Choosing Death

by Albert Mudrian

  “There are, like, 20 reasons why I quit,” says Andersson, “and I have to say that The Hellacopters is not a reason for quitting—I would have done it anyway.”

  The Earache body count rose further when, shortly following their extraordinary Earache debut, Slaughter of the Soul, intra-band tensions tore At the Gates apart in late 1996, after a successful North American tour with Napalm Death.

  “I think the pressure was really hard on us for the next album,” recalls former At the Gates frontman Tomas Lindberg. “Straight when we came off the tour there was pressure on us to do the album really quick, and there were musical differences mounting, along with tension between us. We were still pretty young, so we had a problem with the situation.”

  There was also the complicated matter of one of Earache’s most identifiable acts, Carcass. Thanks to a curious clause in their record contact, with the release of their Heartwork LP Carcass had fulfilled their recording commitment to Earache.

  “There was a clause in their deal at the time that said Earache could have two more albums if we got a record of theirs in the top 40 albums or singles charts,” Pearson recalls.

  “Before Heartwork came out, I said, ‘We could go nuts and kinda force you into the top 40,’” he continues. “But because they were on a profit-share deal, which means they take 50% of all profits of their recordings—which is an incredibly unusual deal—I asked them, ‘Do you want us to waste all of your money by plugging it into independent radio promotions to get you into the top 40?’ I think it would have been worth doing, because it would have been so fucked up to have a band like that in there. But they said, ‘No, don’t bother spending all that, it will be okay.’ And we eventually charted at 54. Then they turned the tables on me slightly and said, ‘Okay, we’re not gonna record for you anymore, because you couldn’t get us in the top 40.’ And I was like, ‘You told us not to bother!’”

  Only a week after Heartwork’s release, Carcass was on the market. The band’s manager, Martin Nesbitt, was already taking steps to position the band for a record deal directly with Columbia.

  “I did definitely tell Carcass to make no secrets that we were out of our contract just to get Sony to actually take a look at us,” Nesbitt says. “We did have interest from East/West here in the UK, which to me was unheard of. Suddenly a UK major was interested in what Carcass were doing, and that just felt mad. But, hand on my heart, I never had any intention of signing to them. There was no point. Columbia were already working Heartwork, so what’s the point of doing a bloody deal with somebody else? But I did have to have someone else to drive up the deal to bid against them. And the powers that be at Sony said, ‘You’d better get Carcass signed, because we’re not working this record just to find out that they’re gone.’”

  The strategy worked. On April 3rd, 1994, Carcass signed directly to Columbia Records throughout the world. Just a few months later, the band replaced recently departed guitarist Mike Hickey with 20-year-old Liverpool local Carlo Regadas and began working on what was to be their major label debut.

  “The time came for us to try and start writing stuff, and Bill turned up at my house and had a drum machine and a four-track [recorder] and we were gonna start getting some ideas together,” recalls Carcass bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker. “My attitude was, at that point—and I’m not just saying this to look cool now—that this album’s gotta be even more extreme, more intense than Heartwork. But Bill just said, ‘Look, I haven’t got any of those riffs in me.’ And he started playing these less aggressive riffs that he had, and I thought, ‘Cool, I can handle that, if that’s the way he wants to go, because it’s his band as much as anyone’s.’ But at the outset, being a simpleton, I thought this album’s gotta be really brutal. Somewhere along the line I just fell under Bill’s spell of, ‘Okay, we’ll do this.’”

  “I think some of the things I wanted to do were just not compatible with Carcass and the timing was all wrong,” says Steer. “I think if we’d gone all out making another really crushing record like Heartwork, which was superheavy and it had guitars everywhere, and it was, in that world, very produced—if we carried on in that direction, who knows what might have happened? But I didn’t really feel like doing that.”

  The recording sessions for what would become the band’s Swansong album were particularly arduous for the group’s members. After spending over two months in the studio—with the money coming out of the band’s own pockets—Walker and Steer were clashing over the direction of the album with increasing regularity.

