Choosing Death

by Albert Mudrian

  “Earache didn’t do shit for us,” Greenway continues. “We had fucking no support. We never took tour support from them. I mean, it was never on the table anyway, but we never asked for it, because it would have made us pig sick to have to go Earache and start asking for tour support, because we hated the fucking way they were anyway. Why the fuck would we wanna lower ourselves and go ask Digby for extra money? We’ve got more pride than that. To back up my statement, it’s always gonna be Digby’s word against ours, but all I can say is, if people wanna find out more about it, get yourselves out on the Internet, or if you can’t, go to a gig, ask a former Earache band, and they will fucking tell you exactly what I’m telling you. And we have no reason to be in some grand conspiracy, because all this shit actually happened.”

  “Frankly, this is the sort of distortion and coloring of past events that makes me pretty annoyed,” says Pearson. “Why the incessant sniping at the label that supported them for a decade or more is beyond me. I’ll suggest: sour grapes, perhaps? The facts are, Napalm Death were dropped because their next personal advance under the contract was £6,500 payable each month—that’s £78,000—and when you add the usual recording costs of £25,000, it makes a total of £103,000, or approximately $150,000 we would have to pay in advances to get the next album. So Barney is quite incorrect.

  “That is in the ballpark of major label-type advances,” Person continues. “So in the light of their steadily falling sales during the ‘90s, we told them straight up that we still wanted to work with Napalm, and would they consider a reduction, but they refused, which was fair enough—I agreed to the large numbers, after all—so we had no option but to be realistic and formally drop the band. Official explanation: disappointing sales didn’t warrant the advances due in the deal.

  “As for the tour support, it’s true that Napalm never needed any. They have been an established touring band, playing in every corner of the globe under their own steam for a decade. So, why do they need support? It’s a little contradictory when Shane, after being dropped, criticized us in interviews saying that Earache wouldn’t give Napalm any tour support for a [November/December 1998 European] tour supporting Cradle of Filth unless a proposed video clip was scrapped to pay for it, which is exactly true, as we didn’t feel comfortable funding both items, when Barney subsequently [says] they never asked for any tour support from Earache anyway and would never lower themselves to ask for any money like that. The truth is, when Napalm Death really needed it for the Cradle tour, tour support was actually paid, but it was a really rare occurrence, since it was hardly ever needed on all their other tours for a decade.

  “When we dropped Napalm Death, it was also prompted in no small measure because of the massive confusion in the band’s ‘support team’, because their longstanding manager Mark Walmesley—who dealt with all [of] Napalm Death’s affairs with us on pretty much a daily basis for nine years straight—well, he just literally quit his responsibilities and disappeared out of the picture one day in 1999. And, crazy as it sounds, the band have never spoken to him to this day, greatly adding to the confusion, not to mention the air of suspicion that his sudden disappearance has fostered within the band. Because of this, Earache has been dragged through the mire with wild accusations and finger pointing for a couple of years—all such accusations are unproven and categorically denied, but have been immensely damaging to the label’s reputation nonetheless.”

  In early 2000 free agents Napalm Death signied a one-album deal with UK-based label Dreamcatcher Records. To that end, the title of the group’s first post-Earache studio LP, Enemy of the Music Business, is self-explanatory. Clearly

  “I think all the shit we went through was a good basis for inspiration,” agrees Embury. “We also went through our experimental, maturing stage, and I think some people liked it and some people didn’t. It was just time for us to start doing what we’re known for again. I think everything we learned from those experimental records has been mashed into this record. Obviously, it’s far more extreme than the last few. It’s probably the heaviest album we’ve ever done.”

  The same can be said of Nile, who also returned in 2000, delivering their second full-length album, Black Seeds of Vengeance. By incorporating more of their traditional Middle Eastern elements with instruments such as tampuras, arghouls, sitars, gongs and kettledrums alongside their metallic savageness, the band’s connection to Egyptian culture grew deeper and darker.

