Dan Nelson, a frequent contributor to
The Believer and
McSweeney’s, has just published a very earnest attempt to alphabetically catalog every heavy metal band name known to man. The cover of
All Known Metal Bands doesn’t lie: it’s a list of all known metal bands. And no one—whether they are mired in the proto-metal riffing of Judas Priest, the molasses thick doom of Sleep, or the classical prog leanings of Stradivarius—is exempted. No one is really sure if this is some ironic jab at heavy metal’s status among music elitists or a very sincere document of the music world’s most rabid strain. The book is a serious example of trainspottting much like George Gimarc’s
Punk Diary which categorized every single piece of minutia of the original U.K. punk era. But where
Punk Diary was written as some sort of document of an era,
All Known Metal Bands comes off as a comment on the style itself.
Gorgoroth. Pig Destroyer. Carnivore. Exhumed. Entombed. Excalibur. Those are just the single named entries. One should also take into account Eyes of the Assailed, Kevorkian’s Angels, and Zombified Preachers of Gore. Over the course of reading this comprehensive and exhaustive volume, one starts to see certain trends emerge and metal genres take shape. Perhaps next on the agenda is a book chronicling the evolution of the Black Metal font employed by acts as varied as Emperor, Falconbach, Goat Whore, Sacramentum, and Hellhammer?
An excerpt on the
McSweeney’s website lists a sample of metal bands that start with the letter Q (which outside of Queen and Queens of the Stone Age is a very under-represented letter in music circles IMHO) and includes the names of Queen Bitch, Queen Evil, Queen of the Elves Land, and Queensrÿche.
The book has already caused a stir in the backbiting blog world where some die hard fans of true metal are decrying it as a hack cut-and-paste job from a few fan-run metal websites. The jury is still out on that one but regardless nowhere else will you find Mordlust and Manowar sharing space with no less than 10 bands of varying nationalities called Sacrement.
Death to false metal!