Last week we talked about how in the 1980s hardcore punk and metal were kissing cousins and should probably just fuck already. Peanut butter and chocolate, baby! Today we’re talking about more misshapen genre collisions. In the 1970s, the hard rock band Carmen smashed together prog and flamenco. It sounds every bit as weird as you imagine: Grand Funk Railroad with castanets. Ay! In the 2000s, Gogol Bordello took Romanian and Ukrainian music and mixed it with punk rock. Try playing barre chords on an oud. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell collaborated on her 1979’s Mingus with jazz composer and bassman Charles Mingus, linking the lounge-y LA songwriters of the 1970s with exciting often atonal jazz of the early 1960s.
These types of music don’t naturally go together. Sometimes it works and spawns genres of its own. Ice-T put metal and rap together with Bodycount in 1990 ten years before rap metal became a chart topper with Linkin Park. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Err, Carmen. And sometimes it works, but not in a way that inspires any followers. Why would you see a band like Gogol Bordello when you can still see Gogol Bordello? They own that lane.
Panopiticon own their lane. On Kentucky, that lane happens to be death metal bluegrass. I know. It sounds like a joke and should play like one, a modern Carmen. But it’s not. It actually works.
Panopticon mastermind Austin Lunn understands that you can’t actually put bluegrass and black metal on top of each other. You can’t have tremolo picked chords ripping while a violin hee-haw saws on top of it. No. He incorporates bluegrass into metal, more or less, by keeping them separate. An old time banjo introduces a lead line that’s then played on an electric guitar. A song outros into a rustic comedown. The genres bleed into each other, but never lay completely on top of one another.
Lunn also finds commonalities in the genres. Ever notice how many bluegrass songs are about death or exploitation? Well, Sunny Jim, doesn’t that sound mighty like appropriate subject matter for a black metal song? Who knew that poor coal miners and Norwegian virgins who want to burn down churches would have so much in common?
Lund’s real inspired stroke though is including bits of the Harlan County, USA documentary, which lets you know, better than his indecipherable monster scream vocals, exactly what this album is about. It’s about economics. Harlan County, USA is about labor strife. It’s about living in a place where the opportunities are drying up. It’s about giving 40 years of your life digging coal to power the nation’s industry and getting only black lung as a retirement gift. That sounds like a perfectly appropriate black metal song.