Bloodborne is, as I imagine most From Software titles must be, an exercise in frustration. At first blush, I couldn’t imagine what most fans could see in the game. At the same time, though, I didn’t have the framework that others might have had to better understand what makes the game tick. I had briefly played Demons’ Souls and Dark Souls both many years before, but hadn’t invested enough time in them to really understand what made them good. Now that I’ve played through the entirety of Bloodborne and can comfortably claim to understand what it is and why it’s good, I can’t help but remember another time much earlier in my life when I couldn’t understand why people were engrossed in something for which I couldn’t see any appeal.
Almost as far back as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed video games. I was playing NES games with my dad before I was even attending school. This was an interest I carried forward through the rest of my life, but it wasn’t until age 15 that I really started to immerse myself in the hobby fully, and a lot of that had to do with the internet. That was the first time I had access to the internet at home and resulted in me joining a lot of communities that gave me an outlet to discuss the games I really loved, like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger.
Several of the communities I joined in this time not only affected how I thought about games and what I sought out in them, but it also introduced me to a lot of other new interests. I was in a phase of my life where I listened to music like any other teenager, but I didn’t consider myself an enthusiast of any kind. I mostly listened to stuff my family had introduced me to. I hadn’t really taken the time at that point to branch out and discover music for myself.
Before I became an avid user of the internet, I listened to mostly classic rock and some metal. The kind of metal I was listening to at the time was stuff like Black Sabbath and Metallica, which are relatively tame compared to some of the stuff you could find out there even in those days. The internet opened me up to a lot of new types of music, including more extreme types of metal that contained harsh vocals, whether those were high-pitched screams or more guttural growls. When I first listened to this kind of stuff, I had a pretty negative reaction to it. I thought it was silly, and even when I found myself enjoying the primal, heavy music accompanying those vocals, I had a hard time getting past those unintelligible roars.
Looking back at it now, I think about how radically my perspective has changed over time. It makes a lot of sense that I was turned off by harsh vocals initially because it was unlike anything I’d heard before. I thought about what they must have been trying to accomplish by screaming or growling in the place of traditional singing. I really enjoyed how heavy and punishing the music itself was, but to me, the vocals were just getting in the way.
Still, even at that young age (and in a number of years that followed), I was struck with the urge to understand why there existed a niche, but dedicated group of fans that really liked harsh vocals. Were they pretending to enjoy them, I wondered, to cultivate some sort of outsider persona? It made me think of what purpose music serves in people’s lives in the first place. It is there to entertain, certainly, and in many cases it enhances other media. It’s instrumental in games and in movies in setting a tone. But it’s also there just to make you feel something, and sometimes what it makes you feel isn’t positive. And that’s okay, because it’s still exciting when a creative piece of work provokes an emotion in you. People like sad or scary movies for a reason, after all. It’s cathartic. Extreme metal is similar in that it combines unpleasant or dissonant sounds in a way that provokes catharsis. The most extreme variants of metal abandon melody almost entirely in favor of blistering speed and noise, but the kind I ended up preferring tends to be a bit more meditative. Although the vocals continue to be dissonant, they are frequently combined with melody in a layered, pleasing way. The contrast is what makes these groups so satisfying.
There were a few groups I became familiar with in those early days when I was still finding my musical identity. My persona at that point had been built almost entirely on my love of video games and fantasy and sci-fi. Music played very little part in my sense of who I was as a person. I liked to listen to music, but I hadn’t listened to much that really resonated with me on a deeper level. I started listening to groups like Radiohead, and the Mars Volta, groups that really redefined how I felt about music. I started to think more about the texture of music and the kinds of feelings it provoked in me. I became a lot more open to music that was experimental or different from the kinds of things I was used to. Even so, when I first tried listening to groups like Opeth, Enslaved, or the unfortunately named Isis, I could barely wrap my head around them.
