hough it's not often overtly acknowledged, science-fiction and fantasy authors have long inspired rock musicians. Acts such as Led Zeppelin, Rush, Mike Oldfield and Pete Townshend have all written works directly influenced by classic speculative stories, just as bands like Icicle Works, Heldon and Klaatu derive their names from specific SF tales. Still, few groups celebrate the link between literature and rock 'n' roll as explicitly as the Seattle-based BlöödHag, an "edu-core" ensemble whose shows, regularly held in libraries, consist almost entirely of speed-metal songs commemorating famed science-fiction and fantasy writers.
Necrotic Bibliophilia highlights 15 of the nearly three dozen tunes in the band's blistering biographical repertoire. Opening with the bone-crushing "Frank Belknap Long," an uncompromising track that venerates not only the novelist's poetry and short stories, but also his friendship with H.P. Lovecraft, the recording blends earsplitting guitar, bass and drums with surprisingly learned lyrics. For example, "H.G. Wells" notes that "writers still swipe from your most famous books, yet they forget the social satire of your later works," while "Octavia E. Butler" drolly pleads "don't make Octavia write for a hundred years, before you treat black women as good as guys with pointed ears." Similarly discerning sentiments are integrated into odes to storytellers Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Arthur C. Clarke, Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.
The shrieking vocals are virtually impossible to understand, but the booklet accompanying the disc thankfully contains the lyrics to every number except the hidden "bonus track," a comical cut that repeatedly intones "BlöödHag is cool ... they're a lot better than Korn." All four band members
are also profiled within the liner notes, with each individual facetiously revealed to be an accomplished author and the recipient of at least one well-known genre writing award.
Inspired, intellectual and incomprehensible
On the surface, it seems silly to craft intellectual songs, then blast the melodies out so ferociously that the concepts expressed within the works are altogether incomprehensible. Yet that's part of the absurd genius of this project. The group, whose motto is "the faster you go deaf, the more
time you have to read," isn't interested in having listeners grasp the nuances of every track. Rather, they seek to inspire curiosity, directing fans to study the liner notes and then—hopefully—head to the local library to examine the authentic output of the respective authors.
Each song is, in effect, a mini-treatise that, more often than not, provides biting social or historical commentary. "Roger Zelazny" declares that "the page of New Wave bore Roger's fresh face, set the taste and the pace for his time and place," just as "Jules Verne" observes that the novelist "fit his fiction to the science of the day ... practically invented the NRA." Then again, not every song is entirely serious. "Michael Moorcock" proclaims that the storyteller is, quite simply, the "best Eternal
Champion a kid ever had," even as "J.R.R. Tolkien" rhetorically asks if the late author should "kill Ralph Bakshi for the [animated] Lord of the Rings?"
A few cuts are disappointing, especially "Ray Bradbury," which is basically just a litany of the writer's most famous works, and the liner notes are inexplicably riddled with typographical errors. The actual melodies are also unexceptional, lacking any modicum of subtlety or harmonic significance. Nevertheless, BlöödHag successfully suggests the largely overlooked impact of speculative literature upon music and, to a somewhat lesser extent, pop culture in general. The deafening sound of Necrotic Bibliophilia may chiefly appeal to a youthful, head-banging crowd, but the ideas articulated within the compositions are definitely of interest to a more mature, mainstream SF audience, too.
