The Tibetan-thangka-style art is one thing, but it doesn’t really get more metal than “Garland of Skulls,” does it?* (Queen Elphantine has dabbled in imagery from world religions and cultures, what with album titles like Surya and Kailash, and song titles like “Search for the Deathless State.” And you can download their record, Yatra (as in the Hindu term for “pilgrimage”) for free here.)

Hear the slow, dirgy, powerful track, “Potency,” from Garland of Skulls, here.

(See here for another recent — and recommended — Buddhism/metal crossover.)

* Note: I have dibs on the band name SkülCüp.

Anyway…: Yob has just gotten back at it after some inactivity. Hearing that, I recalled their last album; it was called The Great Cessation. Was it possible they could be talking about nirvana there? “The great cessation” is in fact one translation of the term parinirvana, the “final nirvana, which occurs upon the death of the body of someone who has attained complete awakening.” (Yes, I cribbed that from Wikipedia but it works for my purposes here.)

Yob’s new album (shown here) is called Atma. About the title, the great heavy music blog The Obelisk writes that it “refers to the Buddhist concept of the complete, spiritual self.” Now, that’s not a Buddhist concept, really — Buddhism usually emphasizes anatta, or not-self — but still: Hmmm. And in addition to a title track, there’s another song on the album called “Upon The Sight Of The Other Shore.” That sounds like it could be reference to the “other shore” referred to in the closing lines of the shorter version of The Heart Sutra, about which Barbara O’Brien writes:

The last words in the shorter version of the sutra are “Gaté Gaté Paragaté Parasamgaté Bodhi Svaha!” The basic translation, as I understand it, is “gone (or ferried) with everyone to the other shore right now!”

A little more Googling about Yob and Buddhism turns up a quick reference in a Rebel Extravaganza interview with vocalist and guitarist Mike Scheidt, in which he responds to the interviewer’s question about the use of the word bardo in the song “Ball of Molten Lead” from 2004′s The Illusion of Motion LP:

I’m surprised that one jumped out at you, man! A bardo is a term used in Buddhism. A bardo is a segment of life. The Tibetan Book Of The Dead goes into it, the bardos of life… the stages of life and death. More in depth, when you get into the places where the book deals with learning how to die. We go through time periods of trying to understand and remember who we are outside of this life.

And the band has a track called “Asleep in Samsara” on 2002′s “Elaborations of Carbon.”

Is all this a coincidence? And more important: does it matter?

I’m not saying that Scheidt is a Buddhist or that YOB is in some way a “Buddhist band.”* (And either way, they get points for clearly not trying to cash in on Buddhism’s cultural cachet. They’re hardly hitting us over the head with the references here.) They probably wouldn’t want to be identified as a Buddhist band, even if they were. And I’m not saying they are. All I am saying is this:

1) Metal can be a lot smarter than some would ever think.
2) Buddhism can be way more metal-confluent than some would ever think. (It can also be way more punk- or hip-hop- or baseball- or business- or whatever-confluent than some would ever think, too.)
3) It’s refreshing when a really good band makes great music whose lyrical content is not only not insulting, but somehow in line with the kinds of things that concern you.
4) YOB is one such really good band.

If you like your metal on the heavy, doomy side, you should check’m out on their MySpace page, which includes the first track from Atma, “Prepare the Ground.”

And if you get a little something extra out of Yob’s music, well hey.

* PS: Since this post was written, I’ve seen Scheidt refer to himself as being influenced by many Eastern religions (which would make sense) but that he identifies particularly with Hindu thought (which would account for his interest in exploring the concept behind Atma‘s title.)

Rage Against the Machine, self-titled album cover featuring Thich Quang Duc, 1992.

Outside of Howard Beale from the classic film Network, nothing in the popular culture’s consciousness conveys “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” like the photo shown here, depicting Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc setting himself on fire to protest his government’s oppression of his religion.

So it’s fitting that Rage Against the Machine, a band whose music embodied large-scale protest — on the corporation’s dime, much like Howard Beale! — would employ the image for its eponymous debut. Rage weren’t Buddhists, but they knew that this photograph might make their already-long band name worth at least a thousand words.

In fact, the image turns out to be worthy of a $40,000 grant. After the jump, via Bates College: the story of Thich Quang Duc, and of Trian Nguyen, the Bates professor who hopes to more fully discover the monk whose 1963 self-immolation was not only one of the defining acts of the Vietnam War years, but one of the most significant images of the modern age.

