"seems like the drummer has serious issues"
That video is just plain disturbing

surprised nobody's mentioned fushitsusha yet, i think certain things they've done are the heaviest things i've heard, but also obviously early swans, and i find hototogisu at their heaviest to be the heaviest current band i can think of.
sunn o))) are heavy and everything, but their theaticral nature creates levity.

true, can't believe i forgot; stuff like "that which is becoming to me" has a devastating feeling.

now that i'm listening to them, i forgot to mention mouthus.

Shit... the moment I saw the thread's title I thought of early swans.... Therefore, I'm going to say Einstürzende Neubauten, they've always had a "heavy" dimension, such as with the Silence is sexy or some of their early stuff (at least Kollaps).

Glenn Branca's symphonies are always heavy, at least the ones I have, and, adding to the Swans', the Angels of Light cd I have (Since I left you) is also pretty heavy, sort of calm but hard on the low-end of my aural spectrum, so to speak. Enough to get my trusty speakers to buzz like fuck.

Am I the only one here that thinks the Zeppelin's "Achilles Last Stand" is the pinnacle of heavy?

John Bonham was a fiend behind the kit.

I would go more towards In The Evening from the late Zeppelin for the most heaviousity, but yeah very heavy. Achilles last Stand was Jimmy Page's favorite one they say.

Other exceedingly heavy songs from this supergroup of virtuosic musicans:
(you know, as opposed to rambunctious bunches of bands that you can't even tell their songs apart or what the name is of the damn "song" and aren't fit to even lick The Beatles boots)

Custard Pie
In My Time of Dying
Bring It On Home
When The Levee Breaks
No Quarter
and the heaviest:
Dazed & Confused live!

I had forgetten about that one. Solid choice.

"In My Time Of Dying" takes it for straight up blues heaviness.

thanks for ...

but anyway,

nice to read the learned opinion of someone for which actual music is not anathema, by the way.

Oh yeah! Dazed and Confused live.

The part that sticks out for me there is the bow solo when it's just all rumblely noise and then breaks down into the wah/hand slide part to finish it off.

John Paul Jones' hell-spawned bass aside.

Another heavy hitter is "Sunshine Of Your Love" Those tones don't come out with anything under 10.

i've never made it all the way thru a led zeppelin show, so i guess you could say that's heavy (as in boring).

i like no quarter better than dazed & confused, riffwise, dazed is better (smoking sabbath when they were still shuffling to the blues) but if you are talking heavy, no quarter is fucked. that's like khanate 30 years before.

Funny thing, an awful lot of these groups being mentioned...they're all wimps & poseurs. The music business is such a business now, after all. And the art suffers, so the music suffers.

How so? How are many ultimately poseurs? (besides the fact that none of them are virtuosic musicans with some being barely "musicians" at all?)

Refer back to my original post in this thread.


Every artist I mention was addicted to drugs. Almost all of what I mention was written, composed, recorded and performed live while everyone involved was smacked out of their fucking minds.

Now please, don't try to form some juvenile argument that I'm saying all great music has to be made by drug-addicts. That obviously isn't true and I wouldn't hold it as a prerequisite per se. But what is undeniable is that most of the best music throughout history has been made by drug-addicts.

Sightings
early AMM
Tony Conrad (not a band but still pretty heavy shit)

the early melvins. Gluey Porch Treeatments and Ozma.

godflesh , the first one, streetcleaner. that shit is heavy.

and the best heavy song ever, BLACK SABBATH children of the grave!

Keiji Haino is a virtuosic musician; he can play it straight with the best of them, and simply chooses not to a great deal of the time. He does do the occasional "jazz" set on guitar, and he definitely knows the instrument inside and out. I hardly think anyone who can play for 12-18 hours straight at the age of 50+ can be called either a "wimp" or a "poseur." Fushitsusha definitely made some of the darkest and heaviest music I have ever heard. I'm pretty sure Haino steers clear of the drugs too, but drug use or non-use matters little to me.

i was going to mention fushitsusha but didnt have time to type it.

