Death metal existed without a name for many years, being influenced by both the extremes of speed metal (Destruction) and Thrash (Cryptic Slaughter), as well as carrying forward influences from hardcore (The Exploited) and Gothic influences to original heavy metal and industrial. In fact, like a genetic profile, the genre is not identifiable by a single trait alone, but by a collection of traits and the common ideas that allow them to be organized as such. Riffs from The Exploited, for example, could be transplanted into modern death metal without being out of place (especially from their "Let's have a war..." album); similarly, distortion and song structures from Destruction can be played "in style" by death metal bands without seeming out of place. However, what unified these concepts, and gave the genre its name, was its literal morbidity: it did not praise death, nor warn of it, but explored it in a strange obsession designed to reinforce the existence of "ultimate reality": the physical, natural, objective world in which we live, and in which we die. In fact, the early death metal especially can be explained almost exclusively by the Hellhammer slogan, "Only death is real."
This outlook, a primitive denial of all that asserted the existence of society on a level above or more important than natural reality, was not explicitly political, nor was it identifiable with any social movement except perhaps fragments of existentialism, nihilism and naturalism; it was certaintly not studied to that degree by the majority of death metal bands and fans. However, by taking this route, death metal avoided the increasing politicization of post-hardcore music which was occurring around it, and the consequent "internalization" of dialogue to the point where a genre only existed by the barest of aesthetic commonality: it used the same instrumentation and distorted, but shared no culture or musical direction or belief system. Over the next two decades, this litmus test for a genre would be reinforced time and again, with genres that could not maintain shared direction collapsing into commerce.
Many bands applied the styles -- chromatic progressions, fast strumming, ambient rhythms -- into different incarnations of a new genre, death metal. The mainstream-moral/underground-nihilist dichotomy was illustrated in the songwriting of older metal bands, which followed too much of the friendly rock music format and allowed itself to anticipate the conditioned desires of the listener, as contrasted to the new music which emphasized structural change (narrative) over finding a convenient harmony and riff and sticking with it. The innovations of Discharge, allowing chromatic riffing to be used in the context of melodic songwriting, and of Bathory, in building song structure around the shape of its riffing, were applied in the works of bands obsessed with death, mortality, and the obscurist predictions of mythology. Apocalypticism, which in speed metal bands had been a dire warning, was here a foundational assumption. As part rebel and part insurgent structuralist, metal broke the scale into broad tonal leaps and chromatic rhythm playing where the structure was the message, not the root note to which it was harmonized or the conventions of such construction followed; key is used carelessly if at all at focal points of intersecting themes in motif development, eschewing the cyclic silhouette of rock form.
This was most clearly defined in the second generation of the new style, which began with Sepultura, Massacra, Possessed, Necrovore and Morbid Angel, whose music was both a radical primitivism and a futurist adaptation of classical theory. Although many elements of metal and hard rock remained, what was emerging that made the genre distinct from all others was a way of taking a "riff salad" and shaping it into a changing pattern which eventually revealed a conclusion. Much as Mozart's music would dance through motivic change for most of its duration, finally uncovering its central theme, a gentle melody, in death metal a thunderous barrage of chromatic riffs prepared the listener for certain expectations in tone and phrase shape, then brought out the conclusion, like the last stanza of a poem: that which explained the journey and why its conclusion was apt. This style was most reminiscent of past centuries of Romantic and Naturalistic European poetry, art and music, but was missed by all but a few death metal fans - not, however, by the innovators creating music in the genre.
Aesthetically, death metal was abrupt and disturbing to most because of the vocals, which were organically distorted by pitching the voice either lower or higher than normal and forcing it to volumes not normally invoked except in an open-throat shout. It was a guttural growl, like that of a defensive animal, and it matched the often-downtowned guitars and layers of thick distortion which as often as not cut out the middle ranges of sound in favor of low-end and high-end. Drums used an extreme form of syncopation known as double bass, in which two bass drums were played alternatingly at high speed, destroying the syncopatic effect in the context of the song but providing a buffetting, urgent constant rhythm. In this genre, power chords exclusively were used, and new forms were incorporated including dissonance. Further, rhythmically the genre operated more as ambient bands do, with percussion framing the music but not leading it on, avoiding the expectation-based "funky" rhythms of rock, bluess and jazz. The result was that even without analyzing the music most listeners identified it with something unearthly, morbid, malevolent and antisocial.