  “Branching out to this degree will, of course, spawn detractors and imitators,” declared Terrorizer in its October 2000 review of the incendiary Black Seeds, “but the exceptional authenticity of Nile’s experiment cannot be questioned. Neither can the fact that this is probably the best death metal album since Necroticism.”

  “I haven’t seen anybody that would say they gave a crap about doing what we’re trying to do,” offers Nile’s chief songwriter Karl Sanders. “I’m still not sure what to think about that. On one hand, I think, ‘Well, maybe people just don’t like what we’re doing and so why bother trying to copy it?’ Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery. Well, if no one is trying to imitate us, that’s kind of unflattering.”

  By the end of 2000, Terrorizer’s annual album of the year issue awarded Nile’s Black Seeds of Vengeance the pole position honor and Napalm’s Enemy of the Music Business a second place finish, besting black metal godfathers Mayhem and heavy metal progenitors Iron Maiden.

  “I’ve been playing metal and listening to metal for a long fucking time, and there are a lot of influences, and they are all part of the stuff swimming around in my brain,” says Sanders. “There is a lot of stuff in that soup, so there’s not one overriding, dominating influence that slaps you in the face and you go, ‘Ah, this is obviously Cannibal Corpse,’ or, ‘Ah, this is Suffocation,’ or, ‘Ah, this is Morbid Angel.’

  “Why in the world would anyone give a fuck about me if I were to just regurgitate old death metal point-blank? There are so many other bands that are doing that exact same thing, and we’ll be another one? No—fuck, no. I don’t see what the fucking point is there. I think we’ve got to move forward and perhaps stop looking at the past in a golden years kinda way. If death metal’s gonna have a future, I think we gotta look forward.”

  10

  Altering the Future

  OVER THE COURSE OF TWO DECADES, death metal and grindcore’s models of blast beats, guttural growls and detuned guitar riffs remained largely unchanged despite the addition of literally thousands of new bands to the underground. A new generation of Swedish death metal acts, however, seemed intent on following the leads of early innovators such as Death and Carcass. Traditionally the most melodic and tuneful of death metal and grindcore’s original genesis points, Sweden’s second wave of young death metallers were also expanding on the influences of their own countrymen. Their beginnings, however, were simply clear reflections of the Swedish scene’s progenitors, such as Nihilist, Carnage and Dismember.

  “Those guys are a couple of years older, but they were the big guys, and they put out demos and had gigs and stuff while we were just rehearsing,” recalls Stockholm native Mikael Åkerfeldt. “And obviously, they were the first death metal bands who got record deals [in Sweden] and influenced the world, so we were looking up to all of those bands.

  “You didn’t know anything about the Stockholm scene until Entombed got their deal,” he continues. “Then it kind of escalated from there, because after Entombed put out Left Hand Path, there was this Stockholm sound, and every band went to Sunlight Studios to get that guitar sound. I was a big fan of all those bands, like Carnage and Entombed. They were my idols.”

  Åkerfeldt proudly wore those influences on his long sleeves, playing in a number of local death and thrash metal groups, including Eruption, before co-founding the fledgling death metal band Opeth with guitarist/vocalist David Isberg in 1990.

  “We had long songs back then, but they didn’t have any kind of symphonic or progressive elements,
” says Åkerfeldt, who moved from bass to guitars and vocals upon the departure of Isberg in early 1992. “It was just grind, midpaced and doom back then. I incorporated everything into a song since I was influenced by everybody, as long as it was extreme. I didn’t actually think too much about the quality. If they had an extreme logo, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is fucking cool.’ It was not until maybe a couple of years later that you found out that some bands were crap, while bands like Entombed and Morbid Angel, their records are timeless.”

  Within a few short years, Opeth weren’t just incorporating Åkerfeldt’s extreme music tastes into their approach, but also his love of obscure ‘70s progressive rock acts such as Camel and Caravan, resulting in a strangely sinuous blend of protracted compositions averaging nearly ten minutes in length. By the band’s third full-length LP, 1998’s My Arms, Your Hearse, Åkerfeldt had successfully implemented choral vocal lines into nearly every one of Opeth’s songs, ultimately crafting some of the first traditional “hooks” brought forth in the death metal or grindcore genres.

