For almost a year now more black metal than death metal has emerged from metal's legion of musicians worldwide. More press and promotion covers black metal, and in light of the new evolution of metal death metal releases are being written off as uninspiring, unemotional, passe. But is death metal dead? And what is death for a musical genre?

Death metal brought images of impending doom and a fascination with the macabre into a dark world. It built upon what speed metal and grindcore had already established: an apocalyptic epic where the only future was decay. Death metal incorporated the righteous integrity of speed metal and the nihilism of punk into a musical onslaught warning of destruction. It fit into Kurt Vonnegut's famous metaphor for art: that artists are to society what canaries were to the coalminers who brought them into the depths of the mine as warnings. When the song of the canary turned weak or stopped, it meant that suffocating coal gas was flooding the mine.

Death metal is an extension of the complexity of speed metal, partially arising from the attitude of that genre that any large problem can be solved by reason. Speed metal and thrash believed in rationality, and preached insanity as a negative characteristic. Death metal became the science of understanding insanity and breakdown, not preaching against it as speed metal often did but explicating it in epic songs and vivid imagery. Black metal returns with the romantic side of metal as its primary vehicle; its emotion is more obvious as that is its obsession. A death metal band would never argue destruction of the world, calling it irrational, where a black metal band would call for destruction of all life on emotional grounds. Black metal's sadness comes from its emotional entrapment in a mechanistic world, and for that reason it rebels against order, whether in Heaven, on Earth, or in Death Metal. Black metal is in many ways a return to the mission metal left when exploring the scientific mindset of the technological age (as computers revolutionized life in the eighties, quantitative rationalism experienced a resurgance of influence).

Metal started in its first form with Black Sabbath's epic proto-metal release Black Sabbath in 1969, a darker, slower, and emotional music. Its lyrics were mythological conceptions from practical fears to pure fantasy and breakdowns of reality. The mythological fascination extended to the occult, shocking the tender audience of the day. Over the next five albums the music evolved from a heavy style of blues/metal to a separate genre, but then regressed toward more conventoinal blues-rock to gain commercial success. Black Sabbath laid the foundation of metal in structure, in aesthetic, and in intellectual focus. Structures were rigorous but intricate and repetitive underneath an aesthetic of "heavy," an emotional darkness and resonance that appealed to the sorrowful and alienated.

Black Sabbath brought romantic ideas from literature to rock music. Romance, in the rock of the day, meant getting laid. Romantic literature meant dark figures and an obsession with ruins and traces of the ancients. It meant a mystical belief in nature and an individual against a false world. Romantic literature also carried with it a love of the morbid, and a fascination with death. This combined with the dark music of Black Sabbath was too extreme to continue as a genre, and so heavy metal was born as a style.

Heavy metal fused the dark abstract Sabbath styles with the catchier tunes of progressive blues band Led Zeppelin. This style is most appropriately called New Wave of British Heavy Metal, as the second wave came from Britain with bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, or Motorhead. Heavy metal was harmonic and used vocal and lead guitar melodies, although it used minor keys and darker rhythms than the happier genre of hard rock. Its obsession was the difference between reality and fantasy, and its fascination was with death and afterlife, war and destruction. Usually mythological or narrative lyrics showed the influence of romantic literature from several centuries before. Heavy metal has always been, and will always be, music for stoners and dreamers. It is the music of what could be, and if destructive it mirrors its reality with a reactive worldview.

Throughout the 1970s heavy metal retained its romantic and musical roots but took on a more commercial nature: songs were more verse-chorus, and lyrics covered love songs as well asimaginary worlds and the powers of fantasy. In response the metal community embraced the harsh aesthetic of punk rock and infused it into the next genres of metal, taking both the abstraction of simple dissonant music and the rigorous alienation of the lyrical makeup.

Speed metal came to moderate maturity in the first three years of the eighties, appearing simultaneously with thrash and a hybrid metal-thrash style pioneered by Slayer. Speed metal and thrash are birthed of the same components: heavy metal and punk music (as distinguished from "punk rock," later abominations in the name of punk). Speed metal wrote NWOBHM riffs with punk's speed and placed them into vast structures influenced by the progressive rock of the 1970s. Thrash mixed short, simple punk structures with Black Sabbath style heavy riffs, most prominent in bands like Cryptic Slaughter and DRI, who wrote anthems to the alienated in Reagan Amerika. The romanticism of the previous genre mutated into alienation and idealism, with topics such as warfare or killing coming into the music. Fascinated by violence, speed metal and thrash sought to explain it and give it a place where it was not harmful, in music and in the vigorous slam dancing which evolved with it. Thrash and speed metal derived emotion from the violence and the fundamental objection to it of a rational mind; these movements were empathic and deeply romantic in their altruism toward other lonely sufferers in life.

