Revival of Instead of Clothes

Everyone,

After a long hiatus, during which much as changed and equally has been learned, Dave and I - Zach - along with a new author, Jon, are reviving the beloved Instead of Clothes blog, this time with a new look and a fresh sense for what's worth listening to in the greasy, bloody cesspool that is modern metal music.

Before getting back to the basics of what this blog is meant to do, let's introduce everyone who will be writing, starting with the n00b.

Jon has been a close friend of mine for many years, going to high school together, going to neighboring colleges, and forming a death metal band together. He's a gifted bassist, has a physics degree from one of the best engineering schools in the US, and loves meat products. His beard has stopped traffic. His mustache has made women want him and men...want him also. In terms of his writing focus at IoC, Jon is firmly seated as Chair of the Death Metal department, where he also holds secondary appointments in the Departments of Local/US Black Metal and Assorted Grindcores. He has been a metal music fan since I've known him (so, at least ten years) and has strong and important opinions to share with you silly bitches.

Dave is my cousin, long-time friend, and Co-Chair with me in the Department of Hardcore. (He's really the boss, however. He beats me.) Dave is probably the most entertaining writer I know, especially given his knack for attention-grabbing strings of offensive and brutally explicit metaphors and my knack for enjoying such. His experience with hardcore, death metal, and grindcore dwarfs Jon and my own combined by at least a factor of 1,902,441. I usually consult him when I have a question about metal history, what new music is even worth a shit, buttsex, or appropriate cereals for a healthy and balanced diet.

I am Zach. I don't really have any credentials whatsoever that would justify my being a part of anything like IoC. It is true that I've been a metal guitarist for about 5 years, listen to and enjoy a wide variety of metal genres, go to shows, enjoy and am minimally competent at writing coherent thoughts, and cannot whistle. It is also true that I like criticizing, arguing, and coming to the truth about things. IoC was bequeathed, in its birth from my slimy, mental womb, its sense of seriousness and realism about what is good in metal and what is worth writing to express that.

The goal of Instead of Clothes in its infancy stupid-phase was to bring a higher level of aesthetic and critical treatment to a music that is branded in most popular media as revolting, artless, or too strange for proper interpretation. A simple lack of humility (or a naïveté that IoC thankfully lacks) is all one needs to come to this view. As it turns out, most metal musicians are highly educated, intelligent, aesthetically and otherwise artistically sensitive, painstakingly perfectionist, and in doom metal's case, high as fuck. Most of the gory or otherwise disturbing lyrical content typical of some metal genres is usually taken too literally. And lastly, just as classical enthusiasts can appreciate the avant-garde - Bartok, Ives, serialists - in their favored genre without, for example, finding the concept of tone rows workable or agreeing about their intellectual value, so metal enthusiasts can appreciate the twisted and noisy wreckage that is grindcore or Satanic black metal, without the weighty commitments to doing crack and killing prostitutes or worshipping the dark lord the intellectual commitments to what the music stands for.

In its revival, Instead of Clothes will try to continue this fine tradition, and nothing more. One can only hope that in this blog's purgatorial phase, the authors have learned to stop being such pretentious douchebags.

Good luck with that.

Love,

Zach, Dave, & Jon

P.S. The first (real) posts in the Second Coming of the IoC Collective will be our respective Top 20 albums lists for 2012. Jon will be doing, as of right now, a Top 25, because he thinks he's cooler than all of you.