The easiest way to cope with the realignment of genres would be to develop new fondnesses for new hybrids, and I've done plenty of that in other analogous situations, but in metal's case I've opted to narrow my idea of its essential character and press on until I find some people who appear to agree. My old definition of heavy metal was that it was music for which power was, if not the sole aim of art, at least the central urge. The rest of the simplistic taxonomy starts something like this: punk is based on anger, rock on sound, pop on melody, dance on movement, folk on storytelling, and so on. Exceptions and perversion are prevalent, but when I do the scatter-plots in my mind, every genre I care about collects around something. I know this sounds circular, since we wouldn't think of them as genres if they didn't somehow cohere, but I guess I believe the common motivations bring about the genres, not vice versa. As the millennium ends, my minor reformulation of the rule is that metal is the genre that still takes sonic power seriously. Korn and Rob Zombie don't count. Hip hop collectives that resync old metal riffs to lurching drop-kick rhythms don't count. Metallica doing Bob Seger covers doesn't count. All those things have their places, but they're not what I mean by metal any more.

And if the things I've excluded from my version of metal don't seem absurd enough, maybe the things I include will be the last straw. My favorite metal album of late, joining such dubious past honorees as The Sisters of Mercy's Vision Thing, Living Colour's Vivid, The Screaming Jets' All for One and Gary Numan's Sacrifice, is Visual Audio Sensory Theater, the acronym-expanding debut by guitar-prodigy Jon Crosby's studio fabrication VAST. The name makes it sound like the kind of multimedia experiment that would flatten onto a CD inelegantly, like I thought Thomas Dolby's The Gate to the Mind's Eye soundtrack did, and I was at home writing music reviews the night VAST played in Boston so there may be a spectacle that I missed, but if I heard this album without knowing what the name stood for, it would never have occurred to me to wonder. The things that make VAST metal, to me, are the dense, surging guitar riffs (omnipresent, but in sharpest relief in the pounding opener "Here" and the Led Zepplin-ish hooks of "Three Doors"), James Lo's sledgehammer drumming on the choruses of "Touched", whirring Deep Purple-esque organ sighs on "Dirty Hole", Crosby's fraying howl on "I'm Dying", the brutal machine rhythm of "Temptation", the groaning bass on "The Nile's Edge", and the ominous space-opera noises on "Somewhere Else to Be". If your meter flips the other way, it might be because of the Nine Inch Nails-style battering-ram drum loops on "Here", the brittle acoustic guitar on "Touched", the distended blues of "Dirty Hole", the burbling synth-pop effervescence of "Pretty When You Cry", the haunting strings and solo cello on the "Comfortably Numb"-like "Flames", the way the geometric stomp of "Three Doors" makes you think for the first time that Stabbing Westward may have been onto something, the extent to which the macabre "Somewhere Else to Be" reminds you of Propaganda, the two songs laced with Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares samples and the four built on Benedictine chanting, or the breathtaking grace of the slow, humming finale, "You", like Thomas Dolby's "Leipzig" swollen to the scale of U2's "A Sort of Homecoming". The meticulous production and the choral samples both argue that Crosby is an heir to the paradoxical sweeping-epics-born-in-studio-reclusion legacy of Kate Bush and Andrew Eldritch, but his idiom is less theatrical than either of theirs, the oblique running interrogation of god in the lyrics notwithstanding. I assume Nine Inch Nails were an influence, as well, but Crosby's notions of gothic horror are a bit more complex than Trent Reznor's, and to me even more affecting (to pick the most obtrusive example, contrast Crosby's conflicted "I didn't want to fuck you, baby" with Reznor's blunt "I want to fuck you like an animal"). And perhaps the most exciting thing about VAST, which I'm not sure I can really say about The Sisters of Mercy, and certainly not about Nine Inch Nails, is that I'm quite confident Crosby understands music. This is a record about atmosphere, as much as about composition, but there is skill and subtlety in it. Nine Inch Nails' power is a product of attitude, aggression superimposed on a docile infrastructure like a toy guitar run through a stack of Marshalls the size of Macy's. Visual Audio Sensory Theater would be a very different record without all the production tricks, but I think there would be something left. The string arrangements are sensible, the guitar-playing is deft. Crosby is still working out where his vocal range ends, and how he should behave when he's outside of it, but his voice mixes some of Bono's epic composure with traces of Josh Clayton's weary melancholy and a tiny bit of Jim Morrison's strut. It pleases me to imagine that Crosby and Kleenex Girl Wonder's Graham Smith are alternate incarnations of the same spirit, the will to turn a bedroom inside-out so the dreams can escape as sound. Smith's careening low-fi pop tries to batter the rest of the world into the bedroom's comfortable disarray; Crosby explains how the biggest yearnings and doubts in the universe can fit within any four walls.

