photo by Patrice78500

Well, I managed to compile another one of these THAT’S METAL! posts without waiting a month or more since the last one. If I had tentacles for arms, I’d pat myself on the back. (That reference to tentacles is what highly paid literary journalists such as myself call “foreshadowing”.) Today I have ten items for you that I think are metal even though they’re not music.

ITEM ONE

As usual, I’ll start with the image you see at the top of this post. It’s a photo of a canopy of Dryobalanops aromatica trees (more commonly known as camphor trees) at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia near Kuala Lampur. I was first attracted to the image because I thought it would make a cool metal album cover, perhaps for a nature-centric atmospheric black metal band — but also because it’s intriguing.

You’ll notice that the tops of the trees don’t touch each other. There are gaps that look like the channels of a river, or perhaps the branching of capillaries or neurons. There’s a name for this phenomenon, the exact cause of which is uncertain, and the name is the second reason I thought it was cool. Continue reading »