  “They were butting heads constantly,” remembers Swansong producer Colin Richardson. “But Bill was really hard on showing his feelings, so he would rather leave the room and be on his own for like three or four hours and come back rather than actually having it out with the rest of the band. He didn’t know how to communicate a problem, because he was an inherently shy guy.”

  “The atmosphere was so bad in the room that I just knew our days were numbered,” offers Steer. “We wouldn’t socialize unless a band thing was happening. I wasn’t even sure if we’d make it through the record. Everything felt wrong.”

  The band survived long enough to present rough mixes of the new material to Jim Welch at Columbia in early 1995. Welch wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about what he heard.

  “It was me basically saying to the band, ‘I really think that you can do better. You’ve done better, and by better I don’t mean more commercial,’” says Welch. “They already had some really commercial songs. But just because they were more commercial didn’t necessarily mean they were better. I would have much rather had three songs that were heavy but still better, just more memorable. I don’t care if it sounds like Reek of Putrefaction. I remember Jeff got really pissed off at me for saying what I thought. But especially being the first record you’re gonna put out as [a] strictly Columbia [release]—I mean, come on, it should be their best record.”

  “Jim was a bit cold about it, and I started to hear things like, ‘Maybe Jeff should go for singing lessons,’” says Walker. “Obviously I put my back up, thinking, ‘What the fuck is he going on about?’”

  “Jim said, ‘I just think the vocals aren’t accessible enough,’” recalls Richardson. “But I just think when you sign a band like Carcass you kinda know what you’re gonna get. It’s extreme vocals. I think they made an attempt to slim the songs down to three-and-a-half, four minutes and put in a chorus. But looking back, for me, the album never had the excitement or the classic riffs that Heartwork had. With the band pulling in different directions it ended up to be a little bit of a hodgepodge. What happens to certain bands is you wanna please everybody—you wanna please individual members of the band, you try and please the label, the management, and it just ends up not knowing quite where it wants to go.”

  It was becoming apparent that Columbia wanted no part of Carcass’ new death/heavy metal direction. Sensing that the label would never provide the band with the funding to finish the album, Nesbitt proposed the idea of cutting Carcass loose from their deal with Columbia.

  “It got to the point where they didn’t wanna change it, and I didn’t feel totally comfortable putting it out,” says Welch. “We gave them back the record, they made money, and they were free to go.”

  Carcass used much of the money from the settlement to complete Swansong in April of 1995. By then, the band’s members knew the record would be their last.

  “That fatalistic attitude definitely set in after the album was in the can,” says Walker. “We’d spent so long in the studio that I think we were just sick of the sight of each other.”

  “Parts of the recording were like a nightmare for me,” recalls Carcass drummer Ken Owen. “Yeah, it was just a clash of personalities between Bill and Jeff. There was no malice, but I often had to mediate.”

  “I was really determined to see it through, because I didn’t know anything else,” says Steer. “But I did have this feeling that there was no way forward for the band. For me, it was a mu
sical thing, because I had been pursuing a certain direction in my head for a few years, and then suddenly I was doing stuff and wanted to do stuff that just wasn’t compatible with Carcass. I didn’t wanna record four guitar tracks for each rhythm. I didn’t want that wall-of-guitar sound. I didn’t want the solos to sound overproduced. I wanted things to have a rock vibe to them, which is kind of crazy, thinking about the band’s background. But that’s just how I felt at the time. In some ways I was happy with the riffs I was bringing in, but more often than not, I was spending the day thinking, ‘Fuck, this is not happening.’ And I just knew that there wasn’t any more mileage in this.”

  “Bill made the decision that I didn’t have the balls to make, to be honest,” says Walker. “He said to me that he didn’t wanna do it anymore. And with Bill doing that, I let out a sigh of relief, because there was no way I was gonna carry on without him. I was not gonna let Bill walk away from it and me carry on like a complete loser with other musicians.”

  With a record but without a band, Nesbitt brought Swansong back to Earache despite the band’s differences with Pearson. The record was eventually released in May of 1996 to lukewarm reviews and disappointing sales figures.

