The Aaron Effect
What happens when you marathon a band's discography?
This piece originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market on May 2019. This is an annotated version.
Back in January, our own Aaron Lariviere completed a true death metal triathlon, playing the full-length discographies of Immolation, Incantation, and Gorguts back-to-back-to-back over a weekend. That, my friends, is 26 albums, a metal marathon if there ever was one.1
As his reward, he gave himself a chance to exsanguinate2 his remaining free time with Cannibal Corpse’s oeuvre. This is like your parents catching you smoking a cigarette, them teaching you a lesson by forcing you to smoke a carton, and then you teaching them a lesson by smoking another carton.3 “This album rules,” he wrote while in the middle of Gallery Of Suicide, the second-lowest-rated album per the reviewers on Encyclopaedia Metallum. At that point, he still had 350 minutes of Cannibal Corpse remaining. “Turns out 14 Cannibal Corpses are a lot of Cannibal Corpses,” he wrote many hours later.
Aaron’s marathons are a thing of Black Market legend. It’s always an event. Your column-makers pile into a thread for a live report as he plows through the entirety of Dismember or Bolt Thrower or Summoning’s catalogs. It’s not even a stunt. He just does it. Naturally, “dude, why?” is an AMA consistently filed near the top, as marathoning one artist or band for albums at a time is now so incongruous with how modern music platforms automate users’ experiences.4
Seriously dude, why? “On some level it’s a personal challenge and a test of endurance, like reading Finnegans Wake or running a marathon, two things I’m constitutionally incapable of,” Aaron told me. Makes sense. The thrill of embarking on a masochistic, and thus contrarian, undertaking is a thing that has always been spudding5 around in death metal’s shadow. Aaron Lariviere, befuddler of the false, death metal Desert Bus.
However, what he said next got the rusty gears in my brain turning: “But considering how easy it is to quit by putting on literally anything else, I suppose I enjoy the simplicity of the exercise and the way it flattens an entire body of work into something entirely different by dramatically altering the context of an individual album.” Ah, yes, now this is extremely my shit.
Here’s the crucial bit: “I always do discographies in order, so you’re hearing the lifecycle of a band — there are obvious changes like different producers and members, but you also get to hear the band develop and advance their craft, usually with a few missteps along their way, to some kind of career plateau before the inevitable holding period or sharp decline,” Aaron said. “But again, it’s the flattening effect that makes it so interesting — you’re hearing progression and decline across a span of hours rather than years. Played back to back, albums display minor differences in a strange light.” If I may be so bold, behold: the Aaron Effect.
So, let’s play this out. As Cannibal Corpse is one of the more consistent metal bands on the planet, both qualitatively and sonically, the Aaron Effect is felt most effectively within their early discography, from the thrashy beginnings of 1990’s Eaten Back To Life to 1999’s Bloodthirst.
Do we have minor differences and changes? Yes. That seven-album run contains its share of shifts in membership: original vocalist Chris Barnes exits after his dying cough on The Bleeding (1994)6 and is replaced by George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher on Vile (1996), O.G. guitarist Bob Rusay shreds his last riff on Tomb Of The Mutilated (1992) and is replaced by Rob Barrett on The Bleeding, who in turn leaves after Vile and is replaced by Pat O’Brien on Gallery Of Suicide (1998). These are the blarghs of our lives. There’s a three-hour documentary that can catch you up. It’s actually good.
Do we have missteps? Indeed. However, no one agrees which albums constitute those missteps. Outside of Tomb Of The Mutilated, which is an absolute classic and is only disliked by idiots and you should fight me at a show, the ranking varies wildly by ranker, a weird quirk for a band known for doing its workmanlike thing and doing it well over and over again. (This is why I’m convinced the debate will surely have its own ring in the viral stump of online discourse. Do you wash your legs in the shower? Do you think The Wretched Spawn cracks your top five? Did you know Dragonriders Of Pern is insane?)7
Finally, I’m going to throw this in there: If I were a young, unknowing metalhead and went to Encyclopaedia Metallum, I’d see that Vile and Gallery Of Suicide’s combined scores (65 and 71 percent, respectively) dip like an elephant crossing a rope bridge before Bloodthirst (1999, 83 percent) rebounds and sets up the 21st century holding pattern. Me, that hypothesized young version of me that has good hair and is so full of promise and isn’t writing this because other intros came together, might even skip Vile and Gallery Of Suicide because of that. Time is finite. Why waste it on anything but the user-approved standouts? But that’s exactly what the Aaron Effect helps to rectify.