Hypothesize a genre: modern metal arose wtih the musical style and structure Slayer innovated in the early 1980s, halfway between speed metal and thrash, but without the conventionality and rock-n-roll tonal progressions of speed metal. It had the speed and dissonance of thrash but grew to even more complex structures than speed metal, even though its riffs were often simple thrash-based components in large structures alluding to the progressive aims of speed metal. Slayer brought forth lyrical visions of death, destruction, and the forces of evil; the duality of worlds suggested a world beyond acknowledged reality in which chaos and evil were rational and provided a more relevant life than the static boredom of technological existentialism. With slayer came Modern Metal, a more dissonant and structural type of music that created death metal, black metal, and grindcore from its evolving ideas. Modern metal abandoned society's ideals entirely and served the self with a dark projection of the future and a bitter nihilism. Its emotion brought forth images of desperation and nihilism, a rejection of the mainstream attitudes in which no solace could be found for the rational minds dissenting.

Slayer's style birthed death metal, which both simplified and extended the structures of modern metal to make a dissonant, cacophonous musical terror. Fascinated with structure and distortion at once, bands added the rough-throat vocals that grindcore and punk vocalists had begun to use (probably influenced by Motorhead's raspy vocals). A new style expanded, mostly in death metal but also in the fledgling black metal. Concurrently grindcore, a direct descendent of thrash, developed with its fascination with the disgusting and disphase rhythms.

The speed-thrash hybrid influenced Bathory in 1984, who began to produce very Slayer and Venom (one of the two NWOBHM bands that incorporated punk into its composition, the other being the godly MOTORHEAD) style modern metal with diffusive distortion and death/grind vocals stretched to a higher pitch. With the second album in 1985 Bathory had begun to differentiate a new style: modern black metal, which had none of the normalcy of older black metal but projected pure nihilistic satanism. Hellhammer and Sodom, contemporaries of Bathory, were mostly followers of the genre-metal of the time. Black metal went into its third stage with the evolution of modern black metal, which added dark melodies and more ambient structures to the simplified metal-punk crossover it had been. From punk it took the violent rhythms laden with potential energy and the dark self-destructive stance of the alienated: in a world I cannot understand or like, all I can see is destruction, of self and world.

As death metal rose, speed metal faded into the background as commercial music, starting with Metallica's "...And Justice for All." Mainstream radio shifted its stance and began to play music heavier than its previous benchmark of extremity, Amerikan hard rock. Bands such as Ministry brought some death metal influence into mainstream music, and death metal influenced commercial speed metal, making it simpler and more percussive as well as more punk, more angry. After several years of this, death metal began to fade as black metal rose into prominence as the growing tip of metal's evolution.

Death metal's commercial presence comes in the style Obituary and Sepultura predicted, using rigorous, repetitive, hard-edged percussive structures with sublimated rhythmic hooks. Fast and angry music with heavy bass sounds from guitars and vocals, it too shall fade into obscurity as anger becomes less of a righteous intellectual reaction and more of a silliness in the face of a world obviously doomed. Generation X, and the rise of apathetic ideologue, illustrates the crisis of humanity throwing up its hands in the face of its own ancient, massive mess, and the collective ignorance that ensures its perpetuation. Anger is only another form of ignorance; as life gets worse, art gets further abstract and focuses on what might be next, now that death is inevitable.

Modern metal brought us structural, rational metal portraying a future world of destruction, a mythological evolution of the obsession with nuclear holocaust the permeated speed metal lyrics throughout the ending days of the coldwar. It maintained its rationality, and built great structures, but lost most of the mythological and emotional focus of previous metal. With black metal those return, and death metal seems obsolete. But is it unemotional? Is it any less worthy? In both cases it is not, but it is clearly a different science. To treat it with respect we must analyze its offerings as artistic documents and keep those that are profound, rejecting those that followed a genre-path or innovated an aesthetic without any real depth.