  “I think we are definitely still a death metal band,” offers Åkerfeldt on the potentially thorny subject of categorization. “And to many we are nothing but a death metal band, and we still cling to those roots. We still have the vocals, and I’m still very much into the aggressive and brutal arrangements. And to me, there’s not much in the world that’s so aggressive and still has the finesse that death metal has. You can go and listen to grindcore and industrial and noise, and it’s brutal and all, but it just has no punch. It’s not that we tried to pay our dues to death metal, but for us death metal is as important a music style as pop and rock. We just wanna make Opeth the band that expanded from being a death metal band to something else, but still having those roots.”

  Although born in the city of Gothenburg, the roots of fellow Swede Anders Fridén weren’t planted far from Åkerfeldt’s. Fridén was an early underground obsessive, trading tapes and attending any death metal show that came through town after forming his own death metal act Dark Tranquillity [sic] in late 1989 at the age of 14.

  “I’d say it was the traditional start-with-covers kind of thing,” says Fridén of the earliest Dark Tranquillity material. “Then we get tired of that, and we started working on our own stuff. We listened to a lot of Swedish death metal, but we also listened to a lot of German thrash. As far as the influence, we wanted to do something different. We didn’t wanna sound like [other Swedish death metal bands]. We did wanna have their heaviness, but with the twist of speed and melody.”

  That Swedish death metal influence was apparent in the band’s earliest recordings, but it was the twin guitar harmonies, directly inspired by traditional heavy metal heroes Iron Maiden, that set Dark Tranquillity far apart from their blasting brethren, defining—with help from In Flames and especially At the Gates—the blatantly melodic “Gothenburg sound.”

  After recording a pair of demos, a 7-inch and 1993’s long-player Skydancer, Fridén left the band in the summer of 1994 due to an unwillingness to commit to the group on a full-time basis. Six months later, he reconsidered his dedication to music, joining In Flames, while former In Flames vocalist Mikael Stanne actually filled Dark Tranquillity’s vocal position, which had been vacated by Fridén. By 1999’s Colony, In Flames’ songwriting evolved to produce more traditional verse/chorus song structures, complementing Fridén’s emergent melodious singing.

  “It’s never been In Flames’ goal to be a death metal band,” says Fridén, whose death metal rasp still dominates his vocal delivery. “In some people’s eyes, we’re not at all, but to some other people we might be just because we scream. I don’t know and I don’t really care—I hate labeling music. We just write good songs, but of course, we belong to the extreme side of music.

  “You have to do something with the music,” he continues. “You just can’t write the same albums with the same riffs over and over. You have to incorporate new ideas and new styles. That’s why we are here today. I admire those that are just into death metal and they just play death metal, as long as they don’t complain about other people’s choice not to do that. I mean, how much more heavy and extreme can it get?”

  Former Carnage and Carcass guitarist Michael Amott asked himself the same question when he founded Arch Enemy in 1996. Down-tuned ferocity would obviously be a key component to his new band, but songwriting was equally important. To his credit, Amott has been able to craft catchy death metal songs without relying on traditionally sung vocals to deliver the hook.

  “It’s kind of the beauty and the beast—the contrast and the tension between major and minor keys,” says Amott. “I mean, we’re all music nuts in Arch Enemy, and we love playing brutal and fast, but we also like putting in melodies and harmonies and creating different atmospheres. There are a lot of bands that have the same kinda influences as us, but there’s really no other band that does it exactly the same way that we do it.

  “I think we do have death metal elements,” he continues. “We used to call Carnage brutal death metal, but I’ve kinda moved away a little bit from categorizing stuff. We didn’t even do that with Carcass. We didn’t call that death metal then. And when I joined, they just wanted to call it metal. But I guess that’s typical of every musician—you don’t wanna categorize your music. You don’t wanna put it in that box. That said, there will always be death metal in Arch Enemy, because that music is in my blood.”

