It’s officially October, better known as “Spooky Season” or “Spooktober” in Casa Goat. As a time that inspires many a metalhead to simply be themselves out in the open — the darker side of human imagery, skulls, witches, demons, erections, having a welcome place in the open —we here at The Goat Review embrace both the spooky in sound and in picture. Today, our own Scuttlegoat steps forward to recommend you an album from the wild, industrial side, The Berzerker (by The Berzerker), and a film from the honorable terror, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (by Shinya Tsukamoto). Partake in one or both or neither, just make sure it doesn’t drive you berserk…
The Berzerker – The Berzerker (2000, Earache Records, Industrial Deathgrind)
In game design, there is a concept of designing bottom-up versus designing top-down. Bottom-up means that the game mechanisms inform the flavor and lore of the game — say you want hook swinging to be a part of the gameplay, so you then work backwards to figure out why the character has a hook and in which setting that would work. Top-down is then the inverse — let’s say we know we want a western setting, so now we can think about what game mechanics could fit this world. Likely shooting, lots of open space, and hefty amounts of dysentery.
We don’t often think of artists approaching music this way. And while I would argue that, in most cases, musical albums are made “mid out”, examples for both top-down and bottom-up design certainly exist. Anaal Nathrakh, for example, have continued the pursuit of more and more expression with matching levels of musical extremity by incorporating varying amounts of heavy electronic elements into their sound. The punching, overloud electronic bass drums in a song like “Hold Your Children Close and Pray for Oblivion” from 2016’s The Whole of the Law are a solution to the puzzle and serve to preserve the momentum of intensity through a section that is, ostensibly, a breakdown. Compare this to the subject of today’s review, The Berzerker.
The Berzerker’s approach to percussion is entirely the point of their self-titled debut, The Berzerker, as the band conceptualized itself as a hybrid of the most extreme of electronic music with the most extreme of heavy metal. The way schranz-y techno beats mingle with barbaric deathgrind tremolo runs is not subtle and often approached with little care. The drums might frequently overpower the rest of the performance, which would normally become an issue, but here it’s entirely the point. This whole album builds around the absurd premise to pair the asinine, base simplicity of techno drums with the asinine, base simplicity of simple deathgrind. And in that way, it succeeds — without subtlety, yes, but also with a sense of weirdness. These songs aren’t written by a metalhead, but by a techno producer who gained a sudden interest in extreme metal and as such, the songs feel ever so slightly off-kilter in how straight and mechanistic they are.
And for that reason we’re pairing it with…
Tetsuo, The Iron Man (鉄男) (1989, dir. Shinya Tsukamoto)
Tetsuo: The Iron Man is an odd specimen. So odd, in fact, that even Joe Bob Briggs recommends you watch the shortest cut. Admittedly, he also called the film a one-of-a-kind experience and the most punk rock movie ever made, so don’t get deterred from putting this eclectic gem into your LaserDisc player. Directed as if Cronenberg, Lynch, and Jarmusch had fused together in a freak accident, Tetsuo resists presenting a fully decipherable narrative, ruminating instead on the idea of man transforming into metal. After a salaryman (with a reasonable sized cock) commits a hit-and-run, he slowly transforms into a hybrid of machine and man. Luckily for us, Tetsuo then also spirals into the classic Japanese platter of absurd gore — sex involving a man’s penis turning into a drill, sodomy via heavy machinery, and general metallic mutation, all you could want is here. Finally, the salaryman meets up with his hit and run victim once more, only to fuse with him and try to turn the world into an all-metal dystopia.
The story leaves more than a couple questions. Why the initial hit-and-run incident would lead to the transformation involved is unclear — few things are spelled out in the film. Frankly, it is hard to believe that there are answers for these questions in the first place. The concept of man turning into metal is likely what the film started as, completely written around the desired imagery. Tetsuo is, in that sense, fully bottom-up. It is a weird, sometimes sloppy, and often tasteless work, pairing perfectly with the garish attitude of The Berzerker.
