In preparation for writing this column, I often burn an MP3 disc of songs to crank in my car’s CD player. I still don’t think there’s a better way to listen to music. With this admittedly lofi system, I don’t have to hassle with my phone or Spotify or Bluetooth or an aux cable. The music starts up right where it left off when I crank the ignition. And I can use the big knob three inches away from my stick shift to determine how much I want to hurt my ears. 

I’ve long wanted to write about black metal – the genre most famous for being created by Scandinavians who also burn churches and kill each other – but I feel I need to do a bit more listening and research before I’ve anything interesting to say on the topic. Regardless, a CD with ORANSSI PAZUZU’S 2020 album MESTARIN KYNSI has been spinning my radio all week long. 

Oranssi Pazuzu are hardly your traditional black metal band – in fact, today’s best modern metal bands are hardly “traditional” anything. The Finnish Pazuzu throw doom, Krautrock, death rock, psychedelia, and noisy electronics into a frozen swamp and see what monsters crawl out. On Mestarin Kynsi, they’re seven- to ten-minute monsters, galumphing, caterwauling, lumbering, floundering, pounding, thrashing, shrieking, bellowing, dripping monsters. 

After hearing the bleep/bloop keyboards buried under the doom riff and guitarist Jun-His’s viscous vocalizations on opener “Ilmestys,” I lamented leaving Oranssi off last year’s list about cool use of keyboards in rock bands. Unlike other metal acts who use keyboards to grant a moment of reprieve from the pummeling, Oranssi Pazuzu never let them sound pretty. They’re just another element to blend into their polluted miasma. Even the couple of minutes of space they’re offered on “Uusi Tekokratia” feel sickly.  

If Red Red Meat’s acoustic/electric music resembled a dying industrial world overtaken by vegetation, represented by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Oranssi Pazuzu’s music represents another classic of Soviet cinema, the world of Konstantin Lopushansky’s Dead Man’s Letters, in which a nuclear war has obliterated the world. Mestarin Kynsi’s cover art features, I believe, a pair of tattooed arms submerged in water, but its texture and coloration evokes a poisoned world. A wet, poisoned world.

It’s that wet part that we’re talking about for today’s Heck Records. Where some albums conjure sunny days and others midnight despair, there are some records that just feel…wet. And here’s a few of them. 

For the record, we’re sticking to metal today. Surf music, with its tubular single note lines and splashy spring reverb tanks, may be the reigning champ of “wet music” but we’re living through a heyday of wet metal, and I think it deserves to be appreciated. 

If Mestarin Kynsi reminds one of the sopping wet ruins of an industrial hellscape, TOMB MOLD’S PLANETARY CLAIRVOYANCE calls to mind the natural world retaking that hellscape. I visualize the Canadian death metal band’s twinning guitar lines as vines reclaiming jagged bits of aircraft, silicon chips, and concrete for the Earth. Tomb Mold’s music – with its muted drums and blur of rhythm guitar – feels…mossy, as if the band were playing in a forest. Their mix is atypically mid-friendly, eschewing death metal’s favorite squealing frequencies, which makes their guitarists’ few visits to the bridge end of their fretboard feel like sun cutting through a jungle. Planetary Clairvoyance is as earthy as death metal gets. 

Now for a less landbound wet album. Boston’s post-metal band ISIS were among the first to mix hardcore and ambience on their seminal 2002 album OCEANIC. Their guitars sound like Helmet’s Meantime, but the space between them sounds like Brian Eno’s Music For Airports. Together, they sound like waves. If you need a visualization, check the cover, which features a vast expanse of sun-dappled ocean. Form following function here, folks. At their calmest, Isis’s slow tempos, crisp guitars with just a hint of delay, and long song runtimes makes their music feel like a pleasant day at sea. But, inevitably, the weather turns stormy. The guitarists hit their fuzz pedals, and the waves – I mean, guitars – grow huge. 

You would think that no list of wet metal albums would be complete without MASTODON’S 2004 album LEVIATHAN, a concept album influenced by Moby-Dick, and whose artwork, by Paul Romano, of a whale breaching the water and capsizing a sail-powered whaling ship, is undoubtedly aquatic. Guitarist Bill Kelliher also considers this album as representing the water element. However, to me, Leviathan isn’t an especially wet-sounding album, as the guitars sound too cloistered and the snare drum is tuned too high. Kelliher and Brent Hinds’ pair lead lines and arpeggiated chords, but never in a way that recalls water. A true wet album would’ve needed more chorus and vibrato, and Mastodon don’t stray that far from their speed metal and sludge roots. Leviathan, alas, is not a wet album. 

For a truly nautical whale album, let’s pick the German funeral doom band AHAB’S THE CALL OF THE WRETCHED SEA. Seven songs, sixty-six minutes, with lyrics not only inspired but written by Moby-Dick author Herman Melville himself. Not that I can tell. Daniel Droste’s low, slow guttural growl may as well be seismic movement, while the harmonizing synthesizer may as well be whalesong. If you need one Melville inspired album in your collection, go with Leviathan. But if you want the wettest one, get 2006’s The Call of the Wretched Sea. 

You wouldn’t know from such a desolate image, but the photo of the bull elk on the cover of AGALLOCH’S 2002 progressive black metal masterwork THE MANTLE was of a statue on Main Street in the band’s hometown Portland, Oregon. I’m sure they had to crop it perfectly to match the isolated, rainy day quiet of the music within. The Mantle is both powerful and gentle, a fusion of black metal and folk made famous a couple years earlier by Sweden’s Opeth. Its arpeggiating lead guitars hang suspended in the air like fog, while its overdriven rhythm guitars crash like waves on rocks. Although Agalloch aren’t afraid to crank their amps (check the triumphant guitars after minutes on the travelogue instrumental “The Hawthorne Passage”), they keep away from the most aggravating parts of extreme metal. No squeals, no graphic depictions of death or decay, no outright fascism. Hell, no blast beats even. Just autumnal, folky, sweater weather metal. This ever-so-damp album would make a good Baby’s First Black Metal Album, so you should give it to your girlfriend today. 

Maybe it’ll make her wet. 

(Fuck. Sorry.)