I was familiar with stuff like Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Judas Priest already, so I could handle the dissonant guitar solos, driving rhythms, and howled vocals, but when it came to the guttural bellows of Opeth’s Mikael Akerfeldt or the ghastly gurgles of Enslaved’s Grutle Kjellson, I couldn’t make that jump to understand their appeal. Even now, I understand why others are turned off by it, even if they otherwise like heavy music.
Vocals are always a big sticking point in whether or not someone is going to like a particular kind of music. I can’t count the number of times I’ve overheard someone make a statement like “yeah, I like the music, but I just can’t stand his or her voice.” It’s definitely an important factor because vocals are really front-and-center in the majority of popular music. I’m no music historian, but I imagine that’s been the case for the better part of the last century. A lot of folks really connect to the lyrical content of their music, too, so it’s easy to see why a vocal style that deliberately obfuscates the content being delivered to the listener would feel alienating.
As crass as it may sound, I’ve never been the kind of person that cares that much about lyrics. I will notice them if they’re well-written or interesting, but for the most part I don’t care about them. The feeling the words evoke combined with how they entwine with the music itself is much more important to me. This makes it clearer why I was able to get to a point where extreme vocals resonated with me. But it took time to understand that. It required me listening to music for awhile that I didn’t really enjoy all that much at first. And that raises a question: why invest that amount of effort to understand or enjoy something that demands so much of you? This question was also on my mind as I bashed my head against the brick wall of Bloodborne. I was sure there was a good game in there somewhere but I wasn’t sure experiencing it was worth the effort the game demanded.
There is a group by the name of Enslaved, a black metal group that has been around for many years. Their early material is very straightforward, lo-fi black metal with fast tremolo picking, shrieked and raspy vocals, blast-beats (hyper-fast alternations between the snare and cymbals/bass drums) and little else to distinguish them from other groups of that type. Those early albums are good, well-performed black metal albums, but, at least in my mind, there’s not much about them that’s particularly interesting or very different from other groups in the genre. As they progressed further into their career, they did begin to introduce more melody and experimental elements, but one thing about Enslaved since the group’s inception has remained constant, which is a focus on hypnotic, repetitive rhythms. One could almost say there’s an element of psychedelia to their music as well, particularly in tracks like “Bounded By Allegiance,” from 2004’s Isa.
The first album I ever listened to from Enslaved was 2000’s Mardraum - Beyond the Within, which impressed me in a number of ways but I found very challenging to listen to when I was still discovering extreme metal. Not only did the intensity of the music unnerve me, but the tonality of the production and the almost impossibly bestial nature of the vocals actually made my stomach hurt when I listened to it. Consider that album’s second track, “Daudningekvida,” its most direct and aggressive piece of music. It has a razor-thin, treble-heavy production with a guitar sound that slices through your eardrums. It’s grating, especially at first. This type of production wasn’t unique to Enslaved and I soon came to find that most black metal tended to give me a stomachache in those days. Still, after repeated listens, I started to understand that album and become very engrossed in the type of music they were producing, even to the point where I could enjoy not only their less accessible material, but the music of other extreme groups as well.
In the case of Bloodborne and its predecessors in the Souls series, there is a sense of low fidelity in the way the games are produced. The games definitely have good and interesting art direction, but on top of everything else I found frustrating about the game at first was just how unpleasant I found the game to actually look at, especially for long periods of time. Just as the Mardraum album gradually heightened my anxiety as I listened, so too did Bloodborne take a toll on me with its excessive motion blur and poor anti-aliasing.
Now that I’ve played dozens of hours of Bloodborne, I can barely notice the graphical issues because my brain has become so accustomed to it. I’ve plugged into the experience in a big way. Enslaved (and other black metal besides) no longer give me that sense of anxiety, either. Both are more rewarding as a result. Again, though, it’s worth questioning whether or not these two pieces of art are better for the rough edges they have or simply serve as crosses to bear before enjoying something that is ultimately very engaging.