Let’s get the reappraisal rolling: 1998’s Gallery Of Suicide does indeed rule and it rules harder within a marathon. The criticisms that the disenchanted have leveled at it — the diminished production, then-new guitarist Pat O’Brien not being Bob Rusay and/or Rob Barrett — are transformed into vital distinguishing characteristics when the previous-album layover shrinks from two years to two seconds. With that kind of smash cut, the idea of Cannibal Corpse — what the band is, isn’t, can, and can’t be — isn’t allowed to curdle, never given the time and space to be reformed by memory and then further shaped by intervening human experiences. In other words, the memory of Cannibal Corpse doesn’t calcify into the kind of hypercritical bedrock the next album needs to chip through in order to receive a standalone appraisal. Gallery isn’t Tomb Of The Mutilated and it isn’t Bloodthirst. Inside of the marathon, that’s kind of the point.
But the Aaron Effect goes a little deeper than that. “My brain starts to synchronize with the internal rhythms of the band, I start to identify with the band in a new way, and each passing song and album feels like another step into something larger,” he explained. “It’s totally a projection, just a consequence of punishing your brain for too many hours with too much noise, but you trick yourself into thinking there’s a transcendent experience to be had down there at the bottom of the well with Incantation or whatever.”
If you have the free time, an Amish-esque, pre-smartphone attention span, and don’t mind if your family leaves you, you should give the marathon a shot and let Gallery play through while it’s hot on the heels of five other Cannibal Corpse albums. Provided you actually did this and showed up at the 9th green at 9 and wrecked your Discover Weekly forevermore, I’ll now ask: Is this album not a breath of fresh air in this setting? The title track’s comparatively midpaced tempo and dismal dissonance stick out for the right reasons, showcasing a natural evolution of technical and compositional chops. Better yet, a closer inspection of “From Skin to Liquid” within the context of a cram reveals it to be, and this is a technical term, pretty sick. It feels right in a way that it didn’t before.
Perhaps the Aaron Effect is the audio analog to semantic satiation or jamais vu, when repetition turns common words into oddities, separating them from their associated meanings.8 By the time one hits that supposed Vile/Gallery fallow period, one has filled one’s good-haired head with so much Cannibal Corpse that minor differences might sound revelatory. And there’s a tractor-beam pulling you forward: It might get even better. (It does.)
But that’s not quite it. No, the Aaron Effect and metal marathons in general kind of mirror the Up series of documentaries, how the neutral passage of time takes on a story-esque quality when framed as a life. But, it’s also the time-lapse historian’s view, where new connections can be soldered through hindsight and presentism. It’s like knowing the “where are they now” epilogue beforehand. This is all catnip for the human brain.
So, yeah, maybe Gallery would sound different if that’s where the story ended. But we know that Bloodthirst is great (don’t even start with the ranking stuff, we’ve moved on to talking about Pern)9 and the 2000s would only increase in quality. Knowing that lessens the stakes, allowing me to hear Gallery for what it is, which — again I’m really sorry for tossing this academic jargon all up in here — is pretty freaking sick.
Since this is very much extremely my shit, there’s so much about the Aaron Effect that I want to explore. But I fear that the rest of the world thinks this is some straight up Mindhunter stuff and will soon incarcerate me and Todd Fraiser in weirdo space jail.10
Because, jeeze, despite the fact the rest of the entertainment world is binge-crazy, with each new media property seemingly attracting legions of completist, sleep-deprived consumers ready to chug the hemlock, no one binges music in this way. Plug “binge watch” into Google and enjoy sifting through 66,900,000 results. “Binge listening” only racks up 9,480,000, with most of those concerning the spell cast by narrative podcasts. Does Netflix really leverage the human desire for immersion, escape, and empathy better than music can? Are we just not wired to enjoy music the same way?