On June 11, 1963, at a busy intersection in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire to protest the government’s discrimination against the nation’s Buddhist majority.

Captured in an Associated Press photograph that was distributed worldwide, this horrific act launched a series of events resulting in the fall of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation also came to symbolize America’s unpopular involvement in Vietnam, and Malcolm Browne’s photo became an icon of the era.

Professor Trian Nguyen, who teaches art and Asian studies at Bates, has received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for field research intended to address what he perceives as the scholarly neglect in recent decades of this figure, who remains highly revered among Vietnamese Buddhists. Nguyen was one of 57 to receive the ACLS grant out of a pool of 1,136 applicants.

“Many questions related to this Vietnamese senior monk and his final act are still unanswered,” says Nguyen, assistant professor of art and visual culture and the Luce Junior Professor of Asian Studies.

In his project, Nguyen will study Thich Quang Duc’s personal items and letters, books, legal records and other documents kept at Buddhist temples in Vietnam, and some two dozen interviews with people involved in events around the monk’s self-sacrifice.

Culminating in the first full-length book about Thich Quang Duc in English, the research will bring to light significant new facts about the monk and his significance within the cultural context of the time. Nguyen hopes that the project will also reawaken awareness, within and outside Vietnam, of both the historic importance of the monk’s self-sacrifice and the existence of the research materials.

The completed work, Nguyen writes in his ACLS proposal, “will make a substantial and original contribution to the understanding of both this famous monk and Vietnamese Buddhist culture and history in the mid-20th century.”

The ACLS advances studies in all fields of the humanities and the social sciences, and aims to maintain and strengthen relations among national societies devoted to such studies.

Nguyen came to Bates in 2000 under the auspices of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, and is the first faculty member to teach Asian art history at Bates. He holds a doctorate in Asian art history from the University of California, Berkeley, and obtained his master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School.

Nguyen’s primary research situates Buddhist art and architecture within the religious, political and social conditions of Southeast Asian culture. He has a particular interest in Vietnam. His teaching covers a wide range of topics in Asian art history, including the art of Zen Buddhism and Buddhist architecture, storytelling in Asian art and monuments of Southeast Asia.

The article, called “Heavy Metal Dharma Thunder,” features eleven examples of this surprising but time-honored trend. Check it out here.

What’s the Dharmic connection (besides the forced pose in their promo photo)?

Well, they describe their music as “Modern Metal, Ambient, Folk with soul-searching lyrics [in] an Oriental Dark Metal style” — and I guess I can kinda hear that — but other than that? Not a clue. (And seriously, someone tell them to ditch that word, “Oriental.”)

If this sounds like your bag, hear ‘em here.

“Hey, I read an article on this on pitchfork. Prince’s new 3 disc album will be released exclusively at Target. The title is Lotusflow3r and the image is below. He also bought the domain name: http://lotusflow3r.com/

“I just love prince’s weird embrace of the new age vibe.”

The site is nearly as odd as the cover graphic — but if you look around you’ll at least hear a little music….

Queen Elephantine has a new album called “Kailash,” named for the famed mountain of Buddhist and Hindu lore. You can hear it in entirety on their MySpace page — just select the second player (not the top one, though that one’s good if you want to hear older tracks).

So is QE Buddhist or Hindu? Can’t say, but they certainly seem interested. With song titles like “Search for the Deathless State” and previous releases called “Surya” and “Yatra,” they at least have a sympathy. Whatever their deal — if you like this kind of music, you’ll like them.

Also: good ol’ Konchog Norbu reminded me to give the band Hayagriva a mention. Named for the horse-headed deity found (again) in both Buddhism and Hinduism, they have a totally different thing going on — kinda theatrical black metal.

If that sounds like your kinda thing, you can hear it here.

You’ll find a bunch more Buddhist-inspired album covers — here, and in the Dhama-Burger archives, here and here.

You can hear it here.

With a name like that, you might think that these guys, who play metal in the death-metal/grindcore vein, are insensitive, bloodthirsty goons. But nope. They’re actually really quite concerned with such things as animal rights, vegetarianism, and the ecology.

The cover depicts a six-armed, knife-wielding, bull-headed figure that’s quite obviously a nod to the wrathful deities of tantric Buddhism (and also some of the gods of Hinduism).

It’s even levitating, in meditation, over the slaughterhouse drain. Strangely, it’s kind of a nice touch…