It’s weird how bandnames cluster around certain letters of the alphabet. De and E were lousy with bands I like and so will M & S be, but bands with a name starting with “F”? Though the BNR Metal Pages list eightytwo I could only think of one that I actually knew and liked. You know this one and you know this song, as it was inescapable back in the early nineties:
Faith No More – Epic
I always thought poor old Faith No More were a victim of the rise of grunge. Like quite a few bands from around that time they were busy mixing up metal with rap with hardcore punk and along came the sullen Nirvana boys with what was basically just more mopey guitar based rock and that was the end of that.
Entombed knew their audience. ‘Eavy Metal might look tough, but it’s a decidedly nerdy music genre, so what would be more appealing than have your favourite lite Death Metal band sing about your favourite badass hero?
Entombed – Wolverine Blues
Gimmicks and MTV friendly image aside, Entombed has always been a good death metal band, but one that quickly grew bored with the somewhat limited reach of the subgenre, mixing other influences, especially hardcore punk — something that came natural for a lot of metal bands. This might be my favourite song in their original style.
Left Hand Path:
And this of their more modern style. In both cases the introduction sets the tone for the rest of the song, the long drawn out scream of Left Hand Path, the tching-tching of The Hollow Man, grabbing your attention before all hell breaks lose.
If y’all been following Metal Monday the past couple of weeks you may have noticed the preponderance of death metal. This is not just because it’s one of my favourite subgenres, but also because so many of the better death metal bands seem to cluster in the early part of the alphabet. Today we have the classic Florida death metal band, Death itself, now sadly defunct after founder Chuck Schuldiner “pulled the plug” in 2001, having died of brain cancer. Though he denied it himself, he and his band were incredibly influential in shaping the genre and you can do worse than to buy their first two albums, Scream Bloody Gore and Leprosy. The latter album is represented here with the title song:
Diamond Head was a New Wave of British Heavy Metal band who never quite made it into the big time, but gained fame because Metallica nicked all their best songs, including this one: Am I Evil:
Finally, another Death Metal band, Deicide, with “Lunatic of God’s Creation. Unlike Death, Deicide is a seriously anti-religious, anti-Christian band; their name of course means “god murder”. It’s all so much posturing however, despite the socalled satanic messages in their music, Deicide doesn’t actually believe any of it, unlike the more extreme Norwegian Black Metal bands. The latter’s loathing of bands like Deicide and touring partner Gorefest might actually have led to an attempt to blow the band up live on stage in Stockholm…
That last video also nicely shows off the “death metal grunt” voice.
Heavy metal and Christianity don’t generally mix, though there are some pale imitations of metal bands that call themselves Christian — like every Christian imitation of a secular idea, they’re shit. In fact, whole subgenres have sprung up revolving around the hatred for Christianity or the joy of being a satanist. A lot of this is of course playacting, or just done to shock the bourgeoisie, but trust the Norwegians to have made it all real: the rise of Black Metal as a seperate genre in the early nineties saw a spate of church burnings, threats against more mainstream metal bands as well as at least one suicide and one murder. All this didn’t necessarily improve the music….
Venom – Welcome to Hell
Entombed – Left Hand Path
Mayhem – De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas — at the time of this album’s release, the lead singer had suicided and the guitarist had been murdered by the lead singer of a rival black metal band.
Death metal can be a very silly sort of music, not at all grown up. In attempting to shock its audience, or more often, the people judging its audience, it often resorts to the grossout, deliberate over the top stories of horror and revulsion, with decapitations and biting off the heads of bats and such. All a bit childish, an adolescent rebellion against authority, bought for the shock value. Certainly a lot of death metal fans, not to mention the musician share Calvin’s motivation in the strip above…
At first sight Carcass may fall in that category, but the band (which split in 1995, but has since reunited) has insisted that they have legitamite reasons for their grossout lyrics: they want to revulse people into stopping eating meat! (Of course, this is one of those things I’ve read a long time ago and can’t find any evidence for anymore) This may explain titles like “Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency” and “Vomited Anal Tract”…
Whether or not this helped convince anybody of the benefits of vegetarianism is doubtful; like so many death metal vocalists their lead singer is difficult to understand at the best of times and metal fans on the whole are a pretty unshockable lot
“We don’t sing about politics. We don’t sing about religion…All our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose they could convert it into a horror movie. Really, that’s all it is. We like gruesome, scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it’s about killing people, but it’s not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories, and that’s it. And anyone who gets upset about it is ridiculous.”
Horror inspired, extremely violent and sexual (some would say: sexist) it’s no wonder such uptight countries like Australia and Germany banned their records and in the latter case, even the band performing songs from those banned records! But again, for me personally the lyrics are not the reason I like the band: it’s the music and the feel of it — heavy, sombre, aggressive — that I like.
