Coming Apart at the Themes Mick Barr and John Zorn find new ways to attack heavy metal.

As half of Orthrelm and ringleader of various side projects, former D.C. guitarist Mick Barr (who left in 2003 and now lives in New York) has credentials in minimalist avant-metal that would seem to make him a natural fit for John Zorn’s Tzadik Records. The label is a home for experimental fringe-dwellers in all genres, but it has long been timid about even the most experimental metal. It’s had very few such releases, and most of them (like Kayo Dot’s Choirs of the Eye and Time of Orchids’ Sarcast While) have been shoehorned into the Composer Series—ostensibly for “classical concert music.” Not only is that positioning misleading, but it’s surely tough on the players: If avant-garde musicians can’t fit in at an avant-garde label, where can they fit in?

Iohargh Wended—Barr’s second Octis disc and first for Tzadik—purports to combine “the power of rock with a classical asceticism,” but the description shows a misunderstanding of classical music. The album is speed metal—the gaudiest, showiest metal of them all. The songs consist of Barr’s breakneck, atonal guitar runs, composed as freewheeling but repetitive cycles, underscored by a cheap-sounding drum machine. There’s no question of Barr’s chops; the complicated riffs and phrases he effortlessly burns through are incredible, to say the least.

But virtuosic playing does not classical music (or even good music) make; the category implies architecture and direction. And Barr’s fireworks have very little of either. While each of the 16 tracks (which comprise the two extended pieces, “Iohargh” and “Wended”) has its own internal structure, more often than not those structures move the music in circles and leave off in midair. Moreover, Barr’s focus on repetitive figures gets him stuck in a rut once every 45 seconds or so; with the drum machine’s synthesized, machine-gun staccato beats employed on nine of the segments, the music becomes so convincingly glitchy that it necessitates stopping mid-CD at least once to make sure the damn thing’s not defective.

Actually, the drum machine is indicative of the problem. Orthrelm has a human drummer, Josh Blair, who serves as counterpoint to Barr’s experimental flash, giving it contour and momentum. Even on 2005’s unbearably monotonous OV, the duo’s most recent album, Blair’s incessant rolling feels desperate to push things forward. Octis’ box, on the other hand, is completely subservient; it’s there for no other apparent reason besides accenting the guitar vamps. Barr seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to find a drum machine that sounds as coldly mechanical as possible; it may serve his abstract purpose, but it also helps Iohargh Wended to sonically spin its wheels, making tracks like “rr-2” (part of “Iohargh”) virtually indistinguishable from “iomm-1” (part of “Wended”). Then again, maybe that’s why he gave them such flat, anonymous titles.

The exception, appropriately, is the one title that doesn’t sound like some sort of model number. “Wended,” the album’s longest and penultimate segment, is surprising in its decipherable, linear construction—even if it takes its sweet time to build up. The piece does get bogged down in two-note Klaxons; every time it does, though, Barr subtly varies and develops his way free and clear of them and onto the next idea. Its eight-plus minutes is grand, delicate, and, if not quite melodic, at least fully formulated.

It may well be intended as two extended concert pieces, but the bulk of Iohargh Wended feels more like exercises in postnEddie Van Halen guitar techniques. There’s nothing wrong with that: Metal, avant or no, is about prowess and pyrotechnics. But the playing needs to go somewhere if it’s to be more than a jerk-off session. Barr accomplishes that resolution once out of 16 attempts here, belying the notion that he’s working in concert classical music. But perhaps that’s the whole point: recognizing that he’s wedged into a poor classification. It’s not so much that Barr can’t fit into this musical environment as that he refuses to.

If Iohargh Wended represents Tzadik’s take on speed-metal, John Zorn’s Six Litanies for Heliogabalus represents a stew of various other metals: death, goth, industrial, prog, neoclassical, and even some funk, all dressed in avant-garde clothes. That kind of stylistic mélange is no surprise from the wildly eclectic and prolific Zorn. The sparing use of his own alto sax—there’s maybe five minutes’ worth of squawking across the album—is a bit unexpected but well-suited to the album. Even free-jazz blowing has a discipline that, if it were more prominent here, would betray the careful order hidden in Heliogabalus—a piece whose subject matter epitomizes indulgence.

Zorn gathers together an all-star lineup—organist Jamie Saft, bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Joey Baron, electronics guru Ikue Mori, and vocalist Mike Patton, godfather of experimental metal—with a three-woman chorus for his epic tone poem, inspired by the legendarily cruel, hedonistic Roman emperor, who gained power as a child, forced his own religion on the Empire, and, apocryphally, smothered dinner guests to death in a blizzard of rose petals. These players usher the music through six programmatic movements (titled as numbered litanies) that illustrate the decadence, violence, and general turmoil of Heliogabalus’ reign.

As concept music, Six Litanies excels, portraying in no uncertain terms the consequences of giving absolute power to a spoiled, zealous adolescent who, according to the liner notes, “made Caligula and Nero look like reasonable human beings.” The dominant spirit is one of tumult, developing via transitions that first seem sudden and drastic but on closer inspection are smooth and methodical. “Litany II,” for example, moves from industrial noise/extended drum solo to classic metal grind—and back again—to organ-led prog in 6/8 time, with (presumably) luxuriating women, and one man, giggling and gossiping in the foreground; this fades down to the man and woman whispering in Latin (a recurring motif); to noisy thrash madness.

Other tracks engage in similar jumps and segues, with varying effects: “Litany V” is death-metal competing with a funeral Mass, while the chilled-out psychedelia on “Litany VI” gradually deteriorates into a bad trip driven by frenetic drums and electronics, saxophone, and human screams. Even “Litany IV,” a solo piece for Patton, shifts purposefully between his rambling gibberish and shrieks (another recurring element), strangulated breathing exercises, juvenile mouth sounds, wind, falsetto humming, and, most prominently, theatrical choking, as on the Emperor’s rose petals. The track is probably the linchpin of the whole album, a stunning sound painting of Heliogabalus’ violent sadism.

As purely abstract music, however, it’s at least as good. It’s a given that these players, mainstays of post-fusion jazz, are schooled in rock, but the brutal crunch of the harder stuff isn’t so routine in their circles (save Patton’s). But the group, particularly the explosive Baron, seems to have mastered the sound, pouring on the sludge and Sturm und Drang so thoroughly that the music’s complexity and meticulous design are masked in a way that the musicians’ more blatantly jazzy tendencies would have immediately outed.

That masking may not satisfy Tzadik’s following, which—­accustomed as it is to Zorn, Patton, Saft, et al.’s eccentric genre mishmashes—might complain that in celebrating his self-indulgence, the group may have caught the bug from Heliogabalus. But any complaints of excess over accomplishment are checked by the fact that Zorn and the band successfully navigate umpteen kinds of heavy metal without a guitar. It may be self-indulgence, but it’s the kind worthy of awe.