BRUTAL: I can no longer give a convincing impression of someone whose world has been transformed by Jay Leno on prime time, and there’s only so much I can say about Canadian Idol’s yearlong “rest” without bursting into this disturbing giggle, so I thought I’d take a moment to talk about the second season of my favourite show, now on DVD just in time for Christmas.
You don’t have to have grown up in a working class suburb in the ’70s to love heavy metal, but it certainly helps, and as far as I can tell, metal fans generally love Metalocalypse, even though it viciously satirizes everything they hold dear. If you haven’t managed to catch its brief appearances on Teletoon’s adult-only Detour programming block, the premise is simple enough – Dethklok is the biggest band in the world, growing from the 13th to the 7th-largest economy in the world over the course of the show’s two seasons. Try to imagine, say, that Slayer or Cannibal Corpse could cause international riots, or prompt debates at the United Nations.
The band – a mix of American and Scandinavian louts – are morons, and when they aren’t endlessly debating how to do the most metal thing, they’re unsuccessfully dealing with their intimacy issues, or the fact that they’re lousy at doing anything that doesn’t involve double-kick triplets or singing about flesh-eating zombies.
Not that the world needed such a thing, but Metalocalypse is probably the perfect take on metal’s essence – morbid and epic megalomaniac teenage boy fantasies alongside tawdry, lower-middle-class anxieties, executed with plenty of metal’s graphic flourishes: skulls and swords and bat’s wings, and skulls with bat’s wings, and swords with skulls, and bat’s wings on swords. You get the picture.
Season two follows where season one left off – with the band staggering one step closer to the Armageddon predicted in the show’s title, and the shadowy conspirators of The Tribunal monitoring them for their own vague reasons. And then there’s the band, with their pitiful solo projects, family problems, and momentary obsessions with hallucinogenic drugs known only to Amazon tribes, which inspires a brief tribute to Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo.
The show is at its best when little or nothing is going on but the sorts of digressive, numbskull conversations most men have had a few hundred of in their lives, enlivened by a few moments of incredibly graphic violence. Basically, it’s like spending a night in front of an Xbox with a bunch of boys – teenage or older – ungoverned by female influences, if only for a few precious hours.
