December 29, 2002 |
Kalmah, in case you were wondering, is sort of a power-metal band from Finland, except that they’re not exactly power-metal in the classic sense. As we both know, that stuff’s over and done with, except in Germany, where it will never, ever die, not even if the entire listening public of that nation should suddenly be caught up to meet Christ in the air. For the rest of us, though, power metal’s little more than a memory. Slipknot and various permutations thereof have rendered it harmless. Where Kalmah finds novelty within its power-metal underpinnings is in their use of a death metal vocalist (think “angry pig rooting around in muck and dictating its feelings about its experiences into a professional cassette recorder” and you’re not too far off), and in its use of swamp imagery. Ho! Did I give the game away? Yes, I’m afraid I did. I said “swamp imagery.” Because it’s popular music’s recent failure to generate any interesting imagery that will cause history to judge it most severely. I’m not one to complain about baby-baby-baby lyrics -- generally speaking, I can’t get enough of that baby-baby stuff. I love it! Except that now I really have gotten enough of it, because nobody’s doing anything at all interesting with it. Praise the Neptunes to the skies if you want to, but the actual content of what they’re producing is slight at best, to put it charitably: a triumph of style-over-substance. There has to be something more, and the big players of radio’s Next Wave will have spotted that “something more” months before their competitors have even begun to look for it. Substance is going to be the next piece worth playing, mark my words. And so my proposal that you give your DJs absolute and total control of how often they play Kalmah rises or falls on whether you can feel lyrics like these as righteously as I can: When there is nothing left on the surface And the wind is blowing slow Under the carpet of moss Finally I meet my Swamplord |
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