Another reason I enjoy harsh vocals and extreme metal in general is that they are darkly satisfying. Much heavy metal music demonstrates a fascination with horror, whether it be a brutal exploration of real world themes of war and violence, or in the case of death metal, a straight-up descent into gore. The themes that tend to resonate with me most are those that are more otherworldly and enigmatic. Although I couldn’t tell you much about the lyrical content of most of these groups (or indeed much about the specifics of the plot of Bloodborne), at the end of the day, it’s more about how these elements make you feel. Early 2000s Opeth is a good example of metal that evokes a sense of mystery, of magic, couched in the violent expression of death metal.
Bloodborne is, as one could probably guess by the name, a violent game soaked in blood. Grotesque enemies attempt to eat you whole, mercilessly gut you with knives, or even slit your throat. At the same time, though, it is a very mysterious, lore-heavy game, with secrets hidden around every corner. The disorienting contrast of careful and methodical exploration of ghostly, deathly quiet locales with the blood-pumping excitement of squaring off with battle axe-wielding behemoths is not unlike the way a group like Opeth or Enslaved repeatedly alternate between soft and bone-crushingly heavy passages to satisfying effect. They definitely scratch a similar itch.
One of the most defining pieces of music for me is “The Beginning and the End,” by Isis. It was incredibly influential to me in that it was largely responsible for deciding what I looked for in extreme music in general. To this day, it is one of my favorite pieces of music and it was the first song I’d ever heard from what is now one of my absolutely favorite groups. Although Isis disbanded many years ago (in fact, as I am quick to clarify, well before the terrorist group of the same name began making headlines), there is a hypnotic, otherworldly quality to their music, and particularly to their earlier material that continues to worm its way into my brain to this day.
Heading up 2002’s Oceanic, “The Beginning and the End” is a piece of music that assaults you with barked, atonal screams over colossal, chugging riffs, before subsiding into a hypnotic rhythm that repeats for the majority of its 8+ minute runtime. Although the song is simplistic in structure, repeated listens reveal additional layers that flesh out the heft of the piece’s impact. Just the sound of the drums in that song, the soft female chanted vocals that follow the bassline, the tone of the guitars, the way they create texture--it’s incredible. More important than simply the rhythms being played is that absolutely perfectly bright snare sound, that perfect amount of reverb on the toms. The groove that it drops into is such a comforting place to be in once the song has penetrated your consciousness. But when I first listened to it, I could barely stand it. It was long, the vocals were incomprehensible and unpleasant, I felt it was repetitive, and it had very little in the way of melody for my brain to latch onto.
Just as with Bloodborne, when I was struck down repeatedly by ghastly townspeople in the game’s opening area, I couldn’t hear the melody. I couldn’t understand what about the game was fun until I forced myself to invest more energy into it. I played it actively, paid much more attention to every minute action I took. Just as I strained my ears to hear the intricacies at play in “The Beginning and the End,” I forced myself to invest in Bloodborne--and ultimately came away with a more rewarding experience.
In the game’s opening hours, I reduced the gameplay to a frantic game of hack-and-slash. Intimidated by extraordinarily aggressive enemies, I would close in on axe- and blunderbuss-wielding foes and mash R1 until my enemies fell. Frequently, I felt I’d taken down my opponents through dumb luck rather than any pretense of skill on my part. Every attempt I made to take a more measured approach was met with death, painful and immediate.
It wasn’t until I’d made many attempts to conquer enemies that I felt were above my skill level that I really started to get into that groove. Now, when I revisit those earlier enemies, I begin to wonder why I ever felt they were hard in the first place. And when I listen to those groups I first discovered in my teens, it’s harder for me to hear what made them seem so inaccessible, so uninviting.
The question I’ve repeatedly posited is: “Is it worth it?” Life is short, and music and video games are leisure activities. Why try to engage with something that deliberately pushes me away? I think that’s a valid take, but at least for me, it’s worth it because even though extreme metal and games like Bloodborne are inaccessible and difficult, they fill me with tremendous satisfaction. Getting past that barrier helps me not only to understand how others feel but to understand what it means to enjoy something that demands a lot of me. In the end, both forms of entertainment are much more engrossing and enjoyable because the door wasn’t wide open from the beginning.
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