With its unending list of subgenres, the genre of “metal music” consists of a wide variety of musical styles. However, the variety of ways metal music can look is almost as wide as the ways it can sound. Some bands go all-out with intricate band logos, album art, and live performances, others take a more minimalist approach, and some use a combination of both depending on the medium.
One medium that is no exception to this variety is the band photo. While Mgła requires their trademark hoods, leather jackets, trees, and fog, a simple black background and street clothes are sufficient for Obituary. However, some band photos even fall short of the minimalist threshold and are just plain sloppy.
Due to the inevitable fact that any metal band, no matter how popular or talented, will have some terrible photos, I will be limiting my selection to photos from Encyclopaedia Metallum. As the definitive online database of everything metal, Encylopaedia Metallum has pretty strict standards, and they only allow one photo per band page, with few exceptions. It’s no surprise to see obscure bands with lousy photos or no photos at all on the website due to slim pickings, but Encyclopaedia Metallum’s standards usually result in a professional, high-quality photos of popular bands.
However, sometimes a decently popular band will have a surprisingly bad photo on their Encylopaedia Metallum page as well. These are the photos I will be making fun of today. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but because of all the brain cells I’ve lost to mosh pits and head banging, you’ll have to settle for a couple hundred each. Also I’m not these bands’ biographers, so any story I read into these photos is entirely made up.
I will be posting the band photos in question directly to this page without fear of copyright claims, because there’s no way the photographers who took these want to be credited for them.
Vital Remains
As a death metal band, Vital Remains stay true to their subgenre when it comes to stage presence: they don’t wear elaborate costumes and their only stage decoration is a banner with their logo. They do play O Fortuna at the beginning of their set, which probably wasn’t as cliché when they started doing it, but that’s the extent of it. I guess they must have figured that since they were ahead of the curve in on-stage theatrics for a death metal band, that gave them permission to take their band photo in a doorway.
I can just imagine them on tour, backstage after opening for a younger band that has since become more successful than them, saying something like:
Tony: “Hey guys, when was the last time we did a photo together?”
Gator: “I dunno, last tour?
Tony: “When was that?”
Gator: “Like three years ago?”
Tony: “Well, shit. We didn’t have half our current members back then! We gotta take another one!”
Gator: “Okay, well we can hire a photographer, find an abandoned shack somewhere, and…”
Tony: “No! We can’t do that. That’ll take too much time and money!”
Gator: “What are you talking about? This tour did really well, and it’s not like we’re going to record another album once we get home.”
Tony: “I already spent my share on coke.”
Gator: Sigh, “Okay, let’s just have Larry, our tour manager, take a photo of us in front of the audience at tomorrow night’s show.”
Larry, shouting from down the hall: “This is the last show of the tour, assholes!”
Tony: “Whatever. Hey, Larry! Can you take a photo of us?”
Larry: “Why? So I can show all my friends what a bunch of deadbeat crackheads look like?”
Tony: “Uh…yes?”
Peste Noire
I just guessed the context of Vital Remains having their photo taken backstage at some venue, but I actually know the context behind Peste Noire’s photo: it was taken during an actual live performance on a street corner in Ukraine. Before I knew this I was prepared to roast them for intentionally doing a photoshoot this bad, but the fact that they did this in front of an audience makes it even more hilarious. We can start with the obvious: the drummer (I don’t know which one, the sunglasses make it hard to identify him), is sitting on the ground banging on only two drums. Frontman Famine apparently can’t remember his own lyrics, as made evident by the music stand next to him.
But there’s much more ridiculousness that wasn’t caught in the photo frame. Famine is standing on an uneven slope for the entire performance, as is his music stand. The band’s third member, at least at the time they played this gig, is playing the accordion. Two drums and an accordion, that’s the extent of the instrumental accompaniment in this photo. The studio version of the song uses a more traditional ensemble of a full drum set, guitars, and bass, along with “occitan preaches,” whatever those are. But Famine rarely chooses to follow convention, so I guess when it came time to play the song live he opted to make it even more ridiculous.
I should note that said live audience on a street in Ukraine contained more attractive women per capita than any metal show I’ve attended, so maybe Famine’s really having the last laugh here.
Blasphemy
On second thought, Morpheus, I think I’ll take that blue pill after all.
Despite lead guitarist Caller of the Storms’ resemblance to Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix, he’s actually the least ridiculous-looking member of the band in this photo (with the least-ridiculous pseudonym).
Blasphemy are far from the only black metal band to do photoshoots in a basement, but despite the mockery that is endemic to this location, I selected Blasphemy’s photo because of the stage in the band’s career when they took it. It’s one thing for a budding black metal band to do a photoshoot in their basement with medieval weapons as a bunch of teenagers or young adults. However, the band’s rhythm guitarist on the far right, Deathlord of Abomination and War Apocalypse (try saying that three times fast), didn’t join the band until 1999, fifteen years after the band began, and long after they could be considered “young adults.”
That means after at least fifteen years of edgelord criminal activity and occasionally recording music, Blasphemy got the original idea to do their band photoshoot in a basement. I’m almost ready to take back everything I said about Peste Noire.
Impaled Nazarene
Despite everything I’ve said about the previous photos, at least they were of clear quality. I can’t even say that about Impaled Nazarene’s photo. The previous photos also showed their band members’ faces unless it was an intentional style choice like corpse paint or sunglasses. Okay, the accordionist from Peste Noire got cut out of the photo entirely, but you could see the faces of the band members who were in the photo. But I can’t say that about Impaled Nazarene’s photo, either. Sure, the sunglasses were obviously an intentional choice, but why is frontman Slutti666 (I hope that means something else in Finnish) covering his face with his hand? Is he supposed to be raising his fist like a threat? It looks more like he was scratching his nose when they took the shot and the photographer was too fed up with him to take another one.
I can no longer single out Vital Remains for taking their band photo in front of a doorway, because apparently Impaled Nazarene did the same thing. However, unlike Vital Remains, whose background would have still been awful no matter how they positioned it, Impaled Nazarene’s photo actually looks like they had ample solid black background. Maybe what the photographer lacked in the ability to focus his camera he made up for in optical illusions, making the room look bigger. But even if they had limited black background available, they could have disassembled the drum set, moved it out of the frame, and taken the photo at an angle so there was only black background behind them. Instead they chose to leave the door in the shot.
Is this a trend I don’t know about? Is it some kind of subliminal messaging? Could it be the new version of leaving Satanic prayers on the album that you can only hear when you play it backwards? I’ve spent my fair share of time on Encyclopaedia Metallum, and this is the first I’ve noticed this, but maybe if I do a little more digging I’ll find the underground world of brutal door metal, where bands shill for Big Door. As someone who slammed his fingers in a door frame when he was eight, I am appalled at these metal bands’ endorsement of senseless violence.
At least they have a full drum set in their photo.
What an Encyclopaedia Metallum photo should look like
Since you’ve read this much of me criticizing what these bands did wrong, you’d probably like to know what a band photo done right looks like. Well, wait no longer:
You’re welcome.
One Reply to “Popular Bands With Terrible Band Photos”