The Metal Band of my Dreams Just Broke Up

The day after Game of Thrones ended, one of my favorite bands, SubRosa, announced they were calling it quits (for now) on Facebook. I doubt the decision by the band had anything to do with the show, but I find it fitting because SubRosa were the closest thing music had to Game of Thrones. Their songs were epic in scope and had a sound that was both brutal and beautiful, which always took me to a medieval fantasy-type setting similar to the HBO series. Also like Thrones, I thought SubRosa’s music, while foreboding and dark on the surface, contained a lot of empathy and humanity, which is part of what made me like it so much compared to other metal.

One of my earliest posts on the blog came after I discovered SubRosa and declared them “the metal band of my dreams.” When I first heard “Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes,” it practically blew my mind. It was heavy and intense, but it also had those feminine vocals and the two electric violins which created the otherworldly sound that was their signature. It made me interested in metal for the first time and I began looking deeper into the genre, trying to discover other bands that sounded like SubRosa and could scratch that itch. I never found them.

Over their next two albums, More Constant Than the Gods and For This We Fought the Battle of Ages, the band expanded their sound even more, creating 10-15 minute epic songs that showed just how much potential metal has and how rarely it lives up to it. I thought (and wrote) a lot about what distinguished SubRosa, why they appealed to me so much when I couldn’t really get into other metal. Of course, part of it was the sound, which had that crushing beauty dynamic that I love, almost like My Bloody Valentine and other shoegaze. But I think it went deeper than that: this band played with a purpose. They weren’t interested in clobbering the listener with noise just to be edgy or shocking. I think they were very attuned to the idea of earning emotion and catharsis, and their songs often built drama through the dynamics, which went from lovely whispers to bone-crushing doom metal. Even their longest songs never for a moment felt self-indulgent.

SubRosa also fixed the other issue I have had with metal, which is how the lyrical content usually is incomprehensible or focused on darkness to the point of cheesy self-parody. The massiveness of their sound and the length of their songs allowed them a lot of room for almost novella-like storytelling, and they explored themes of suffering, power, and love in a way that was much more nuanced and sophisticated than typical music. A song like “Wound of the Warden” tells an entire story about surveillance, power and free will.

When I first started writing, I just made posts about old albums I liked and wasn’t going too deep into new music. SubRosa was one of the first bands I found where I had the feeling of wanting to champion something new that wasn’t necessarily being heard or talked about by many people. When I looked on their website and saw that they had actually quoted my first post about them, it made me feel like maybe writing about these obscure bands wasn’t such a waste of time and energy after all. I liked that I had given the band something, no matter how small, and that it was genuine and not some paid review where I was just giving it a high score or trying to craft the most flattering pull quote for them.

Because of their genre, SubRosa was rarely the subject of much discussion in the music circles I’m kind of in and isn’t going to be appearing on any of those best of the decades lists that people read. But I don’t think there was a better rock band in the last ten years. In a genre that often seems to embrace homogeneity by delivering its fans the same grunting vocals, “shocking” lyrics and constant noise, they dared to sound different and explored real themes in their work. But I don’t want this to sound too much like a eulogy: in the Facebook post, they explain that the members are all working on new projects that will be heard soon. Maybe then, there will finally be some other music that sounds like SubRosa.

Spellling’s “Mazy Fly” is One of the Year’s Most Original Albums

Mazy Fly, the second album by Spellling, feels like a throwback to a sound that never actually existed. Its vintage, sometimes cheesy-sounding electronics bring to mind the 80s while Chrystia Cabral’s soulful voice is reminiscent of classic funk or disco singers. It’s an odd mix of traits that doesn’t feel like it should work, and it took me a couple listens to get used to the album’s sound and its weird internal logic. A few listens later, I’m somewhat awed that an album can be this listenable while having such a unique sound.

Cabral is a really good singer in a conventional sense — she can hit notes and emote in a way that is similar to a lot of much more popular artists who are on the radio. But rather than let that gift be used in generic pop songs, she has her own vision that is haunting, spacey and alien. The mix of the conventional and the uncanny makes everything on the album feel a little off in a way that distinguishes it from other music in this space. On the opener, “Red” she twists her voice into something more grotesque, reminding me of someone like Fever Ray. Other songs like “Haunted Water” have more of a darkwave influence, with creepy strings and a more macabre vibe. The album’s centerpiece, “Under the Sun,” is probably the best showcase of all of her traits, with its long cinematic intro, celestial lyrics, and retro-futuristic sound.