As creatures in the throes of this revolution in thought, we must accept it as theory and explore its premises. Very few things in the world are "completely wrong" or misdirected; whatever it has to offer, there is some truth in it. The image of a canary lauding its own death in an apocalypse of its own making -- not fearing the predators, the goal gas, or the miners, but seeking to destroy itself and its world -- should press heavily against any beliefs of bright futures in young and old alike. We should recognize the truth of black metal, and push the artistic and truthful far above the clogging mass of imitators who have come to this genre like all others.

The world ages with its assumptions and soon it finds itself incompatible with older ways of perceiving it. The edge of the technological age has died, leaving us where we were centuries ago with the added benefits and destructions of society. In our face the order breaks down as it collapses inward toward its own compression and destruction in the winds of chaos.

In reaction, large centralized structures are breaking down into complex organic systems composed of simple textural elements.

Immortal, Darkthrone, and Emperor merged heavily distorted guitar static and drumbeat pulse into a flowing wave of noise which created a bizarre and beautiful ambient space in the midst of grinding metallic dissonance. A television static electric seethe wrapped around the resonating waves of volume, a pulsing living sound.

Further distortion was provided by deliberately bad production, which overamplified the music to break it into distortion through which came images of the original work, processed through waves of distortion and deep spaces of interacting artificial harmonics. Flowing melodies pulsed through this living space in alternate phase to the drumbeat, which was usually a fast blast beat on the snare and double bass drums while different rhythms played off the high hat provided structural continuity. Simple melodies drifted through time and musical space, surrounding the reader with a terrifying mutilated noise - musical garbage, or useless chaos - which could provide depth of melody to a listener who understood the sound. Encoded in noise were the anthems of the mystical world, occult and bizarre, entwined in collision like a cacophony of battle-cries from hell.

With the rise of black metal the structured, centralized sound of deathmetal and speed metal receded from prominence. The metal sound learned to love decay and broke down into thrash-influenced simple riffs or classically-influenced melodies of single notes immersed in their own chaotic space of noise. As the elements of the music got simpler, more of them were layered with variations -- to provide many angles into each element, as Picasso did with his style of illustrating viewpoints of an object from different angles superimposed upon the single, fixed image of the object. An ambience -- a three dimensional view -- was formed.

The implications of black metal for society are obvious, although most people never get past the "They Burn Churches" headline phase. When the canaries in the mine turn against their world in sorrow and destruction, the world's deep illness, denied for so long, is revealed. The people that fear noise and breakdown are those most oblivious to it; to all of us blackmetal shows both the slow destruction of our planet and the necessary erosion of our faith in the quantitative to survive.

And in the meantime, we should celebrate the evolving organic thoughts of underground death metal, because it's not dead. It is slowly lapsing into retirement and speed metal and heavy metal did before it; bands still play these styles, but the appetites of the audiences have moved on, and all of the major innovations seem to be over. More likely, the paradigms have been rejected in denial by an increasingly desperate society.

FIVE	SURVIVORS

Suffocation

In death metal history, Suffocation stands unique for fusing the technical with the percussive and brutal older styles of death metal as well as for being emulated more than any other band. Older death metal used simple structures and repetitive, percussive beats ending in extremely recognizable resolutions to sound heavy and dark, but was shunned by metal audiences as too rudimentary and redundant. Suffocation integrated the heavier styles of death metal with the muffled strumming and downstroke rhythms of speed metal as did many bands innovating New York style death metal, but then integrated more complex rhythms with a variety of influences and bizarre, mocking lead guitar. A typical song begins with slamming, pummeling beats under sections of riffs and then break into the fast strumming chorus riffs of death metal, with chords flowing together from distortion and speed. This beginning modulates into the unpredictable -- a punk-like strut beat, a walking jazz bassline, or a structural bridging to define the song. Each song brought forth its own struggles and torment both musically and lyrically, at odds with itself and the world. With Pierced From Within, Suffocation have returned from the abyss of popularity after their brilliant second album, Breeding the Spawnwas ignored by fans either for its lack of bass-heavy production (made famous by Suffocation's first album, Effigy of the Forgotten) or for the fans' pompous attitudes about death metal. Where Breeding the Spawn was focused and cohesive, Pierced From Within expands to include divergent styles and musical metaphors. Thunderously heavy and rigorously artistic, it surpasses expectations and suprises consistently.