I really didn't think much of that song when I heard it. It sounds like a Guess Who song I found.

for someone who makes great bones about presenting themselves as highly cultured i'm absolutely gobsmacked by your ignorance and stupidity regarding contemporary music. no doubt in twenty five years when some greil marcus like chartacter writes some bogus reevalution of current underground music you'll be able to accept the music as being culturally valid and worth your time. you are a fool, i don't understand why you post on a music message board at all.

caspar brötzmann massaker should be up there.

Haino shits on everyone. There's a four-bar passage on the live video where he plays this entirely straight, proper old-school, Zep-esque metal 'lick' that confirmed exactly what you're saying. It's a 3 1/2 octave run, five times, in 7 (or probably more, I forget) positions at lightening speed, utterly sick. And then he goes back to the excruciating thing that we all know and love him for.

I reckon a mention of Wagner and Mahler can't go awry at this point.

besides, weren't we over this already? you don't need to know how to play to make great music and just because you know how to play is not something to frown upon?

One of the things that makes early swans' sound come across as so heavy is the fact that Cop and Young God on the CD release are so well produced. A bunch of static and nonspecific screaming is yet to suck me in to the extent that Cop does. I remember buying it and walking around London with it on my cd player, it was fucking apocalyptic.

...not to mention the lyrical content.

And the fact you can hear the lyrics.
Big Black is pretty heavy lyrically too.

Q Magazine did a feature on the "50 heaviest albums ever" a long time ago when i was about 15, it introduced me to alot of stuff. They had things like Atomizer by Big Black, Evol, Cop by Swans, a few hip hop albums, that german band spelt Einz.... Neubeuten... whatever it is, Godspeed you black emperor, some obligitory heavy metal albums, and this thing called DJ 6666 which i ended up buying and going "what in fucks name is this" (when i was 15) and sending to a charity shop. Id love to have it back now.

Considering how bland and mainstream Q is it was a really cool little feature.

What the fuck?! This is the most moronic statement I've ever fucking heard in my life.

how about Kevin Drumm? Not a band, but his "Sheer Hellish Miasma" has the balls of a bulldozer on crack

merzbow was pretty heavy as well. i find that when something is really, really droney and heavy it starts to make me feel sleepy but in a good way.

hotugogisu i didnt think where that heavy. they where heavy but it was more of a feedback drone thing where as sunn o))), earth, merzbow etc make your bowels loose.

yes i know what you mean about the layers of sound as apposed to the just doom laydeness of guitars de tuned. lightning bolt, now i dont really know where thay would fit?

i recall seeing some power electronics gigs and having to leave the room because it was so harsh. normally i would have stayed but this was just microphone feedback, looped, through a very large speaker and the guy making it screaming every now and again in between attacking the audinece. the sound was making my head swim and i felt like i was going to pass out.

i was thinking that in quantanomo bay and places like that they put people into rooms and play 'white noise' to them as a form of torture/dissorientation. what happens if they get someone who is really into it?

i was going to say sheer hellish miasma, but since it was about bands/artists and kevin drumm's discography has so much different stuff, i restrained.

but sheer hellish miasma? fucking right, one of the heaviest records ever, and one of the best.

i wanted to review it (the reissue) for the magazine i work for but they wouldn't let me.

skullflower are also pretty damn heavy.

Electric Muthafucken Wizard.

Actually, it just occurred to me that nobody ever talks about Whitehouse at this here place.

Whitehouse.

Muthafuckers.

the Unicorns.

My idea of heavy:
Suma
ufomammot
bongripper
conan

this track is like a 13 minute breakdown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ychT04UK1TE

mine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkHce9cGQ88

Earth is my idea of heavy.

remember when you wrote that love letter about earth about how they were like this big gay bottle of wine and how you wanted their dicks in your mouth that was fun

slan
naked city w/eye
melvins

Big Black

Most of these other bands only use conventions to make their music sound heavier... Melvins did it with speed, Atari Teenage Riot did it with volume, Doom Metal does it with bass, Atari's bands do it with drugs, plenty of other group do it with lyrics... But Big Black is the only band I've ever encounted who achieve earth-shaking heaviness without the pretentions or conventionality of these bands that rely on their pre-determined method of arriving at it.