From here the genre bloomed, splitting into several different styles. Massacra was representative of the flowing, liquid, high-speed strumming style that rapidly included bands like Incantation, Hypocrisy, Vader, and later, the heavy-tremolo and electric blistering distortion-clad bands from Sweden, including Dismember and Entombed; Morpheus (later Morpheus Descends to avoid legal conflicts with the hard rock band from Sweden) established the percussive speed-metal-influenced style of choppy, muted riffs and precise drum patterning, a subgroup that included Sinister, Suffocation, Suffer and Cryptopsy; PossessedTherion, Demigod, Monstrosity, Deicide and Unleashed. Sepultura reverted to being a speed metal band before getting in touch with their punk and world music roots, and Celtic Frost veered into glam rock before calling it a day. Sodom remained consistent, but gained instrumental prowess, making their new music unrecognizable to older fans. For each of these styles, diversification occurred, sometimes with interesting results. created a style somewhere in the middle that eventually included bands like
Some blended jazz with death metal, as did Atheist and Cynic; others mixed in grindcore for an aggressive but often blockheaded style called "deathgrind." Some tried to work ambient into the mix, as did Kong, and a few worked on hybrids with past versions of metal and rock, most of which were absorbed by their rock half and thus were unpalatable to metal fans, and equally unrecognizable to rock fans, causing the bands to either shift fully to rock music or to give up entirely. Some found a balance between the faster and mid-paced styles of death metal, to which they added simple but spectacularly effective melodic composition; good examples here would be Amorphis and Demilich. In summary, this was the genre of metal so far which created the greatest room for variation, in part because it was unified by a belief system more than a lifestyle choice, and in part as a result of its broad range of musical applications and few "rules" or genre conventions, despite having a clear musical identity in its nearly-keyless, atonal-and-dissonant friendly melodic structural form of composition.
Death metal had taken the style underground, but also generated a flood of "angry" mainstream imitators and sellouts. Bands like Pantera, Cannibal Corpse, and Tool made use of death metal imagery or technique in the format of complacent suburban music designed to fill lives with distraction. For many, death metal died with the explosion of the Swedish scene and lyrics like those to the first Therion album - selfconscious, moral, and pious while being anti-religious and "metal," in a conflict that while not touching the music defined the decomposition of focus in the genre. Morality was "safe." So were rock hybrids like Entombed's "Clandestine." Flamboyant useless stylings of rock music and stadium heavy metal crept in alongside a dearth of ideas and repetition of known formulae. It seemed as if growth had made the genre too self-conscious, and as a result, it had abandoned itself to the methods of its antagonists.
Worth mentioning in the context of death metal is the rise of a similar genre, grindcore, which grew from punk and thrash melded by convenience, to which the guttural vocals and detuned guitars of death metal were added. While the earliest bands such as Master and CarcassCarcass spawned Napalm Death which in turn spawned Godflesh, leaving a trail behind its creators in search of a flexible but aggressive yet musical artform). Lyrics from Carcass were baffling to most as they consisted of humorous descriptions of illness soaked in the language of medical doctors, with latinate words falling into the gurgling voice like a radio broadcast from the land of the dead. Bolt Thrower, from England like Carcass, adopted a more "epic" style, describing conflict in both ancient and modern times, and Blood, from Germany, who took on a mythological-occultist view, added to a genre that was otherwise strikingly literal like punk bands; Napalm Death and Terrorizer provide examples of this general direction. achieved some success, they eventually felt pressure to diversify and found themselves constrained by the emphasis on constant slamming rhythms, like rock based around expectation and not continuity as death metal was, as well as the need to be "extreme" (interestingly,
In its own way, this music was both deconstructive and constructive. Its nihilism and alienation escaped the rules of society entirely and exceeded the limits of religion and conventional morality; it was born to be offensive and thus marked itself as not only not belonging to society but happy in that alienated view, preferring a separate truth to a compromise with something it saw as false and in denial of mortality, thus unable to seek any meaningful values (when life is infinite, and the self is the limits of perception, is there any reason to care about anything but gratification?). Unlike most genres of the time, however, its deconstruction was predicated on the notion that if enough of society were removed, a truth could be seen which was less constricting and less without value. This was years later a fulfillment of the Jim Morrison summary of William Blake's basic theory that if humankind could remove its perceptive confusion, it would see the world as it is - infinite.:)