If I'd spent the whole thirteen years waiting for this record, I'd be pretty disappointed. Ignore the decade, though, and pretend they only spent two or three years making it, and it's an impressive leap. The Sentinel is a novelty record, to me, way too rococo to take seriously, and painfully earnest about its clumsy Atlantis/Europe metaphor. Knightmoves to Wedge I love, but with the understanding that it's partly a commercial sell-out (but then, my two favorite IQ albums are their much-reviled major-label efforts, Nomzamo and Are You Sitting Comfortably?), and a failed one at that, and deliberately underplays Pallas' abilities. IQ worked out a compromise between the two urges, letting their two pop records inform a return to most of the hallmarks of their old style for 1993's Ever and 1997's Subterranea, but Pallas go one step further, and invent a new style that doesn't follow as directly from any of their precedents. Beat the Drum sounds more like Subterranea to me, in fact, than it does like The Sentinel or Knightmoves to Wedge, as if Pallas has decide to write off all the records they should have made and try to get caught up. Alan Reed's voice still wobbles unsteadily, and usually sounds like he's singing through the top of his skull instead of his mouth, but he's learned to keep the plaintive quiver of portent out of it, and acquired a slightly bluesy twang that reminds me of Rainbow circa Straight Between the Eyes (Joe Lynn Turner's shift). The rest of the band (replacement drummer Colin Fraser is the only new member) fan out around him with a much surer sense of the space between them than on Knightmoves to Wedge, where they were often crammed together like they were trying to emit a single five-player noise. However better played this record is, though, Pallas still basically sound like an easily-distracted Saga trying to reverse-engineer Marillion songs, but that was OK with me in 1986, and neither they nor I have changed enough since then for it to not still be fun.

I was overprepared. The title turns out to be about calculating the size of a planet, not its worth, and the length is a function of patience, not thematic ambition. Most of these songs are slow and sinister, but better suited, to me, for background ambience than inspection. I can listen to this music quite happily for the hour and forty-five minutes it runs, but I have to have something else to do while I listen. The songs merge, mercilessly, the band droning, Anneke's voice like a bell I hit an hour ago but can still hear exactly as clearly. In the end only three songs have enough individual identity that I recognize them when they come around again. "Illuminating" is the most like Mandylion, drifting verses that give way to a wailing, pulsing chorus, guitars and keyboards sawing in concert. "Probably Built in the Fifties" is the most abstract, a desultory, distorted drum-loop crashing under humming synthesizers and a sinuous, processed vocal. The third song I remember, though, "Liberty Bell", is almost intense enough to justify the whole ordeal. It builds slowly, taking over a minute to get up to speed, but it does build, and once it's underway it's inexorable, like an unearthly cross between Celtic Frost, the Rose Chronicles and ABBA, Anneke sounding, for perhaps the first time, like she's actually part of the band, not a voice drifting in from some unrelated session in the next studio over. The lyrics aren't much, but they're sung from the point of view of astronauts circling the earth, and I could find a place for this in the story I wanted this album to tell, the diary of observers with the ideal vantage point from which to watch the century end. Their capsule spins right behind the sweep of the sun (would that work? must find an astrophysicist to ask), so they can watch midnight traverse the globe. As the Y2K disaster strikes the longitudes in turn, city lights wink out, and the astronauts watch time seem to unwind, humanity plunging backwards into its own history, every minute undoing a decade (is that right? check the math) of technological folly, racing backwards toward purity (an arithmetic conceit or a Christian one?). And every year the world sheds, through that long orbit of judgment, the astronauts forgive, until as they come around the back side, and finally jump the date line, they have forgiven every wrong the race ever committed. And just then, as their orbit starts to decay (they have no landing module, and will die during re-entry; I don't know why, but I'll think of something), the world starts to reawaken. Power flows back into the grids. People return to their lives, most of them annoyed that the utility companies took a whole day to recover. The workers at the power companies know, though, that they had nothing to do with the reactivation, that their generators were lost beyond recall, that some force much greater than a digit underflow shut off the grids, waited a day, and then turned them on again. What they don't know, and can never find out (as the capsule burns up, arcing toward New Zealand), is that it was the astronauts' forgiveness that saved the planet. The human race continues because three mortals (why three? heretical Holy-Trinity-is-mortal angle?) took on the connected responsibilities of judging and atoning. The answer to the title's question is that you never do measure a planet, really. A culture doesn't have a value that's waiting to be discerned, it only gets value by the sacrifice you're willing to make in order for it to continue. We give it our life.