On paper, this album seems like a lock for one of the most fun and memorable releases of the year, as Drew Daniel is one of the smartest and most innovative artists currently working in electronic music and he and his talented friends are reinterpreting some of the most spectacularly self-parodying music ever recorded (the album's subtitle is "Electronic Profanations of Black Metal Classics").  The reality, however, is more baffling than anything.  While Heathen certainly boasts a couple of inspired moments, its bulk lies somewhere in an unsatisfying no-man's land between one-note joke, head-scratching pastiche, and weirdly reverent homage.
As ridiculous and contrarian as the idea of turning extremely hostile, uncommercial, and politically dubious metal into queer club anthems sounds, it is clear that Daniel went into this endeavor as a sincere fan of the genre who was just as intent on celebrating black metal as he was on calling attention to its more laughable aspects.  Drew clearly knows his metal, drawing as equally from first-wave classics by Venom and Hellhammer as he does from deep obscurities by Sargeist and An.  Also, for the most part, Daniel loosely leaves the original chord progressions and structures intact, which is simultaneously one of the album's greatest weaknesses and one of its most compelling twists.  Staying somewhat true to the original songs definitely inhibits Drew's ability to transform Satanic misanthropy into dance floor-packing pop gems, but the transformation can still be impressively radical, most notably with the soulful House take on Sarcófago's "Ready to Fuck" (featuring guest vocals from Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner).
Given those self-imposed constraints, Drew and his collaborators opt for fairly primitive strains of black metal, as they offer a far less restrictive canvas than more contemporary, baroque strains.  Still, these are not particularly catchy chord progressions for the most part, so Daniel and his cohorts are forced to create their dance anthems primarily through radical rhythmic overhauls.  The execution of that, lamentably, is where Heathen goes very wrong for me, as The Soft Pink Truth seem to combine metal fascination with a crash course in the last 20 years of underground dance music.  The end result often sounds (at best) like raspy metal vocals welded to second-rate Squarepusher or Venetian Snares, making the album both perplexing and instantly dated.  I can understand the conceptual reason for mashing the two scenes together, but it certainly is not easy on my ears.  I did not particularly like rave/house music in the '90s and it is sadly no better when metallized by the guys from Matmos.
That said, some great moments still shine through the clattering, synth-driven chaos, particularly the cover of Hellhammer's "Maniac," as the lazy, cartoonishly menacing verses are absolutely hilarious ("mayhem is my goal!").  Also, Daniel cleverly tosses in an unexpected percussive allusion to the completely unrelated "Maniac" from the Flashdance soundtrack.  That was a nice touch.  Venom's genre-birthing "Black Metal" is also quite fun.  More often, however, things that should be extremely funny just fall kind of flat, elicit a fleeting smirk, or are just are not particularly amusing at all.  The latter category is solely represented by an annoying (but brief) performance of an Anal Cunt side project's "Grim and Frostbitten Gay Bar."  As for the former categories, they are best represented by the C&C Music Factory snatches in "Satanic Black Devotion," M.C. Schmidt's attempt to sound vampiric, and Wasner's deadpan soul diva-wailing of lines like "I will lick you from the feets to the head, making you feel torrential orgasms."
Aside from my fundamental disinterest in taking a tongue-in-cheek trip through the history of rave with some metal vocals tacked on, the most damning flaw with Heathen is that it is just not as good as the music that it is mocking.  As silly as they are at times, most of the original songs are still bracingly, viscerally bad-ass.  These covers, on the other hand, largely feel like a very labor-intensive, elaborate novelty.  Also, several of these bands are better at being self-parodying than The Soft Pink Truth are at parodying them.  For example, Jenn Wasner's performance in "Ready to Fuck" is amusing, I suppose, but not nearly as funny as the singer from Sarcófago referring to his cock as a "penetrator hammer" with complete earnestness.  Consequently, Heathen falls short as both music and humor for me, which is very exasperating given the promise of the premise and the level of talent involved.  It is hard to imagine many people continuing to listen to this album after the initial curiosity subsides.  That said, Heathen does succeed in one regard: as subversive art, as the orgiastic cover art and campy collision of queer/rave culture with corpse-paint and evil posturing goes a long way towards de-fanging some of Black Metal’s more homophobic/fascistic/extreme right-wing tendencies.
 
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