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Up until fairly recently, American black metal was rarely
ever taken too seriously and was seen as a novelty by some, especially those
who fall under the “black metal elitist” category who won’t accept anything
that comes from anywhere else but Scandinavia. American bands that donned
corpsepaint and leather armor and imitated Norwegian low-fi production styles
were seen more as unfunny parodies of black metal and not as groups of earnest
musicians, and by looking at silly photos of Leviathan, Xasthur, and Absu that
ape early Darkthrone album covers, it’s not hard to understand why. It finally
took some bands that were brave enough to opt out of that decade-old image and take
black metal into new stylistic territories for critics and fans to start paying
attention to what the Americans were doing with great interest. By no means has
this pleased everybody; the stigmatized “hipster” tag gets placed on many of
these bands, and even veterans of American black metal like Wrest of Leviathan
have derided them for not being “satanic” (“Don’t call it black metal then.” He
said about Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy in an interview with Decibel.)
But the development of black metal since the Americans have taken over has been
an exciting evolution of sorts, and who knows where the genre will end up next.
