Taipei Metal

Misery Index: Heirs to the Grind Throne

Call them the thinking man’s metal band. Misery Index writes politico-grind in the proud tradition of steadfast old school stalwarts Napalm Death and the defunct but seminal grind outfit Assuck, a band whose final album Misery Index borrowed their name from when the band was founded nearly a decade ago. The booklet for their third full length album, 2008’s Traitors, features thought-provoking quotes from historical figures, while the lyrics for the title track reference Thomas Paine, one of America’s founding fathers, which should come as a surprise to no one given the educational pedigree of the band’s last remaining original member, bassist Jason Netherton. Any metal head worth his spiked leather forearm bands will be familiar with Netherton as the former bassist of tech-death giants Dying Fetus. After experiencing something of a burnout during his time in DF, Netherton went on to not only finish college, but also earn his master’s degree in international communication before throwing himself back into the metal scene, a move that, unlike his educational endeavors, was entirely unplanned.

“I just woke up one day on tour and was like, ‘I think I’m gonna finish college and figure out something else to do,’” Netherton recollects of that uncertain period in his life. “This [Misery Index] sort of happened by accident. I never thought I’d be doing music again after that in this way.”

While earning his post-grad degree under Professor Edward Kilmore in Washington D.C., Netherton began to form the thematic basis for his post-Fetus project. Like all great educators, Kilmore opened Netherton’s eyes, in his case to the illusions we are faced with each and every day from both the media and from a historical perspective, themes that are rife throughout Misery Index’s back catalogue. Kilmore, according to Netherton, approves of his former student’s lyrical focus, even if the music itself is “…a little too much” for the aging academic, who has since returned to his native Canada.

Netherton fully intends to get back in touch with his onetime mentor, whom he lost contact with in the past couple of years, when he moves on to the next goal he has laid out in his life’s journey, earning his PhD. If this plan comes to fruition, it could lead to him becoming the grindcore version of Bad Religion’s lead singer, Greg Graffin, himself a PhD recipient who teaches at UCLA during the school year and hits the road with his band during the summer break. But until that time comes, Netherton is 100 percent focused on the business of grind. Misery Index’s fourth album, Heirs to Thievery, came out in May, and for Netherton making their particular brand of politically corrosive grindcore goes hand in calloused hand with keeping a watchful eye on the American political scene. After eight years of Republican rule, Netherton welcomes, if warily, having a Democrat in the Oval Office.

“It’s certainly a refreshing change. There was this really bad vibe, and that’s gone. A lot of the more progressive ideas a lot of Democrats have don’t really see the light of day, even when you have a guy like Obama. It’s just the nature of compromise in Washington.”

Though yawn inducing to some, any discussion of Misery Index that fails to delve into the band’s political undertones misses the entire point of the band’s musical output and the philosophical and historical themes that underlie their crushing mix of grind, crust, and death metal. Of course, there will always be those who say that music and politics should always run parallel to one another, and never the two shall meet. Netherton makes no mystery of which side of that particular barbwire fence he sits on.

“Music has a longstanding place in culture in every society as the voice of protest. The thing that speaks to the soul or our passions in everyday life can be channeled through music and art. Our main thing is, if we’re writing and singing and screaming about something every night, we want to do something we’re passionate about.”

Social movements throughout human history have been Netherton’s lyrical bread and butter during his tenure at the helm of Misery Index. An avid reader, his bookshelf at home provides him with much lyrical ammunition, with the labor movement in particular stoking his passions.

“So much we take for granted today was earned through blood—stuff like the eight hour day, the weekend, eradication of child labor, women’s rights in the workplace. All of the rights we have which are normal today only 100 years ago were nonexistent. I think we’re definitely in need of a new cultural movement to wake ourselves out of this gluttonous, passive, sleepy consumerism. It seems like when nations get wealthy and comfortable they start to get lazy and do themselves in from the inside.”

When Netherton speaks of such things, he isn’t doing so as an armchair activist or ineffectual academic. The man has put in his time on the frontlines in his home state of Maryland, working in labor unions and being actively involved in the anti-globalization movement before Misery Index began to consume his schedule with a neverending maelstrom of tour dates, writing, and recording. But through Misery Index his activism continues, as the band actively promotes the charity organizations Oxfam and Amnesty International and encourages people to take part in grassroots activities by signing petitions and getting involved online to support their causes of choice. Netherton also turns advocate for a variety of causes on his personal blog, the creatively titled Demockery, on which, amid updates on the comings and goings of Misery Index, he espouses opinions and facts on a wide range of contemporary issues, some of which are very personal to him.