  “I don’t think that’s what anybody wanted from Carcass,” offers Steer, “whether it was the old fans or the new fans, the record label or whatever, we weren’t delivering what people wanted.”

  High-profile death metallers Cannibal Corpse may not have been breaking up, but they certainly were experiencing turbulent times of their own. The 1995 recording sessions for the band’s fifth LP hit a snag when vocalist Chris Barnes’ touring commitment to his newly formed death metal side project Six Feet Under clashed with Cannibal’s recording schedule.

  “The Six Feet Under thing may have been the breaking point for them,” Barnes explains. “But when I got into the studio with Cannibal, everything was cool. I remember writing [lyrics for] one song, ‘Absolute Hatred,’ I think [former Cannibal Corpse guitarist] Rob [Rusay] wrote it, and Rob was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is fucking killer.’ He was all about it, and there were a lot of things like that. At rehearsal, when I’d bring stuff up, they all liked everything I was doing, but then when we got into the studio, I was being ripped apart by the producer, Scott Burns, about certain timings, vocal patterns, and I just couldn’t agree with him. It just accelerated in the studio to right before I left for the first Six Feet Under tour. They were talking about things like, ‘No, that ain’t working, and this ain’t working. ’ [Cannibal bassist] Alex Webster just wanted to get so much more technical with the music, and that’s great, but I don’t think that’s what death metal was, I don’t think that’s where we started from; it was more like raw energy and just brutalness straight out—not worrying about doing a million notes in one fucking measure. So it pissed him off that when I wrote stuff, and it didn’t really go along with what he was wanting from it. So when I was getting ready to leave for the tour, they were like, ‘Look, we’re gonna need to redo stuff when you get back, and talk about what we wanna do,’ and I was like, you know, ‘Whatever.’ And so I left for the tour, and got back, and Alex called me and just said, ‘We’re gonna have to let you go. We got another singer and we’re gonna rework everything.’”

  Personnel tumult similarly plagued Napalm Death. With inner relations already precarious from the band’s decision to incorporate more progressive elements into their grinding approach, Napalm’s marathon 65-show, 68-date European Diatribes tour in the spring of 1996 only further strained affairs between the band’s members.

  “I was like a fucking zombie after that,” remembers Napalm vocalist Barney Greenway. “I could barely walk. And then we immediately did a Japanese tour after that, which, ironically, was the most stress-free part of the world tour, but I was just really down at that point—inconsolable, almost. And I said to the guys, ‘Man, I’m fucking sick of this shit.’ And [guitarist] Mitch Harris turned around to me, and I remember this quite clearly, and said, ‘Man, will you shut the fuck up?’ And I was like, ‘Fuck you,’ and I was shouting in the middle of the street. I was majorly unhappy and knew something had to give. After we came home from Diatribes we had a few weeks off, and I never saw the guys. I never spoke to them. Then we had a meeting one day, and they came and decided that my heart wasn’t in it and they should try another vocalist. And I was fucking pissed off. Although I was unhappy, by the same token I was like, ‘You know what? You guys are pricks.’ So they kicked me out, and so I thought, ‘I best start integrating into regular life again,’ which seemed really strange.”

  What happened next was even more peculiar. First, Napalm Death replaced Greenway with Extreme Noise Terror co-vocalist Phil Vane. And with Vane entrenched in the Napalm camp, Extreme Noise Terrorists Dean Jones and Ali Firouzbakht propositioned Greenway to fill ENT’s vocal slot that Vane had vacated.

  “They asked me to join full-time, and I was like, ‘No, I’ll do an album, but I ain’t joining,’” says Greenway. “I knew that Dean and Ali—no disrespect to them—but I knew that they were the leading lights in that band, and their opinions came first and foremost. And I’ve strived for fucking democracy, which was one of the things I felt was lacking in Napalm during that period. So I did the ENT album, and it was all right. And that was it. I actually did try and get another band together with the drummer from Cancer, Carl Stokes, and a couple of other guys that had never been in any bands before. The aim was to play something that I felt at the time Napalm had turned its back on, which is like fast hardcore, but what I was trying to do wasn’t quite working out. We did a couple of cover songs, and that was about as far as it got, really.”

