Blog, Sweet Blog

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I like metal a lot. It’s not my favorite sub-genre, but it occupies prolly 10% of my collection. I like a lot of the metal sub-genres (black, death, doom, grindcore, thrash, gothic, viking, etc.) but I have to draw the line at National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM, aka Nazi or white supremacist). Which kind of seems ridiculous when you think about it. Most black metal is very extreme, anti-God, and pro-pagan/Satan and I can stomach that somehow. Honestly, I don’t pay much attention to the lyrics and it seems like a lot of those bands are more about the spectacle and being provocative than actively plotting the downfall of Christianity. Oddly enough, I do believe in God and consider myself to be a sort of Christian, but I am extremely open to many forms of spirituality and the occult. So, I appreciate the different viewpoints and dark perspective you often find in metal…it’s the same reason I listen to Current 93, Death in June, and Coil.

So anyway, I like metal and have always been fascinated by its album cover art. In the beginning, black metal albums were overly simple or just silly…

But for a while now, I’ve seen some album art that has just blown me away…which brings us to the point of this here post. I’ve selected a bunch of album covers that I think are compelling, for whatever reason. A lot, but not all, of these are black metal bands and I grabbed most of the covers from the excellent Attila the Hun blog. I tried to do all of these at one time yesterday, but I chose so many that putting them all in the same post seems ridiculous at this point. So, I’m going to break them up into a number of posts. As I said, these aren’t all black metal bands or bands that I even like. But I have included some bands I really like these days…Opeth, Deathspell Omega, Lurker of Chalice, Twilight, Xasthur, Leviathan, Wolves in the Throne Room, Darkthrone, Borknagar, Ulver, Striborg, The Meads of Asphodel, etc. On to the album covers…