Book report: Into Everlasting Fire
The official history of Immolation
Immolation are the band that made me fall in love with death metal. Having purchased ‘Dawn of Possession’ on a whim back in 2005(?) on one of many surreptitious trips to Guildford HMV, something about this album clarified the small print of this genre for me. For all its external bluster, death metal requires a studious temperament orders of magnitude above its troubled cousin black metal. Immolation’s opening salvo of albums make for the perfect welcoming committee, challenging the listener with leftfield assaults without completely decoupling from context. Morbid Angel, Suffocation, Incantation, all made more sense after becoming acquainted with Immolation.
That being said, they are the last band I would’ve chosen to read a four hundred page book about. Surely the unassuming duo of Ross Dolan and Bob Vigna don’t warrant this level of scrutiny? Something also repeatedly alluded to by author Kevin Stewart-Panko. They are, by all accounts, and from my own personal experience of briefly meeting them at gigs, some of the nicest people in death metal, a fact parroted by the many characters interviewed for ‘Into Everlasting Fire’. What possible value could there be in such a detailed analysis of their careers?
A great deal, it turns out. The lack of headline grabbing antics all but forces this book into a detailed study of how the sausage is made. Timeless contributions to death metal are almost incidental to its core purpose of meticulously documenting the daily grind these musicians willingly subject themselves to. From this angle, ‘Into Everlasting Fire’ is aimed at “true” fans in the literal sense of the word, those fascinated by music as a cultural and social process as opposed to debauched calamity porn.
Stewart-Panko is a conversational, personable writer. That is, until he’s required to describe Immolation’s actual music. At these points I couldn’t help but chuckle as the syllable density suddenly triples and Stewart-Panko morphs into a Shakespearean poet.
The book bounces between exposition, interpersonal dynamics, recording sessions, and touring schedules at an agreeable pace. The interviews conducted with the band and their many associates evenly peppered throughout. The flow only becomes repetitive by the time we get to 2009 and Immolation’s signing to Nuclear Blast. But this is more a reflection of their assimilation into a glorified toy factory and its limited tolerance for accident or spontaneity than any fault of the author’s.
I could write an entire book specifically on Immolation’s music. But this, for the most part, is not the intention of ‘Into Everlasting Fire’. Whether by accident or design, its USP is to acquaint the reader with the more intimate details of daily life in alternative music. The challenges of shifting lineups, administrative headaches, the tight budgets, the music industry’s slow decline since the late 80s when Immolation formed. The persistence required to endure all this for over thirty five years straining even these ostensibly level heads.
From a young and unstable lineup trying to find a voice in the late 80s as Rigor Mortis, to the early development of their signature dissonance and tugging rhythms, their oddly coy attitude to label attention from Earache and Roadrunner, their eschewing of the Scott Burns treatment in favour of Harris Johns for their debut (the man responsible for ‘Pleasure to Kill’, ‘Dimension Hatröss’, and ‘Persecution Mania’ amongst others), and Andreas Marschall’s distinctive artwork gracing their early run of albums in subtle defiance of Dan Seagrave’s aesthetic dominance over death metal, their decision to go rogue and severe ties with Roadrunner after just one album, to the countless anecdotes of tours held together by string and good intentions. As the story evolves it becomes clear that through naivety, enthusiasm, and an oddly monomaniacal determination, Dolan and Vigna are anomalous in their very regularity.
The book’s thesis, if it has one, is to explain exactly why Immolation never matched the popularity of Morbid Angel, Entombed, Cannibal Corpse, or Obituary. The answer, predictably, is multicausal. Dawn of Possession’s sales figures were respectable, but the album struggled to shine amongst the formidable class of 91. Their subsequent label woes delaying the release of ‘Herein After’ led many fans to assume Immolation had broken up (this was before we had apps keeping us abreast of each other’s bowel movements). Their decision to partner with a reluctant Paul Orofino from ‘Failures for Gods’ onwards, a producer adamant in his total ignorance of death metal, resulting in an album still criticised for its production (a personal favourite of mine regardless). Further bad luck as some of their strongest material on ‘Close to a World Below’ and ‘Unholy Cult’ coincided with a significant downturn in death metal’s popularity.
And of course there’s the fact that Immolation’s music is itself highly idiosyncratic. Vigna’s off kilter style, the density and tangential flow, the longform, wandering narratives, and their lack of conceptual clarity outside of anti-religious sentiment or vague social criticism (compare this with Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, or Nile). All this and more contributed to their failure to gain traction beyond a certain tier of the underground.
The book is keen to frame the recent past in terms of an uptick in Immolation’s fortunes however, as advances in technology and the security of Nuclear Blast’s backing worked in their favour to bring in new fans and stabilise their release schedule by the 2010s.
The co-option into death metal’s casualised tier was itself hardly smooth however. As Dolan explains, ‘Unholy Cult’ was largely a way for them to metabolise 9/11, the shifting sentiment of their music from that point onwards is attributable to the social and political upheavals following the attacks. 2005’s ‘Harnessing Ruin’ being the most obvious break with the past both musically and lyrically.
