WOMEN ARE BETTER METAL SINGERS THAN MEN
Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 3:00pm by Ian Grey
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.”
Just because all the big bands are partying over at the European festivals at the moment doesn’t mean we aren’t already looking forward to the Fall,* when Moonspell, Samael and Book of Black Earth hit North America for a MetalSucks-sponsored run of dates this October and November. The “Night Eternal Above America” tour is an early candidate for one of the most exciting lineups of the Fall, and also features Germany’s Secrets of the Moon. Moonspell and Samael are pretty much legends at this point yet I’ve not seen either band live; I saw the final minute of Book of Black Earth’s set at this Spring’s New England Metal and Hardcore Festival and instantly wished I’d caught the whole thing. We’ll have exclusive news, giveaways and more for the Night Eternal Above America tour as the dates draw closer.