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy's The Fourth Dimension has slowed from their trademark style of raw, fast, Slayer-influenced death metal, but in its place it has refinement and simple elegance. More harmonic ideas and melodies are used in conventionally tonal (rock) songs, but the aggression that has been lost belongs to another style -- this music wants to be composed and then listened to for a variety of responses, most of which originate in appreciation of its evolved musicality within a simple style. For this reason The Fourth Dimension belongs more to the school of technical speed/death than any other subgenre of metal, causing a different range of appreciation than what one would have for the fast, raw, and resonant music of earlier alienated releases. Songs build toward a dominant rhythm, express it in a riff, issue a few structural points such as bridges or solos, and then recede quietly (relatively, for death metal). Speed thrills come out in a decent number of the tracks, and architected musical work with tempo and tone defines each song differently but as a member of this album, or maybe only this time period. Unique for Hypocrisy and for all of Swedish death metal, this album will not please those who rose with the spirit of Hypocrisy's earlier, black metal-influenced releases but will be a favorite of those who appreciate the refinement of the Metallica era hybridized with melodic death metal.

Cryptopsy

To make death metal interesting in a style originated years ago takes some talent but Cryptopsy have surpassed this by adding their own legend to death metal hierarchy. Their music, with its long blast beat sequences and dark recursions into structural destruction, brings a fervent expression of bitter humans feeding off of a self-consuming universe enslaved to concrete aggression. The band crests the edge of technicality but pursue a goal of depravity beyond that simple categorization. Underneath a grunting forced vocal beats heavy inertial rhythm and varied but classic death/speed metal guitar: much downstroke percussive strumming alternating with tearing streams of chords. There are periodic lulls but they are artistically used; 'unrelenting' would be a good adjective. With this in mind, many would accuse Cryptopsy of being a Suffocation clone, but analysis of the music reveals this to be deficient in structural and rhythmic comparison. Suffocation break their rhythms into cycles and responses, where Cryptopsy use the simpler technique of more linear rhythms interacting only at the level of the song as a whole. Death metal structures permeate Cryptopsy's music where Suffocation use more of a speed metal style. Cryptopsy's strength is the development of an acerbic almost technical style while retaining the brutal classic death metal foundation that makes this music scary to outsiders. It is simpler than technical death metal, and resembles heavy metal more than most death metal, but through this narrowed focus it gains momentum. In pursuing some of Suffocation's ideals - brutality, complexity, and expressiveness - Cryptopsy have leapt over the clone barrier and surpassed the lackluster performers in the explosive guttural zone. Only in a world this stupid could Blasphemy Made Flesh sell fewer copies than Cannibal Corpse's The Bleeding.

Deicide

Deicide have resurrected their music after an arch-technical and abstract conceptual second album in which they explored the mythos of the archangel, or that which could succeed in a world it refused to join. Their first album, Deicide, attracted people for its rhythmic vibrance and anger as well as its simplified speed/death metal structures and satanic lyrics. Once Upon the Cross takes a step back from the first album and makes less of an epic underground death metal release but invents an almost-new style of music, with powerful rhythmic riffs made from simple components joined into the most violent record I've ever heard. Deicide possessed more complexity and spirit, but this new release has as much aggression and power distilled into more focused but repetitive segments. The godly release that Deicide was -- an eternal landmark -- has not been matched, but a new direction brings new powers and some interesting lyrics, although the propagandistic stance of "Kill the Christian" ("Rip up their Bible before it's too late") shows how defensively angry Deicide have become. As usual, Glen Benton's lyrics are a series of finely articulated catch phrases strung together with casual words for rhythmic use; he shouts the vocals hoarsely over the roar of his band, not quite able to do a death vocal but perfectly able to throw emphasis into the phrases he wants heard. Riffs are clean-cut and simple, heavy strumming with coherent response from the drumkit. Songs follow verse-chorus loops, which is at first disappointing, but eventually appreciated as the ambient effect of this much musical violence settles into the listener. Lead guitars interweave atonally with the march of chords but exist as support and not augmentation; the rockstar solos of the first album are gone but so are the integral statements of each solo. With all of this in mind, this album achieves an almost transcendental violent alienation, and for that adds a new style to death metal's songbook.

