My favorite metal label right now is Olympic, which used to be a Chicago label (I think) but is now run out of the Century Media offices in L.A. (I think) and which specializes in death metal (I'm pretty sure). Label identity in the metal world is a tricky thing: at the totally-underground level, it's no sweat (Razorback = gore-grind; Clandestine Blaze = black metal in the nordic stylee; Southern Lord = doom), but once you're looking to get the product into the hands of the mall-crawlers who'll buy at Hot Topic or not at all, you lose the luxury of keeping it real. Purists decry those who are "in it for the money," but people over the age of twenty-four know that a person can only run a business on a zero-profit basis for so long before being eaten alive by cynicism. Staying alive is not the same thing as "selling out," no matter how it may have seemed to us when we weren't yet paying our own heating bills.



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