Ah, metal, dear metal. It’s like an old childhood friend who we always go back to when our new, cooler, trendier mates have started getting all bitchy or forgotten our birthday. Metal: it’s always there and if it changes at all, it does so at its own glacial pace. It never lets you down and anyone with any sense or taste loves it, secretly or otherwise.
There’s always been a pretty decent metal scene in and around Oxford and if many of its best propagators – like perennial Nightshift favourites Sextodecimo – have been and gone, you can bet your last penny there’ll be another generation along any time soon.
Risen In Black, recently announced alongside fellow local metallers Taste My Eyes and Beard Of Zeuss on the Oxford Punt line-up, do what all good metal bands do: they play it hard, fast and heavy and to hell with what you or your overpriced haircut says. From the suitably doom-laden industrial intro piece, they let rip – shredded guitars, blast beats and the sort of venomous growl-cum-scream-cum-roar you tend to get seeping through a crack in space and time in Dr Who. “What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence?” whispers the spooky little girl voice halfway through `Circle’ before even that is swept away in a boiling storm of pure noise.
Don’t ask me for specific reference points; I’ve never even heard of half of Risen In Black’s influences listed on their Myspace and when a friend recently played me a Terrorizer cover-mount compilation CD I thought it was all the same band, but to stand before the rage that is Risen in Black, curtains drawn closed to block out the sun, volume turned up high enough to startle the cat, is to experience a musical purity you’ll not experience in any other genre.
It can adapt, it can subsume or absorb other styles of music as it wishes, but at its heart, metal remains metal always and it’s this refusal to compromise that makes it the most consistently alternative of any form of music. With bands like Risen In Black it is in safe hands.