“The reason we like listening to music and feel the desire to have it repeated is likely that it affects the reward center of our brains,” said Peter Vuust, director of the Center For Music In The Brain, to Noisey’s Alfred Maddox in 2017 for a piece exploring repetitious listening. “This is the biological system that rewards us for doing things that are vital to our survival. It’s the reason we get a little high from eating food, and a little higher from having sex and so on.11 It’s nature and biology’s way of making sure we repeat the things necessary for our survival.”
The interview is worth a read, particularly regarding how music taste is further shaped and reinforced by one’s identity and social groups. But the important part here is Vuust describing how music can get played out, how one can take a ride on the inverted-U line and get dumped off at the meh end: “If you listen to something a bunch of times, it makes its way to the other end of the spectrum, and we stop learning anything new when we listen to it, which our biological systems are hypersensitive towards.”
Which, I mean, yes: 14 Cannibal Corpses is a lot of Cannibal Corpses. I get it. That said, I’m sure I would’ve said the same thing about 14 episodes of Friends in 1994. Which is to say, technologically speaking, we’re at a perfect point where the metal marathon could become similarly normalized. Heck, you no longer need to own 14 Cannibal Corpse albums to marathon them. But, I feel like like mainstream interests in making sure our hypersensitivity is never tickled, are moving us away from this method of music exploration being an availability, much less a choice.
“We live in a singles world today. No longer does anyone consistently sit down for 40 or 50 consecutive minutes to listen to an album from front to back like they used to,” Bobby Owsinski wrote in Forbes in March 2018, a piece I read while wading into a 72-minute Warforged album. Despite metal still being very much a full-length style, with LP numbers eclipsing EPs and singles combined every decade since the ’80s, you can see how this pop group-think is making playing simply an album cumbersome on some platforms.
“I’m trying to get Alexa to play the album Magica by Dio, and she will play specific songs from it but says she can’t find the album,” wrote Reddit user Taalii earlier this year. The best workaround that someone could offer was to “create a playlist that is just this album.” So much for the Aaron Effect, right?
Alexa, play every Blood album in order.
…you are going…to space jail….12
Alright. This one is a great example of multiple intros falling apart due to interviews not coming together in time, research failures, uninteresting topics not paying dividends, etc. If I remember correctly, I wrote this, like, 10 hours before deadline, mining the internal Slack for content. I thought this was a complete bomb when I filed it. Reading it now…I mean…I don’t want to sound conceited, but it’s not bad? Considering that I thought it was DOA, the mere fact that it holds up puts it in the top 10 percent of garbage I’ve written. So, yeah, I wouldn’t recommend having to fear-write something, suffused in flop sweat, while you watch the hours count down to deadline, but sometimes they do work out.
I must’ve been playing Bloodborne around this time. If you go on my LinkedIn, you’ll see I put “platinum’d Bloodborne” under my achievements/awards. No one has hired me since.
This is an ungainly sentence. It’s like watching a whale play Scrabble.
Yep. There it is. The admission that this is internal horseshit becoming external horseshit.
I don’t even know if we explained the concept of “spud,” that being a regular-degular death metal band, to the audience at this point.
Man, this is brutal. Sorry, Chris.
I bought a Cameo from Barnes last year, and he was actually nice and personable. I hope he never reads this.
Ha, we should’ve kept the Pern bit going longer. More on this in a second.
I, of course, need to blind you with science.
OK. I hate to even admit this, but after doing the column for so long, we would take bets about what we could possibly reference in the intro/blurbs to keep ourselves amused. It was like, I bet you won’t, I dare you to; that kind of thing. It kept things fresh and tested our writing skills. I think this was a bet that I couldn’t fit the Dragonriders of Pern into an intro. I fit it into two. I am just that kind of sicko.
Wow. Todd Fraiser reference out of nowhere. Remember Some Guys.
Ayyyyyyooooooooooooooooooo.
This is a hyper-specific in joke for die-hard readers. For a long time, I was being sentenced to space jail. Then, when Aaron didn’t have enough time to write anymore, I’d explain his absence by saying we were trying to break him out of space jail. That was going to be a running bit, but we dropped it because it would be too confusing for new readers. It was like a season of Fringe in the blurbs.
Anyway, the mere thought of space jail is too funny for it to have come from me. I must’ve picked it up from somewhere.