14.666: Heavy Metal Philosophies (feat. Adam Koch of Silent on Fifth Street)

This episode is a bit of a Heavy Metal Special! And that also makes it an opportunity to play some brutal solos and breakdowns courtesy of the metal band, Silent on Fifth Street, of which my friend Adam Koch is the bassist. You can find their music on Youtube, Spotify, and iTunes the easiest and we'll be playing a few samples of tracks here on this show instead of the usual bumps of black hoodie rap.  So if you have an aversion to bone-crushing metal with pummeling vocals, then it's okay to sit this one out. We all like what we like and I wouldn't blame you! But maybe you non-metalheads just skip the music breaks and tune in anyway -- you might gain some good food for thought here. Having been around for a handful of years now, Silent on Fifth Street are a presence in underground metal, receiving positive reception from heavy metal news outlets and even getting themselves some small-time hits. But this is still only the beginning, because they're currently cooking up a new EP -- and just a few months before recording this podcast, they'd actually managed to open up for Suicide Silence, Carnifex, and Lorna Shore. Some notable names for anyone that follows the really heavy side of metal. Join us as we talk about why metal gets more and more extreme, the differences in old school and new school metal, vocal techniques and instrumentation, the worst mosh stories we've heard, metal gatekeeping, and of course philosophy. Can you summon demons with metal? What about just in the allegorical sense? How healthy can it be dwelling on such dark topics with dark instrumentation? And how does Satanism factor into it all? What about Christian metal bands? All this and more on this week's conversation.  Silent on Fifth Street's music  Galaxies  Better off Dead  The Sickening Truth and their newest song: Meaningless Life