  Still more troubles awaited Earache. The label’s other high-profile act, Morbid Angel—who were still under contract with Earache throughout Europe—were nearing the end of their relationship with Warner Bros. subsidiary Giant Records. After 1993’s hugely successful Covenant record, the band followed it up with Domination in May of 1995. By then, MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball had been pulled from the airwaves in the States, leaving the band without the promotional tool that had been so vital in their recent commercial achievement. Despite still selling an impressive 70,000 copies of the record in the United States, Giant did not even consider picking up the option on the band’s next full-length due to serious restructuring within the label.

  In the summer of 1996, Morbid Angel were about to undergo some reorganization of their own. Longtime frontman David Vincent decided that the band’s upcoming fall European tour would be his final venture with the group. Out of respect for his bandmates, he kept the decision to himself until the completion of the tour.

  “There were a lot of things that were changing,” says Vincent. “Some things in my mind were changing. There were just things I was unhappy about, not necessarily with the band; it was time for a change. Sometimes you get up, and you’ve just had it. I’m the kind of person that if I get to the point where I’ve had it, then I shift—I shift into something else, and that’s where I was.”

  “At that time, I was kinda dissatisfied with some of his ideas and where the band was going,” says Morbid Angel guitarist Trey Azagthoth of his former bandmate. “I always thought Dave was an incredible artist, but I could just tell that he was not really into it, because I was into the spiritualism with the music and being ritualistic, so it became difficult to relate to where each of us was coming from.”

  After recording four full-length LPs and spending ten years fronting Morbid Angel, death metal’s allure was simply beginning to fade for Vincent.

  “The last tour that we did, I wasn’t getting the reaction out of the crowds that I was used to, the power, and people just going mad,” Vincent recalls. “I thought maybe there was something wrong with the soundman. So I walked out during soundcheck and I stood at the mixing board and I listened to the band, including myself playing along at the desk. And sure enough, it was killing. We had all the technology, we put triggers on the kick drums so we didn’t have to worry
about the fluctuation of different mics or temperature or bass drums going out of tune. Everything just sounded tight and powerful and totally in-your-face, and I was like, ‘Why is this not going over?’ I could feel a difference. It wasn’t the band. We were on top of our game more than anybody. But what I just realized was that everybody was doing this now. We’d go out on tour, and there would be four bands, all of them being death metal bands, all of them having blast beats and double bass and raging vocals, and people were numb. After four hours of listening to this stuff, you can only take so much. There’s nowhere you can go from there.”

  That notion is central to the genre’s demise. When bands like Napalm Death started playing as fast and heavy as possible, it was seriously intended to be the end of the line in terms of extremity. Realistically, you can’t progress and expand on something that was meant to be a conclusion.

  “You can look at every label’s roster from that period and see hundreds of bands that really shouldn’t have been putting records out in the first place, but they were part of the machine,” offers Morbid Angel manager Günter Ford. “And that culminated and peaked with the Earache/Columbia deal, and with Giant/ Warner and Morbid. When you have a mountaintop, either the mountaintop goes to another level and it gets bigger and bigger, or it collapses. And in the case of death metal, these people underneath in these small labels really glutted up the marketplace, and not enough new, young talented bands were given the opportunity to develop properly inside the genre. And let’s face it, the genre is extreme, so for it to even sell the amount of records that Morbid Angel did at the height of their career is, in fact, a minor miracle—it’s just not pop music.

  “In terms of commercial effort, Domination was a tremendous record,” Ford continues. “We did get to another level. We sold over 200,000 records with that fucking thing worldwide. No one else can say that. Unfortunately, we were not able to continue with the original lineup into the next album. I do think that would have made a great difference as to what we would have done moving forward.”