‘Shadows in the Light’ is arguably the last “problematic” Immolation album, in that it still bursts with character but failed to land with an audience, something reflected by the relatively few pages dedicated to it. An album also looked upon with some bitterness by the band themselves owing to Listenable Records botching the release schedule by putting out the ‘Hope and Horror’ EP at exactly the same time.
These last vestiges of amateurism were finally wiped clean by the easy accord reached with Nuclear Blast, in exchange the label secured a reliable if modest revenue stream. The production lining of metal made all the more explicit by this time as many bands found themselves approached by Scion. The subsidiary of Toyota ploughed money into festival and recording deals that would make any band drool, in exchange for access to a younger marketing demographic:
Part of the company’s goal was to tap into the market of first-time car buyers who had recently graduated college, were working their first “real” jobs and suddenly found themselves with disposable income. Unlike recent college grads from generations past, however, these new entries to the workforce were still clinging to their subcultural identities and lifestyles, those that, more often than not, formed around music scenes.
The forgettable ‘Provenance’ EP the only lasting legacy of this partnership.
And herein lies the bittersweet subtext to ‘Into Everlasting Fire’. Despite Stewart-Panko’s attempts to celebrate their Nuclear Blast material (his favourite album is ‘Atonement’ apparently), he unintentionally highlights the fact that with secure label backing and digital recording technology comes the flattening of Immolation’s oddball contours. A once cumbersome beast, however challenging to ride for its members, becomes a rigorously timetabled content farm.
Whilst the book allows plenty of space for fair criticism of their work (not least from Immolation themselves), one suspects that Nuclear Blast insisted that this period be framed as nothing but good news from hereon in. Decibel, and indeed Immolation themselves, would hardly want to rock the paymaster’s boat too much after all.
The gradual disappearance of Jeff Tandy’s voice in the narrative is a subtle barometer of this. The former Averse Sefira bassist and longtime friend of the band makes regular appearances in the first half, only to mysteriously drop out when the book reaches the ‘Majesty and Decay’ era, subliminally signalling Immolation’s severance with the more chaotic elements of the underground perhaps.
No one could deny after reading this book that Immolation deserved a break by 2010. No one cold deny that they were and are nothing but industrious, honest, and supportive of their scene. Despite my cynicism toward the neutered simplicity of ‘Majesty and Decay’, or the fact that I cannot remember anything about ‘Kingdom of Conspiracy’ despite spinning it as I type, greed and narcissism are the last words that come to mind here.
It should also be noted that their embrace of populist window dressing was not unconditional. The garishly infantile digital artwork – the faceless barcoded figures decorating ‘Kingdom of Conspiracy’ being more aligned with video gaming aesthetics or other media for babies – was a direction that even Immolation began to pull back from eventually.
I always read ‘Atonement’ as a concession to the renewed appetite for old school authenticity by the time of its release, signalled most obviously by the return of the original logo. ‘Acts of God’ was even more explicit in this. The pivot back to classically inspired artwork. The drab colour scheme. A lingering tension in Vigna’s attempt to accommodate his towering compositional identity alongside the need to spoon feed his newer casualised fanbase some Gojira riffs.
No doubt many of these newer fans have scoped out their back catalogue. But how many will take this book’s framing of a clear if gradual uptick in quality and popularity at face value? And how many will sense the subtextual tension? One of a striking musical identity struggling to be born, carried along by well meaning yet malleable personalities, ill suited to protracted battles with the music industry and the pressure cooker of scene expectation. Eventually, and deservingly, deciding to enjoy the ride even if that meant losing a part of themselves in the process.
Despite their amusingly humble demeanours, Immolation’s career was far from normal. For all its naivety, ‘Into Everlasting Fire’ allows us to understand this abnormality better. A careful study of their music, the granular detail of record contracts, the shifting trends of music consumption, and the many moving parts involved in simply keeping a band afloat.
During death metal’s darkest years at the turn of the century they not only carried the genre on their backs but elevated the form. Despite this, one cannot escape the lingering suspicion that to some extent Immolation were always doing it out of habit.
That we and the author are forever noting how quaint Dolan and Vigna’s personalities and war stories are compared to their peers is not just a function of our addiction to problematic celebrity. It raises the question; if not a fanatical commitment to their artistic vision, what motivates these good natured blue collar workhorses? Did they simply become too invested to do anything else? Is Vigna’s ability to churn out achingly multifaceted riffs a function of creative will, or is it simply all he knows? And if it was muscle memory all along, is it any wonder that Immolation’s rougher edges were so easily shaved off by what remains of the profit motive in metal?
Or maybe this is too cynical. If this book achieves nothing else, it inadvertently forces us to question the assumption that we need artists to live in a manner befitting their art. A prejudice that still lingers toward musicians in particular. The people behind these great works must be Homeric, tragedian, with storied pasts and reformed presents (if they even survive to tell the tale), provoking in us an intoxicating mix of schadenfreude and deification. This prejudice is our problem, not Immolation’s. This book, every bit as unassuming and naïve as its subject matter, is a quiet rebuttal to our voyeuristic entitlement over musicians. Gently advocating for a story as humble as Immolation’s, one that has just as much right to be heard given the towering accomplishments of its individual members.