For this week’s Metal Monday post I thought I’d explore a different sub-genre. The first two weeks have focused on Thrash heavyweights in Slayer and Megadeth, and I feel like I’ve got the gist – it kind of rocks, but is also kind of terrible. And two songs is more than enough to judge an entire genre isn’t it?
So, I went where any good researcher would and looked up the various Metal genres on Wikipedia. In amongst the likes of Death, Doom, and Extreme, I was surprised to see Christian Metal listed and had to give some of that a try. Surely Christian Metal is an oxymoron. Isn’t Metal the devil’s music? Does God acknowledge Metalheads?
My main issue with Metal is that it’s often so straight-faced and humourless that it’s actually difficult to take seriously. So throwing in a bunch of dorks who feel the need to express their religion through the art of Metal feels like a recipe for a whole other level of dreadfulness.
Tourniquet – You Get What You Pray For
Californians, Tourniquet, were one of the leaders of the Christian Metal movement in the 90s. The band’s name is a metaphor for “a lifelong spiritual process by which…” Yeah, whatever, read the wiki yourself if you care.
This song is from their 1990 debut album. Fair play, the You Get What You Pray For title is a good pun, and at least shows some humour (although, I assume it’s unintentional). The song itself is gloriously shite though. I’d recommend listening to it, just so you can appreciate the heights of shite-ness it scales.
Noodle-y riffs kick things off, and then appear intermittently throughout. I’m sure it’s hard to play that, but it just sounds daft. And when you use it so often it loses any impact it might have, it’s standard Metal overkill (Overkill would make a good Metal band name BTW).
Vocally, it’s impressive how it manages to be bad in so many different ways. It begins with a fairly standard Ozzy Osbourne imitation; it’s bad, but in a run-of-the-mill kind of way. Then the song’s main hook comes in; a faux-operatic chant of “Let us pray”, and I’m thinking this has to be a piss-take. Later, the vocals randomly transform into a ridiculous falsetto squeal – think The Darkness but without the irony. Now, I’m convinced this is some elaborate joke that I’m not in on.
I was going to delve into the lyrics, but got sidetracked by philosophical questions. I began Googling ‘do you pray to God or Jesus’, before remembering that I don’t care. To summarise, the lyrics are bollocks and contain lines like “When you’re standing in flames, Ya can’t pray to Jesus, He won’t know your name”. Ok, that actually makes it sound sort of awesome.
Look, it’s very likely that I will never listen to any Christian Metal ever again beyond this; because why would I? But I feel like I’ve heard enough to conclude that Christian Metal represents both the complete antithesis to Heavy Metal, yet is also the perfect encapsulation of everything bad about it.
An admirably bad song; like a parody from South Park.
Rating:
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