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A review by wunkymatts
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Didrik Søderlind, Michael Moynihan
4.0
I'm changing my review from the first time I read this book, and knocking off a star. I think perhaps the first time I read it I was distraction by the horror of what I was reading and maybe my critical eye wasn't as engaged as it could be.
This book is very thorough and very well researched and the way it pulls different strands together and shows links between musical and political subcultures really is fantastic. That being said I can agree with some of the criticisms levelled against it. Some stuff that I really wanted to be challenged was taken at face value and some of the conclusions sounded a bit blithe and a perhaps, if I was being really unkind, like they were trying to impress their interview subjects.
The subject matter illicits a very strange response from me. These guys are so....cringe. They remind me of some metal guys I've known and they just try so, so hard and you get the feeling when they grow up a bit they'll be as embarrassed by what they say as you are. But then, at the same time, what they did was so horrific it can't be denied or excused, even of they did it for really juvenile reasons. People died.
They give metalheads a bad name.
This book is very thorough and very well researched and the way it pulls different strands together and shows links between musical and political subcultures really is fantastic. That being said I can agree with some of the criticisms levelled against it. Some stuff that I really wanted to be challenged was taken at face value and some of the conclusions sounded a bit blithe and a perhaps, if I was being really unkind, like they were trying to impress their interview subjects.
The subject matter illicits a very strange response from me. These guys are so....cringe. They remind me of some metal guys I've known and they just try so, so hard and you get the feeling when they grow up a bit they'll be as embarrassed by what they say as you are. But then, at the same time, what they did was so horrific it can't be denied or excused, even of they did it for really juvenile reasons. People died.
They give metalheads a bad name.