Talk about your inexplicable oversights—Netherlands’ Gore included a lyric sheet with their 1987 LP Mean Man’s Dream, but they forgot to sing them! Or probably not; certainly one of the metal power trio’s members would have said, as they were turning out the studio lights, “Aren’t we forgetting something?”
Which means Gore were expecting YOU, dear listener, to sing them! They invented at-home heavy metal Karaoke! They made you the star! It wasn’t like every other loser metal album in your record collection, where you have to compete with some Geddy Lee type capable of hitting notes so high you’d need a surface-to-air missile to hit them. Why, it was the greatest stroke of genius since Uriah Heep’s 1971 album Look at Yourself, the cover of which was a mirror allowing you to stare into it and say, “Fucking A, The Heep put ME on the cover!” And the lyrics are in Dutch and English. Which only sucks if you speak Swahili! (Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if they’d printed them in Swahili? Now that would have been a stroke of genius.)
The weird part about this is that Gore don’t strike me as pranksters. Their music is utterly devoid of humor. It’s also, in case you’re wondering, utterly devoid of color. And no wonder. Gore stripped metal down to its bare bone essentials. No vocals. No guitar solos. No harmonies. No irksome melodies even. All of that stuff is for decadent bourgeois types who can’t handle the brutal truth that life is a relentless and remorseless grind intent up grinding you into powder! Gore’s is a puritanical minimalism that brings them into the realm of the avant garde. Which is French for “no fun.” But who ever said you were supposed to “enjoy” music? Gore understood a simple truth: you’re its punching bag! And Gore wore brass knuckles.
Gore’s songs are as regimented as a panzer division—they’re loud, very loud, but they’re exercises in self-control. They’re remorselessly tight and linear affairs with lots of stop-start and plenty of changes in tempo but the players—Peter de Sury (guitar), Marij Hel (bass), and Danny Arnold Lommen (who handles drum chores and would go on to join the far more chaotic Caspar Brötzmann Massaker) play with unwavering discipline. They toe the line and always draw within the lines. Yet despite these self-imposed constraints their songs manage to generate a surprising amount of, well, I wouldn’t call it excitement, so let’s go with abstracted fascination. It’s like they’ve deconstructed Black Sabbath.
Why, I might even listen to the damn album if it weren’t for the band’s affection for the staccato—the songs on Mean Man’s Dream don’t swing, they lurch. And the pleasure, such as it is, lies in the myriad sounds de Sury tortures from his guitar, Lommen’s surprisingly subtle variations on pounding your head in, and the shifts in tempo, which are abrupt but never take the songs away from their undeviating progression from beginning to end. It’s remarkable how much they do with so little, and while I’ll always find their music monochromatic and too tight-assed for its own good, I admire their spartan determination to strip things down to the metal essentials. This is monk metal, played by three guys who know a thing or two about both self-abnegation and philosophical rigor. Which I suppose also makes it Wittgenstein rock.
One of the best thing’s about Mean Man’s Dream is it’s a real time-saver, because all of the songs sound the same which means you only have to listen to one of them! This will afford you the leisure time to learn how to correctly pronounce “Van Gogh” (which should only take about twenty years). Or to turn your attention to Gore’s post-Mean Man’s Dream release Wrede (or The Cruel Peace), a double album made up of four monolithic songs which have actual melodies and was co-produced by one Steve Albini, who didn’t have much to say about the sessions (which he talks about in his classic Forced Exposure essay “Eyewitness Record Reviews”) other than that he learned how to say “Put your headphones on, you little faggot, or I’ll come out and crush your brains!” in Dutch. Or check out their 1987 split LP with Henry Rollins, although why you’d want to do something so contrary to good sense is beyond me.
But all of the songs on Mean Man’s Dream don’t sound EXACTLY the same, which is why your open-minded metalhead will want to check them out. Some of them sound like monster trucks trying to herky-jerky their way out of tar pits, while others sound like complex math problems with monstrously large integers, while still others sound like a two-hundred-foot-tall troll stomping on people really fast like he’s playing whack-a-mole but not because he hates ‘em but because he’s having a heart attack and is in a dead hurry to find a hospital. And one of ‘em sounds like a chainsaw with a rhythm section (it’s called “Chainsaw”) and another (“Meat Machine”) sounds like an abattoir wearing steel jackboots. And then there’s the amusingly titled “Out for Sex,” which is the perfect song to play if you never want to get laid by anybody, with the possible exception of the aforementioned troll. That title may or may not be proof that Gore possess a sense of humor.
How do I say this? Gore goes about its thankless task like a free jazz band that knows it isn’t free, and acts accordingly. These Dutch lads sing in their chains like the sea, but when all is said and done the word that comes to mind is “monotonous.” The tightly-wound instrumentals on Mean Man’s Dream sound like exercises, and who wants to exercise? It’s tiring! You could pull a muscle in your ear! Your headphones will end up smelling like sweatsocks! The boys in Gore are on one very loud treadmill, and it speeds up and slows down like it has a mind of its own, and in the end it’s you who are exhausted.
Recommended to heavy metal reductionists, rigid formalists, anal retentives, attorneys specializing in whiplash injuries, would-be lead singers, and people who agree with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous statement, “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C
