Riz Ahmed was a drummer on film, and for Guy Licata - his teacher and drum trainer for Sound of Metal - there are no partials. But that low bar isn’t what this is about. But I’ve seen worse, less convincing drummers on actual stages, in actual clubs, at actual shows. Of course, the same people who gripe about the technical flaws of Ringo or Lars will stroke their chins about Ahmed’s drumming. His stroke is in the entirety of his being. His expressive punch of a stroke does not stop at the fingers or the wrist, or even the hunched shoulder. It’s an excellent film, with powerful performances and I recommend it.Īhmed’s representation of a drummer - the high Moeller strokes, the double bass churn, and the physical training regimen reportedly inspired by the look of Death Grips’ Zach Hill - was attained through fierce determination. Personal history aside, I can appreciate Sound of Metal for the many scenes that do not feature drums, drumming, or the transportation of drums, however superfluous they are to my priorities. So consider this a PSA: wear ear protection. It could be worse, but now that I think about it, his words echoed the doctor’s grim assessment of Ruben’s hearing in Sound of Metal : “The hearing that you have lost is not coming back.” Recently at an O+ Festival in Kingston, New York, a volunteer audiologist informed me that I had lost 15% of my hearing in that ear.

I spent weeks back home anxiously fighting through a gauze of hearing loss. The venue was packed, and I didn’t want to break the spell. There was no popping my plug back into my ear. As these things go, the band charged out of the pensive, quiet section and into the loudest ten minutes of squall I’ve played against. But during the set, a moment of wrong-headed inspiration caused me to pull out the plug closest to the speaker grill (left ear), so I could harmonize during a quiet improvisational vocal passage. I wore earplugs and I needed to feel the sound waves ripple across my cranium. During sound check, I kept telling the sound guy to turn the system up. In 2004, I lost a short and painful bout with a monitor speaker in Mezzago, Italy. For some of us, this is something we don’t learn until our fourth decade. Cliff’s Notes version: Our eardrums are frangible take good care of them. Sound of Metal can be read as a cautionary tale for drummers. Ruben loses his hearing suddenly one morning during a grueling tour - nightly jet engine decibel levels were the cause, and as an audiologist tells him during a harrowing hearing test, “… the hearing that you have lost is not coming back. British actor Riz Ahmed plays Ruben, a drummer in a scrappy metallic noise (perhaps not quite purely metal ) duo, dead ringers for the peripatetic Jucifer. The recently released drama - directed by Darius Marder -is a nightmare for musicians. For the first hour, Sound of Metal is a horror film.

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