In this bimonthly column, staff writer Doug Moore takes a very close look at extreme metal lyrics. Some will be serious, some will be silly, but they’ll all go under the microscope.
Simplicity is powerful.
It’s easy to lose sight of this fact in the metal world, where bombast so often defines the game. The amps get bigger, the riffs get heavier, and the antics get zanier, forever and ever, amen. Thus it has been since metal’s early days, and so shall it always be.
But some metal bands understand that less can be more. Neurosis has built a career on this idea. They use simple pieces to build their songs, but taken together, these pieces form cosmos-sized wholes. Neurosis exceeds all of their peers in their mastery of this concept. That’s why they’re so hard to successfully imitate.
Frontmen Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till treat their lyrics with the same restraint that they treat their songs. “I Can See You,” a Kelly tune from 2004’s The Eye of Every Storm, demonstrates the power of this discipline.
Did you see your people?
They all turned out for you
We were all together not so long ago
In the shadows we can see you
In the wind we hear your laugh
When the light reclaimed you
We were left clawing at the sky
In the oceans we can find you
In the sun we praise your name
In the dirt we pray for God to bring you back again
I can see you, I can see you
In the void the stones are turning and turning and turning
I can see you, I can see you
Songs don’t get much more frugal, and expressions of grief don’t get much more profound. “I Can See You” has just twelve distinct lines. Between them, they feature just one word that’s longer than two syllables (“together”). Kelly’s lyrics hit that much harder for their compression.
We think of dying as a momentary act—a brief threshold between existence and absence. But for those close to the deceased, death can reverberate through the years. When you lose someone close to you, their presence in your life doesn’t end with the funeral. You begin to see reminders of them everywhere: in the sun, the wind, the shadows, the sea.
You cherish these reminders, no matter how much they sadden you, because they’re all you have left of that person. You can’t bring them back, no matter how hard you pray. They are as far beyond your grasp as the sky itself.
Meanwhile, the universe goes on. The sun keeps shining. The planets and their moons—stones in the void—keep turning. Other people continue to work, play, fight, give birth, and die in their turn. And you must do so too, no matter how shattered your inner world feels.
This is a simple fact of life, but even simple facts can be hard to deal with. Simplicity is powerful, after all.