  Arch Enemy further separated themselves from the death metal pack in 2000 with the addition of death metal’s first high-profile female vocalist, Angela Gossow.

  “I’m very emotional and I’ve got a lot of anger, and I think it’s a way I can relieve my anger in a way without hurting anyone else, including myself,” Gossow explains. “I’ve been raised a very free spirit. My mom never told me, ‘You’re a girl. You’re not supposed to do that.’ I’ve always been more like my brothers, climbing up trees, falling off. I’ve never played with dolls, I was racing toy cars.

  “When I became a teenager, I was a bit different from other girls,” she continues. “I didn’t like the mainstream music. I didn’t like the clothing that people were wearing around me, and I kept away from the typical school parties. I was just looking for something that fit me, and then I discovered a metal channel on the radio one day, and that basically changed my life. Then I got into the death metal scene, which my mom wasn’t so happy about because of all the dark religious imagery. She was a bit afraid of me getting into Satanism and stuff like that, but that didn’t happen. I just joined a band. I was 17 and I started screaming and growling my head off.”

  Not just another pretty face, Gossow’s vocal delivery is nothing short of vicious. Sporting a deeper and altogether nastier voice than most of the male vocalists Amott has performed with, Gossow is determined to never soften her approach.

  “I take vocal lessons, but that’s basically for myself, because I’m a music fan and I should get as much education as possible, and that includes clean vocals, as well,” she says. “But adding the clean female voice in Arch Enemy’s sound would make it totally cheesy. I shouldn’t have to do that just because of my gender.”

  In fact, the German-born vocalist is still only one of a handful of women playing extreme music.

  “It doesn’t surprise me; I guess it is an acquired taste [for women],” says Bolt Thrower bassist Jo Bench, the first woman to gain notoriety playing death metal or grindcore. “I think there are more women in the scene now than when I started out in ‘87, but I never thought, ‘Oh, no, I’m the only girl.’ If I did, I don’t think I’d have lasted five minutes. I found it easier just to get on with it and let the music do the talking.”

  Still, such music isn’t appealing to most women, in many cases, for the simple fact that a number of death metal bands seemingly advocate gruesome violence against women—most notably Cannibal Corpse, who with song titles such as “Fucked With a Knife,” “She Was Asking for It,” and “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt,” imme
diately alienate a good portion of any possible female audience.

  “I loved Cannibal Corpse’s [1990 debut album] Eaten Back to Life, because it was so extreme at the time when I was a kid, but I didn’t sing along with those lyrics,” Gossow admits. “It’s somehow just a bit intimidating. It’s so much about violence against women. It’s not a guy who’s being totally shredded—it’s always women. It’s usually a sexual thing too, like rape, then murder, and I don’t think you should promote that. You don’t wanna have your girlfriend raped, strangled and ripped apart when she was pregnant. I still don’t get it when so many of the people out there that sing about that [subject matter] have girlfriends—I just don’t know how they can justify that.”

  Despite such obstacles, Gossow’s done her part in exposing a new generation of female fans to this extreme form of music.

  “Arch Enemy has tons of female fans nowadays, and we never really had that many before,” says Gossow. “They’re fond of me, because they see a female who’s not afraid of being strong. I think it encourages guys as well to maybe get a female in a band. In fact, I’m in touch with lots of females getting involved with this music. I am totally against competition and cat fights—we support each other.”

  Further support for death metal even came from the once candidly hostile black metal factions. By the end of the ‘90s, not only had black metal bands proclaimed their fondness of old school death metal bands such as Cannibal Corpse and Deicide, some black metallers, such as Marduk, actually joined the bands on lengthy European and United States tours. The Norwegian group Zyklon, however, spoke the largest of the genre cross-pollinations. Formed in 1998 by Samoth, the then-guitarist of black metal’s most popular act Emperor, Zyklon has evolved from an Emperor-esque black metal act into a pure death metal band over the course of a pair of records.