The mysterious, out of place sound of Mazy Fly fits with its themes, which are similarly hard to pin down. The album’s Bandcamp page has its own press release explanation of what’s going on, but I think it’s more effective as a vague, ambiguous journey, and the variety of sounds gives the listener a lot of freedom to put it together themselves. More than anything, the joy of this album is hearing such a talented artist maximize her abilities and go down her own path instead of taking the easier road traveled by so many others.

The Bells and the Mirror

The most famous scene in Game of Thrones is undoubtedly the Red Wedding at the end of season three. With one scene, the writers of the show completely upended what viewers were conditioned to think the story was about as the group of characters assumed to be heroes were slaughtered. In its latest episode, “The Bells,” they pulled off an even bigger long con, revealing the true nature of one of the main protagonists of the series in one of the most daring and confrontational episodes in TV history. Understandably, people are a little upset: it hurts to have the mirror turned on you, to have your own biases and assumptions exposed for what they really are.

Daenerys Targaryen was a character who had many redeeming qualities, and she was often positioned opposite of loathsome characters like Cersei Lannister, which added to her likability. But despite all her proclamations of breaking chains and wheels, something was always a little off: she demanded people bow to her or she’d burn them alive, she killed people for nothing but vengeance, and she was always being kept in line by her advisors, whether it was Tyrion, Missandei, Jorah, or Varys. With all but one of them out of the picture, in “The Bells” she snaps and lays waste to King’s Landing, even after the enemy has surrendered.

People didn’t see all of the cracks in Daenerys because the show convinced them she was the best leader and deserving of the Iron Throne, even though she never led very impressively and was later revealed to not even be the true heir. Fans named kids after her, put “breaker of chains” in their Twitter bios, and celebrated her as a badass woman here to overthrow the world of terrible men. They waived away her other murders and poor decisions as actions that needed to be taken to “break the wheel.” They watched the show eagerly anticipating the moment she would finally take what was rightfully hers, but seemingly none of them thought about what it would actually look like.

“The Bells” shows you, in gruesome detail. It is directed from the perspective of the common people along with Arya Stark, who flee for their lives amidst falling rubble and ash, all in broad daylight, forming a stark contrast with the show’s previous epic battle against the undead in “The Long Night.” As scary as those zombies were, this episode shows that what humans do to each other out in the open in search of power is even more terrifying.

Faced with Daenerys’ “heel turn,” the viewers who worshipped her are now engaging in cognitive dissonance, criticizing the writing and calling it misogynistic because there’s no way they could have been duped. Let’s just say all those memes comparing her to Hillary Clinton are more than a little ironic now. This is also the same group of people who subscribe to the “only good things should happen to women characters and they should never do anything bad” mentality, which is put forth as a feminist idea even though it limits the diversity and agency of women characters. If you didn’t want to watch characters who have flaws make bad decisions that ruin lives, you shouldn’t have still been watching Game of Thrones. And if you think any of this is unrealistic other than the dragon, then you probably don’t know much about history or reality.

Comparing Game of Thrones to contemporary politics is a cliché at this point, but I don’t know how you could watch that episode and not think of so many years of misguided U.S. foreign policy. Many people buy into the idea that what our military does abroad is for the greater good, it’s necessary, and it’s worth celebrating. More than any piece of entertainment I can think of, “The Bells” shows what war really is: it’s horrible, it’s brutal, and there are no heroes, only victims. This show with a massive audience aired an episode that is a strong leftist argument in favor of pacifism and non-intervention. Unfortunately, its audience has become too bloodthirsty and entitled to understand it.

A revealing comment I’ve seen from many was a complaint that Cersei Lannister’s death in the episode wasn’t satisfying enough, as she ended up buried in rubble while embracing her brother/lover, Jaime. Many viewers were like Arya Stark, craving vengeance and blood, even though, as Sandor Clegane points out, it leads to a life of misery. So it’s fitting that Cersei’s death, like her son Joffrey’s, showed her in a more sympathetic light, as a woman who was raised in a horrible environment and has lost everything. She was a piece of shit, but she was also human, and it’s pretty messed up to wish death on anyone, even a TV character. Once again, the show holds a mirror: it confronts the audience and shows them that what they thought they wanted wasn’t actually a victory. It’s not unlike how Daenerys felt, sitting on that dragon, having won what she wanted her whole life and realizing that it wasn’t enough.