I’m not much of a splits guy. Usually it’s a too much of this, too much of that, and I end up forgetting about them entirely. But here we have a perfect split from a marriage of like minds that have no doubt watched David Warner get his head sliced off by plate glass in The Omen and thought, “God, I wanna do that one day!”, but settled on metal as a distant second career instead.

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Sharie Nayland‘s voice is like ice water and mercury dripped down the small of your back in a darkened room. She’s like a post-apocalypse metal Grace Jones or Eartha Kitt, her vibrato just too-tremulous enough to give this music the exact amount of the creeps it needs. Avoid any acid while listening to The Wounded Kings’ superior Hammond-laced doom; you’ll just freak yourself out and think you’re Sean Connery in Zardoz , nearly naked and running from a giant floating head yelling “The Penis is evil!”

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The thing driving traditionalists crazy is the fact that there’s never been a better time to be a forward-thinking metal fan. I mean, Aborym, Rolo Tomassi, Iwrestledabearonce, OvO, Sigh — what is that shit?

It’s the outlier ethos finally hitting metal. It’s what follows after bands have already pulled at the fabric of metal genres and, no surprise, find them to be made of frayed old material that rips real easily.

To keep this metaphor going way past its due date, what’s happening now is part inexplicable, and part a groovy generation stitching swatches of all kinds of shit to all kinds of other shit while the metal-god version of Tim Gunn yells, “Make it work!”

Incredibly, with incredible regularity, it does.

Do you feel it, ladies, gentlemen, gentlemen who wish they were ladies, and so on? The incredible holy-shit-we’re-in-a-golden-age-ness of it all?

Because we totally are.

And we need to feel proud. Proud that, despite all the hard work and best efforts of the musty traditionalist ‘tards and constant efforts to suffocate metal in neo-thrash dead ends, Big Four circle jerks, only-troo-allowed ideological purity tests, and the first gurgles of the coming neo-nu metal kraze, The Armies of Awesomeness have beat out the Fuddies of Duddy.

So the three discs I’ve chosen are almost random in the sense that almost every week something blisteringly terrific shows up which leaves us with only one real problem — what the fuck do we call the issue of this new era of sui generis excellence?

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Jennifer’s Body was screwed before a single image flickered in public. The immediate reasons were twofold.

First, Karyn Kusama directed it. That would be that same Kusama whose gritty indie-film Girlfight was celebrated, but whose pricey, high fashion futurist Æon Flux was shredded by the studio and then released without reviewer pre-screenings. The press surveyed the carnage, located the person least responsible— ironically, Kusama — and promptly laid blame on her.

Around the same time, Diablo Cody was still flush with the out of the box success of her first screenplay, Juno. Was it time to knock the attractive ex-stripper down a few pegs no matter what she wrote? Yes it was.

So — deadset on consigning Kusama to the dustbin of one-hit-wonders and eager to loathe anything Cody crafted, the critics promptly lowered themselves to the occasion by trashing the hard-to-pigeonhole Jennifer’s Body on its release in 2009 for reasons that were united mainly by their inchoate ugliness. But later for what may have explained Body’s kneejerk drubbing.

For I am here to praise Cody/Kusama’s great film, which may have MetalSucks readers going, “What the fuck is Jennifer’s freakin’ Body release doing in the New York Times of Metal anyway?”

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After listening to Psycho’s female blowtorch, Penny Torture, and Ava Inferi’s haunting distaff elemental, Carmen Susana Simões, I realized it’s time we just chill and admit that women are all-around better at this metal-singing thing.

Is this mad exaggeration? It feels like that when I’m away from an MPEG player, but then I listen to those two radically different bands, to Psycho’s primal-scream old school death or Ava Inferi’s doomed-out, gothy whatsit, and it feels I’m not over-reaching, I’m underselling.

And it’s not just two superior releases (Ava Inferi’s Onyx and Psycho’s Pain Addict Pigs). It’s just become impossible to ignore the fact that females are not only doing equal or better work in the same genre jobs as male counterparts, they’re also making metal records that go places no male on Earth — none, nada, zip-ol-lina — could go. That 2011’s best metal so far — Subrosa’s No Help for the Mighty Ones — is an almost all-femme effort of relentless pan-genre awesomeness only adds arsenic and new lace to my argumentative cake.

All of which may have the reader thinking, “You do realize, you silly person, that you’ve just written off the work of one half the human race.”

To which I say, “Yeah, well, I guess I’m pimping a little irony here, since that’s business as usual with women and the metal press. But irony aside, please bear with me.”

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