A new book titled The Spiritual Significance of Music (Metal Edition) explores metal music’s connection with various spiritual and religious topics. The book website gives the following description:

METAL EDITION provides an exciting exploration of how music powerfully impacts spirituality, and why spirituality influences music. Readers will discover sincere expressions of spiritual beliefs from the world of metal music. This portfolio includes an eclectic mix of musicians playing many forms of metal music… Metal Edition provides readers with an important introduction to metal music’s affinity with demonology, divination, magic, mysticism, Satanism, spiritualism, the occult, and witchcraft.

As far as I can tell, the metal edition has supposedly been released online as of January 2009.

From the descriptions, I was expecting a full-blown analysis of extreme metal music’s relation to spirituality. Instead, the Metal Edition page provides short interviews with members from over 120 extreme metal bands. The bands included cover almost every sub-genre you can think of, and range from the fairly mainstream to the ultra-obscure. Some examples include My Dying Bride, Enslaved, Enthroned, Gorgoroth, Striborg, Malevolent Creation, The Locust, Dragonforce, Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death, Esoteric and Samael.

The various interviews from each band are interesting, but most of the artists are just briefly discussing how music affects them or how they see it personally, instead of the much more extensively-researched treatment and analysis that I was hoping for. It’s a topic that seems like it really could have an entire book written about it, and probably a very interesting one if it’s done well.

I’m hoping that either I’m mistaken and this guy’s work will lead to a larger book release, or that someone else will take this subject and give it the treatment it deserves.