I remember when feather-haired heshers would FREAK the fuck out if anything slightly resembling disco got anywhere close to their PRECIOUS heavy metal. That, however, was a long time ago. Today's contemporary metal has been borrowing from industrial/electronic/techno/house/etc. music for a LONG time now; I guess once beards and black shirts replaced the feathered hair it was obvious the electronic sounds could add another arrow to ye 'ole heaviest of heavies quiver!! That said, The Soft Pink Truth is not a real black/metal group, rather it's a side project of Drew Daniel, a member of experimental electronic duo Matmos, and his new album, Why Do The Heathen Rage? Electronic Profanations of Black Metal Classics (Thrill Jockey), is all house/techno versions of blackest of metal jams. Turns out tho', the point of remaking these black metal classics by SPT does happen go deeper than just tryna blend genres, there's plenty of politics in this expression.

Black metal fandom all too often entails a tacit endorsement or strategic looking-the-other-way with regards to the racist, anti-Semitic, sexist and homophobic bullshit politics that (still) pervade the scene, on behalf of either escapist fantasy talk, shaky invocations of art as a crypto-religious path to transcendence, or—the oldest cop out in the book—the quietist declaration that “I just like how it sounds.” Just as blasphemy both affirms and assaults the sacred powers it invokes and inverts, so too this record celebrates black metal and offers queer critique/mockery/profanation of its ideological morass in equal measure.

Fair enough. One of my biggest problems with a lot of metal, especially when heads tried to compare it to '80s hardcore, was the shitty politics. The only "single" off the WDTHR? is a version of Venom's "Black Metal."

I kinda thinks this SOUNDS a lot like what some contemporary metal bros are, perhaps, interested in, and looking past SPT's political narrative, the MUSIC really puts a weight on the relevance of other genre-blending-with-metal groups who are somehow classified as metal. Like, to me, it gives the cracked, pop genius of Babymetal context.