I’ve always had a certain fascination with the dark and morbid, and as a teenager my taste in music, reading and other media reflected my interest in the grotesque. It was Napalm Death and Carcass, Lovecraft and Poe–for that matter, my favorite wrestler was The Undertaker. I’m old enough so that this was back in the days when music was distributed on cassette and then compact disk, before the internet and media streaming made everything available all of the time. Music was purchased a la carte rather than as a subscription service. Part of the experience of consuming media was browsing the stacks at Tower Records or Blockbuster video, looking at the covers and sometimes making a decision based solely on the packaging. While the cover art was secondary to the music, it was nevertheless something that could be appreciated on its own, something with its own aesthetic value.
As a metal fan, I appreciated the fantastic and sometimes lurid or horrific scenes depicted on the album covers. There were hellish landscapes, melancholy ruins, gorey horrors and other macabre visuals to feed my love of the strange and uncanny. I remember the sense of recognition after finding out that the cover of Carcass’s Heartwork album was done by Swiss artist H. R. Giger, also responsible for the otherworldly design of the “Xenomorph” creatures of the Alien film franchise, tying together the work of two favorite artists of the dark imagination.
The Codex Metallum
The book Codex Metallum, authored by two individuals credited as Maxwell and Alt236, is a collection of short essays, with accompanying illustrations, based on themes they’ve traced through an encyclopedia’s worth of metal album covers. It is structured into sections, each based on a broad theme, titled with faux-latin phrases and lead off by an illustration. Each essay focuses on a particular theme and discusses how it is used as material and inspiration for the album covers as well as lyrics, music and band image. The topics cover a wide gamut, from natural elements, animals and architecture to colors, continents and materials. Each is a page long, with the alternate page displaying some examples of covers that exemplify the theme.
Although it is subtitled “The Secret Art of Metal Decoded,” there is nothing terribly revelatory here. It is not surprising, at least to someone whose interest in the genre goes beyond Slipknot and Metallica, that many black metal albums feature forests on their covers, or that it is not hard to find death metal albums featuring skulls. What makes this a fun and interesting read is the diversity of themes, bands and albums that are covered, ranging from the earliest days of heavy metal to recent releases, from instrumental prog to depressive black metal. As I read I spotted the occasional album that I recognized, but these were sprinkled throughout a number of artists and releases that were new to me. Streaming music may mean that we can no longer fondle our latest find as if it were a trophy, but there is no replacing having immediate access to a library of music many times larger than any brick and mortar store could hold. Reading this book with Spotify open in front of me meant being able to look up anything that caught my eye and give it a listen, giving this book an extra dimension as a way to explore new music.
The Many Faces of Metal
While the emotional palette for metal music is somewhat limited by the fact that things can’t get too sunny or it won’t be very metal anymore, metal bands have found musical material and inspiration in many places, some going down well-trodden paths and some taking roads less traveled. This book showcases some of the more exotic alleys and byways that metal artists have wandered down in the search for inspiration. While it is no surprise that many metal lyrics discuss horror and gore in sickening detail, you will learn here that there are also bands that write lyrics solely based on Tolkien’s legendarium (Summoning), ancient Egypt (Nile) and even Moby Dick (Ahab).
It seems that metal is an exceptionally good genre for these kinds of super-specific lyrical themes, since in many of its sub-genres, the vocals are delivered in an inhuman growl, with no attempt being made to get across the lyrical content, reserving that for the lyrics printed in the cover booklet. This is not music for singing along to, so you don’t have to be concerned that your fans will feel awkward when reciting lyrics that name-check Bilbo Baggins.
Should You Read It?
I can recommend Codex Metallum to anyone into metal, and especially someone who appreciates it in all of its various flavors, from growling over chugging riffs to screeching over tremolo picking and blast beats to emoting over epic power ballad chords. It is light reading and something like an encyclopedia of metal, although a very abridged one. The fun of this book is the amount of exploration it affords you, as you read though it, spotting here or there the name of a band or an album cover that looks promising, and bring it up in your streaming service of choice to give it a listen. It is a window into a wide view of the world of metal and will introduce you to music you otherwise would not be exposed to.
Coda to the Codex: Albums in the Digital Age
The transition from vinyl to cassette and then CD as the medium for recorded music has been lamented because of the loss of space for artwork and linear notes compared to what was afforded by the size of a vinyl record. In the streaming age we have further cramped the real estate available for the imagery associated with an album down to the thumbnail that appears next to its name, without even space for lyrics or the band member’s traditional “thank you” section. While the web is a virtual space with effectively infinite room for extra-album visuals and information, I’m not aware of any artists who have taken advantage of this freedom. The website for an album generally only features links to where it can be purchase or streamed, and maybe a track list. There may be a reason for this, known to people in the music industry and not obvious to someone on the outside, or possibly it is just because the infinite canvas of a website is lacking the familiar frame of folding pages into which lyrics and thank-you’s can be laid.