Vader
Don't buy this EP, Sothis, unless you are a collector or become fanatically inspired by this article, because it makes for poor value: 3 songs and some amusement at an import price. Buy it because what it has is critical evolution of death metal, an advanced artform coming perhaps past a logical time and past the real innovations of this style, but nonetheless a unique and evocative perspective of the genre. Any development from Vader occurs within the three original songs and in intros, but definitely not in the Black Sabbath cover ("Black Sabbath"). Sothis opens with an intro and has an electroacoustic interlude two tracks later and then an ambient masterpiece four tracks beyond alluding to and incorporating some of the sound-collage and ambient ideas of black metal; the intro starts with bubbling noises over dark groans and explosions, calling voices of demons in the deconstruction of a world. The opening intro is less profound, with wheeling noise and guitar crashing underneath fairly silly chanting about the ancient ones, but it is hardly surprassed by "De Profundis," which is a trudging bass-drum time-waster. In conclusion: Out of seven tracks, two are worthless intros; the Black Sabbath cover may be disparaged by some and is painful to listen to for vocal reasons: the vocalist can't reach and doesn't try to attain the vocal performance of Ozzy Osbourne. The remaining three tracks (7 tracks - (3 intros + 1 cover)) are powerful death metal in Vader's characteristic fast-strumming, Slayer-esque style. The album whose songs would compare to these would be Morbid Angel's Covenant: with fast strumming in alternating rhythms drifting in out and of synchronization with itself, and quickly switching patterns augmented by rhythmic and structural modifications, this album successfully double-tracks guitar and builds a rhythmic and melodic sense sublime beneath the powerful, evident riffs in the way Morbid Angel integrated black metal elements back in 1993. Lead guitars are fast and noisy, often chaotic, but eerily integrate well with the motion of the music. In a distinct style, Vader have integrated the dark and melodic elements of black metal with the powerful, fast, and structural forces of death metal; for this they deserve praise, but only the brave are gonna buy this for the three real songs it has to offer. However, in that there's the acquisition of some metal that's actually rewarding, a rarity for death metal after 1993.
Some time after the above was written Vader's full length album, De Profundis, appeared in my possession and was immediately eviscerated for the cause of its deconstructionist pummel upon the reader. It posits a deconstructive rationalism, a structural viciousness of perception, that takes on a mystical dimension of abstraction despite the derelict nature of its muse-servants, the almighty modern artists Shambo, China, Peter, and Doc. Whether or not you think this music is sufficiently advanced to make any waves in the guitar-snob world, you will acknowledge the complex structures with chaotic mirroring of expression that unify what would otherwise be a collection of disparate ideas into a song. You hear deconstruction, you feel the real structure emerge, a sublime of idea under impression of chaos. This process may be unconscious within the artist; from a distance this album sounds like a more refined version of Slayer's Show No Mercy or Massacra's Final Holocaust: it has many fairly random, angry ideas that convey a general spirit. Even the lyrics are deconstructionist, basically phrases unified with rhythmic filler. The phrase is emphasized, and the rest holds the beat in exploded-throat chanting. Vader's work differs in that it builds complex structures out of its unification of dissonance into idea, both in raw sound and in structural opposition within its boundaries. The music reminds us that all our perceptions are just containers, and brings into play the rare and intricate art of complex recombinance. In this it significantly differs from The Ultimate Incantation, Vader's 1993 debut on Earache Records. There is not as much of the melodic experimentation as on Sothis, but its more deathmetal replacement is very fast strumming of chords or low notes to produce a flowing feel to the music, a blurring of structure, between more definitive moments of the song. An aesthetic of chaos disguises intricacy in the twisted and self-distorting lead guitar that shoots through layers of riff patterning like a sign flash-lit by lightning. Another expansion on a Slayer innovation, this is not as technical as Morbid Angel but is more noise-y, perhaps a less neurotic K.K. Null crossed with Glenn Tipton. Production is decent. On Croon Records, Krakow, PL. LASOTY 8. All album notes are in Polish but lyrics and explanation are English. Hopefully an Amerikan label will pick this up, because it kicks ass and there's a huge market for it in Amerika. I think this album could be termed a logical successor to Slayer, because all though it is not so awe-inspiringly outrageous, it follows and develops the logic of Slayer more than Slayer can at this time.

Return to columns listing.