Fright Catalog

"Black metal, death metal, blackened death metal—not to mention: deathcore; thrash; the melodic and technical; grinds and dooms and drones; pagan or bestial; progressive or deconstructivist; Norwegian versus Swedish (early Stockholm or later Gothenburg?) versus various Vikings and Scandinavians; first, second, nth wave….. the infinitely divisible subgenres of heavy metal music as discerned by its fans exhibit a mania for discrimination and taxonomy that approaches the monadic. Secrets, in these scenes, threaten to become singularities. Such, of course, is the reductio of all subcultures. And "Poetry," for "Culture," has become the ultimate and necessary subculture of them all. Fright Catalog is thus in part a dissertation on the sublime terror of the poetry scene today — with all its partisan scholasticism and stupid undergrounds (as Paul Mann would say). But this catalogue is also attuned to the poetic possibilities of subcultural discourse, to the phonemic tensions and narrative frissons that arise when metal lyrics are mashed up with phrases taken variously from online gaming dialogues, occult forums, and the secret language of adolescence (by definition: misunderstood; mardy; uncommunicative and inscrutable). In the process, Joseph Mosconi forces the opaque argots and cants of isolated initiates to speak with indiscrete promiscuity. Here, accordingly, are the slogans of an infidel poetics (in every sense of Daniel Tiffany's resonant phrase)."—Craig Dworkin