

Often Black metal bands (especially the underground ones) have accompanied the passion for the Occult side with extreme right winged politics. In the second half of the nineties, the genre has evolved in a most commercial way with the use of keyboards and strings and lyrics concerning less controversial arguments like vampirism and horror cinema. In the Symphonic Black Metal, the most important bands still in activity are Cradle Of Filth and Dimmu Borgir (a little more 'commercially tasteful'), whose albums and concerts are real blockbusters worldwide. The 'No Trend' attitude of bands such as Emperor, Burzum and Mayhem, with their razor's edge sound and no compromise lyrics, made these bands fall in the state of cult ones, but the most important seems still to be Darkthrone, whose straight ahead sound accompanied by a never-ending misanthropic attitude (they quite never played live and according to them, will continue this way) made, of the Norwegian combo, a cult in the scene. The band released masterpieces of the Black Metal style like A Blaze In The Northern Sky, Under A Funeral Moon, Transylvanian Hunger all of them grim sounding and with an evil touch.

Nowadays, the future of black metal seems to be attached to a more electronic touch with bands as Ulver, Kovenant, Impaled Nazarene and so on that are mixing sounds of traditional instruments with synths and drum machines.