One such issue that has impacted Netherton’s inner circle is American health care reform. In March of this year, he revealed on his blog that he had lost a friend in fellow musician and Maryland native Ryan Engle, who played bass for Eternal Ruin, a death metal band with which Netherton had collaborated in the past. Engle, who suffered from a genetic form of diabetes, was awaiting his insurance company’s approval on coverage of a kidney transplant, with a donor already lined up, when he passed away just weeks after meeting up with Netherton at a Misery Index show in Pittsburgh.

“That’s another movement that has to happen,” Netherton says of the embryonic stages of the move toward a form of universal health care in the US, dubbed “Obamacare” by the mass media. “It’s just crazy in the wealthiest country in the world that we can’t cover our citizens in times like that. That’s a perfect example where the system is failing someone.”

Perhaps the tragedy and outrage of Engle’s death will have a place in a song on the next Misery Index album, but on Heirs to Thievery the theme de jour was the expropriation of land and resources from native peoples throughout human history—something that has played out since the days of the first European colonialists to the modern day economic hitmen who run roughshod over the less developed nations of the world. Once again it was Netherton’s personal library that played a role in his selection of subject material.

“I had reread Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States again and it’s just a fascinating discussion of all the losers in American history, the downtrodden, the exploited, and the social movements like the labor movement that don’t really get talked about in our textbooks. I thought this would be a good theme for the title track and cover. Other song titles evolved from that, but that’s the main idea.”

Misery Index managed to churn out Heirs in what, for them, was record time, releasing the album just 18 months after Traitors dropped after consistently going two to three years between full length releases. The entire album was written in just over three months while the band, which also includes guitarist Sparky Knowles, drummer Adam Jarvis, and guitarist/vocalist Mark Kloeppel, was on a break from touring. This lineup has been together since 2006, a year Netherton regards as one of rebirth for the band.

“We sort of reinvented the band in 2006 with the addition of Adam and Mark. They brought in a lot of new influences and playing styles. It took us a couple of albums to get it all figured out between the four of us and Traitors we like to view as our real first album together. It’s definitely an album where every song sounds like Misery Index but it’s coming from a different angle, from death metal, or crust, or grind. This one’s definitely got the most pure death metal songs we’ve had on a record.”

Netherton is visibly psyched when talking about the release of Heirs, and this excitement brings with it somewhat of an air of rejuvenation. It takes him back to a different time for underground metal, when getting the latest releases actually required digging that didn’t involve a search engine, and networking took more effort than a few hastily typed words and the click of a button. At 37 years of age, Netherton has been around long enough to see extreme metal grow from its nascent tape trading stage, to the days of the online social networking generation. Given a choice between the two, Netherton shows a marked preference for the days of old.

“It was definitely far more intimate, and less disposable. You really had to make an effort to find bands and find music. You had to write letters and network through mail. It was an exciting time.”

Today bootleg tape trading, fan ‘zines, and letter writing have been replaced by MP3 downloads, Blabbermouth.com, email, and eye-blistering Myspace page layouts, meaning anyone with an Internet connection can mindlessly sift through the online slush pile of metal bands.

“That’s a cool thing in a way,” Netherton states somewhat unenthusiastically. “But at the same time with the MP3 culture I think it also leads to a more disposable approach to it. Before, if you bought a CD, you paid good money for it, you really wanted to give it a chance. You listened to it ten, fifteen times before you wanted to forget about it or write it off because you had an investment in it. Now, you download the record, listen to it right there, if you’re not really feeling it by the second or third song it’s like ‘delete,’ on to something else.”

Maybe it’s a case of musical overload, but fans today definitely don’t have as long of an attention span as the guardians of the old school. Songs are listened to in 30-second snippets and judged on the merits of a mere sample in less than the amount of time it took to hear them. In a way, maybe that makes brutally fast and honest grind the perfect genre for the present “Go ahead and try to hold my attention for the next ten seconds” generation. But no matter how the modern scene might attempt to influence or corrupt them, like their grind forefathers Misery Index stays true to their old school attitude and aesthetic, keeping the burning, upside down flag of politically-conscious protest grind waving high and proud.

By Joe Henley