The riffs are ripping my chest apart while Dying Fetus go on about being born in Sodom. “This is pure grindcore,” Charlie says. Then he says, “It ain’t how much you write it’s how you say it.”

I’ve got things to say. I want to tell him that. Instead, I look on in awe as he thumbs his way through his hard drive collection showing me, like a true expert, why metal matters. This guy has way too much music. We’re talking every single Sabbath album, not just the good ones. He even has the one with Toni Iommi standing off to the side by his lonesome looking into the wind, thinking “Where the fuck is Ozzy?” And he still had the nerve to call that shite Black Sabbath. “Actually,” Charlie interrupts, “the record label made him do it.”

Charlie also plays some Witchcraft. While listening my mouth drops bits of saliva — it happens the same way when I think about a bowl of wonton soup. Rock versus WonTon soup — that would be a tough battle.

There is something about these guys from Orebro, Sweden that sounds fantastically brilliant in that heavy way that makes you pump your fist in the air with a stoic smile while yelling: “Things don’t always have to be this way.” Each song by Witchcraft is a finely crafted piece of work , and the fact that they are from Sweden and say things like “I can not wake the dead/since they are all ready alive,” makes them extra cool. That little bit came off the shredder, “Wooden Cross” from the band’s 2005 release, Firewood.

But we’re going to check out the tune “Leva” from Witchcraft’s 2007 LP, The Alchemist. In this song, frontman, Magnus Pelander sings every lick in his Sweedish brogue. What he’s saying doesn’t matter so much as the brute power behind his grave tenor. The usual references of Sabbath and Pentagram qualify this tune as straightforward doom metal. But there is something more here that I can’t put my finger through. Perhaps that’s why it’s so damn good. Thanks for the new tunes, Charlie.

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So, there is a hell of a show(s) coming to Brooklyn next week. The legends of doom, Neurosis, will be making a special appearance at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in good ole’ Fort Greene. I imagine it’s going to be an intense affair, the kind of night that will vibrate in one’s head for many days to follow. Cheers to the fine promoter who thought long and hard about putting this event together.

Neurosis were one of those bands that crossed over to all sorts of dudes. (I say dudes because I never met too many girls who got off on the heavy turbulance garnered from a Neurosis tune.) So you’d have your anaracho MRR punk talking about the aesthetics of Scott Kelly’s violent licks, while some hessian dude in a Voivod T-Shirt and a thin mustache listened to the sounds off “Souls at Zero” with a glazed smile on his face. All were welcome if they could take the pain. And it was the power of that mucky sludge that kept us coming back for more.

I want to check out a track off the 2001 Relapse release, “A Sun That Never Sets”. A lot of people panned this album when it first came out because it wasn’t as heavy as their earlier work. But after many listens the songs start to unravel in your head, and you come to realize that acts of quiet desperation are far scarier than quick jabs to the throat. Here is a band that can inspire us all to pay attention to the notion that less certainly can rock a lot fuckin harder than more.

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