This is a cautionary tale.
You know that metal music with the screamo vocals where you have no chance of being able to figure out what they’re singing about? I really hate that stuff. I feel sorry for the vocalists ruining their instruments like that. Why don’t they just sing properly?
I began to dislike them just a little bit more in that moment…
Hate’s a really strong word, isn’t it? Maybe I don’t hate it. But I don’t like it. Maybe I should listen to some more of it before I make up my mind? Maybe I should have never agreed to speak to the people from Boorloo post metal band, Neomantra?
These are some of the things tripping through my tiny little mind as I get ready to meet with Neomantra bass player, Lee Afentopoulos and Drummer, Greg Turner. I mean, the fucking bass player and drummer! Don’t they know who I am? What, the singer can’t come outside while the sun is shining because it might burn his lily white skin? The fresh air might sear his vocal cords? Fuck! Fuck these people for asking me to come talk to them. And fuck me for agreeing. This is not how I want to spend a Saturday morning.
I opened with, “I was listening to your music this morning and the Dogz left the room. Even they don’t like it.”
“My kids don’t like it, either,” Afentopoulos fired right back.
We were on our own because Turner hadn’t even bothered to turn up yet. True, we were both early and Turner, when he did arrive, was dead on time and full of apologies as he saw us sitting in the beer garden, all standoffish, like a blind date gone terribly wrong. It was, after all, him who’d made the arrangements.
I’m writing this now and wondering how long I can keep up this pretence. Afentopoulos and Turner are two of the loveliest people you’d ever want to meet, just ordinary human beings really, and I mean that in the most earnestly reverential way because what are we if we’re not all ordinary? In fact, I’m yet to meet a true rock star who isn’t an ordinary, decent, compassionate human being; and by that measure, Afentopoulos and Turner are true rock stars. But I wanted to open with the hate angle because controversy sells. (That’s controversy, Jeremy, Brian, not misogyny.)
We had a lovely chat. Of course we did. I tried to impress them with stories of seeing Cannibal Corpse (I’ve never been in a room where the scent of B.O. was so strong, where the mismatch between the intent of the band and the mood of the crowd was so great) and Machine Head (where I saw for the first time a circle pit and was tempted to jump into the vortex — I’ve done a lot of shit in my time, but that would have ended me and not because my fellow circlers wouldn’t have picked me up when I inevitably fell, but because I was just too old *sigh*). They’re post metal bands, right? I hoped so.
Then we turned to Tool. I think Afentopoulos mentioned them first as we drifted through a discussion of the mathematics of music initiated by Turner (he is the drummer, after all). I was vaguely aware of Tool’s association with the Fibonacci sequence, but I was, by now, well out of my depth.
“I saw them at Metropolis years ago. Maynard spent most of his time creating a massive artwork on the stage,” was the most intelligent sounding I could get.
Afentopoulos and Turner smiled indulgently and I began to wonder what they were doing wasting their Saturday morning talking to me. They were probably thinking the same. I’d started with, ‘you’re shit’ and here they were refusing to return fire. I began to dislike them just a little bit more in that moment, because I realised I’d snookered myself and reduced my options to one — I had to go away and actually listen to their music. They even gave me a copy of their EP, Henosis, on vinyl no less. Fuck those two, I was back to wanting to hate them.
So, here I am listening to Henosis for the umpteenth time. I need to put something on the record now, it gets to the heart of how prejudice can be so deeply unconscious. I’ve always listened to the voice as an instrument. Sometimes it’s taken me years of listening to a track before I’ve realised what the vocalist is actually singing. So, why my dislike of the vocal style that Neomantra’s Royce Zanetic pulls off so convincingly? There actually is no reason.
Breathe, Andrea. Listen.
Henosis is a triumph of Jarod Callow’s drop-tuned guitar and problem solving, which is where the bass and drums come in. It’s also where the mathematics come in. It’s not just nerdy pretention, it’s an expression of the search for meaning. All music is mathematical, but Neomantra’s take is at the outer edges of the musical canon. As for the vocals, they’re fit for purpose, nothing else would be right in the context of Neomantra’s music. I get that now. These people are operating in a galaxy far, far away, transmitting to the universe in a code they know and understand intimately, but which most of the rest of the denizens of existence are yet to come to grips with. Like all pioneers, it’s not their job to care whether people get them, it’s their job to keep pushing boundaries.
And that’s part of the paradox for Neomantra. Not only do they do what they do in the isolated obscurity of Boorloo, with so little chance of material musical success that Afentopoulos takes his solace from the monotony of truck driving and Turner disappears into mathematical theorems, but they also are made of the stuff that gives them no choice but to make what the mainstream sees as obscure music. Double jeopardy for them.
There is hope, however. Margot Robbie is a big fan. Well, having recently declared her love of metal on the Graham Norton Show, she would be if she knew that Neomantra existed. When it’s online, I’m going to send this article to her and suggest she has a listen, because I fucking love them.
Told you this was a cautionary tale.
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