DEATH METAL

Another controversial kind of music. We can say that the birth of Death Metal was inspired by cult thrash metal bands like Sodom, Destruction (both German), Slayer and Dark Angel in the USA. The sound was very deep and heavy, and the lyrics was again concerning controversial arguments like war, death, sickness, and religion. In 1986 Slayer's cult album Reign In Blood, an absolute masterpiece in metal, caused the increase of the following in extreme metal music, and, some years later the mixing of metal, hardcore and the need to go "beyond" gave life to the darkest form of metal music. Death Metal. Again, many young people began to play that music, and so, in the late eighties and early nineties, the Death Metal scene was counting so much bands that is really impossible to mention them all. For a while, Death Metal primary bands were Sepultura from Brazil, with their intelligent mixing of standards for the genre and a touch of tribalism, Carcass from England, an unique band whose lyrics were written by the drummer, student in a Medical Centre and obsessed by sickness and surgery. Their shocking debut Reek Of Putrefaction and the following Symphonies Of Sickness are famous for their disgusting artwork, consisting in an homemade collage of pictures taken from Medical Encyclopedias, like burnt corpses, dismembered torsos and funny stuff like that.

A real must for the lovers of the genre was surely Left Hand Path by the Swedish Entombed, a band born from the seminal ashes of Nihilist in the end of the eighties. The sound was so heavy, thanks to the guitars chorded two semitones lower than the normal, drum set sounds like explosions and the voice of L.G. Petrov, most monster than human. In Sweden and Scandinavia in general, the album really gave birth to thousands of clones, and the sound soon became a cliché to make distinction from bands from the rest of the world. Soon, Death Metal was divided in two kinds of sounds: the American one (especially prolific was Florida state, with such bands like Morbid Angel, Death, Atheist, Obituary and so on) more technical oriented and clearly recorded (famous was the producer Scott Burns), and the European, more direct and radical, with bands as Unleashed, Grave, Dismember, Merciless whose crunchy guitar sound and low pitched riffs was a trademark for the genre.

Some years passed and the sound evolved obviously again, with the birth to thousands more bands, from the ultra technical Meshuggah (Sweden) and Cynic (USA), to the ultragross Anal Cunt (USA) and General Surgery (Sweden). In America bands like Malevolent Creation, Cannibal Corpse, Immolation and Incantation inherited the sound of the godfathers, as did in Europe by bands as Sinister, Amorphis, Asphyx and the Austrian Pungent Stench. In the middle Nineties, the influence of hardcore music with bands like Corrosion Of Conformity, Biohazard and so on, began to be recognizable also in the metal world, and albums like Fear Factory's Soul Of A New Machine and Brutal Truth's Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses, with their mix of Death Metal and Hardcore started a new way of playing hard. An important chapter of the Death Metal story is the "dark gothic" branch. Bands like Paradise Lost, Anathema, The Gathering first, Celestial Season, Dark Tranquillity next, played and plays a sort of gothic death metal that embraced two kinds of audience. The Death Metal fans looking for something softer and more emotional, and the gothic rock fans looking for something that sounded harder than the conventional gothic bands. New Death Metal, the Brutal Death Metal, still has a lot of following and everything done in the past is now revisited by bands like Dillinger Escape Plan, Nasum, Nile, for the lovers of technical extremities and Mortician, Decapitated, Deranged and Regurgitate for the followers of the splatter oriented freaks. Too many bands has not been mentioned, and it shows how big and continuously evolving and changing is the Death Metal scene.