“To the issue of experimentation,” Hull continues, “on one hand, there’s plenty of room for experimentation, but most of that experimentation ends up being metal-like, rather than truly experimental. Then again, the limitations grindcore has on it really doesn’t allow for much experimentation if you’re a purist.”
Those genre restrictions certainly don’t apply to the San Diego, California quartet The Locust, whose expeditious, keyboard-filled eruptions attract nearly as much attention as the lurid tight green hot pants and mesh masks they sport during live performances. But even though the act’s image—and their song titles, which include numbers such as “Anything Jesus Does, I Can Do Better” and “The Half-Eaten Sausage Would Like to See You in His Office”—may intimate otherwise, the Locust are a very serious band in the grindcore tradition.
“Sure, we have tongue-in-cheek song titles, but I think if you read the lyrics, there’s definitely a message behind everything,” Locust bassist/ vocalist Justin Pearson contends. “It’s got a lot of political undertones dealing with social issues. But it all blurs together. It’s kinda like life itself. There are the funny aspects to life, and then there’s the serious shit.
“I’d rather abide by these rules than some of these other bands that are overtly political or overtly boring,” he continues. “It’s rehashed bullshit. There are already 150 bands that act the same and sound like that, and do we want everyone to be the same? No. So we’re challenging ourselves or trying to challenge people. Sure we love Napalm Death, but they already wrote Scum so we don’t need to do it again.”
“There’s always gonna be that traditional sound that everybody’s gonna go back to,” says Soilent Green vocalist Benjamin Falgoust. “But there’s also gonna be the bands that advance things, which have taken a grindcore element and made it even more drastic—like even The Locust. In the future, when they don’t even exist anymore, they’ll be the people that created this new angle. They won’t be making a million dollars ten years from now, but they’re paving a new direction for bands to drive into, and that’s the important thing. It will never die, and a lot of people still go back to the roots of it, but it kinda evolves and changes. It’s the same thing with death metal. Some people say, ‘Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel were the originators, so screw all the new death metal bands.’ But without new bands like Hate Eternal and Nile changing things, the shit just dies. It just gets stale and it disappears completely.”
But perhaps that’s part of the problem. In their original context, the initial impact of death and metal and grindcore can never really be recaptured after two decades of desensitization to extreme music.
“I tend to disagree with that,” says Earache Records head of A&R, Dan Tobin. “Okay, you could never recapture the time when you were 15 and you first heard Napalm Death or Morbid Angel. I don’t know, maybe in a way I’m still hankering after what I had when I was 15. But I still think you can root out the great stuff that is still out there. I mean, Nile are really carrying things forward for death metal, Decapitated, Hate Eternal—they are all great bands and they’re not copycats of what’s gone before. They take the best elements of the old stuff and they take it further. I’m sure you could have had a conversation ten years ago and someone would be saying, ‘Well, Napalm just sounds like Celtic Frost mixed with Discharge.’ And you would have had to agree with them but, they were doing something exciting and different, and taking the extremity forward. I really fight against this whole argument that it was better back then, because I’m not sure it was as exciting as it is now.”
“Now a fan has a choice,” offers Cryptopsy drummer Flo Mounier, “whereas before there was maybe one type of thing that you could listen to, now he can say, ‘I’m gonna relax to Cryptopsy, and then I’m gonna work out to Nile.’ It’s just really good, because it gives the scene a lot more credibility because it’s not just one thing. It’s good to have the old stuff like Cannibal Corpse with their bloody pictures, because that’s their trademark and it worked for them. It’s just like rock ‘n’ roll—the rock ‘n’ roll formula hasn’t changed over the past 50 years. Death metal has worked in the same way.”
So while much of the genre clearly continues to evolve and expand, a new gerneartion of artists led by Exhumed, Dying Fetus and Krisun draw their inspiration almost exclusively from death metal and grindcore’s past. Additionally, some of the movements’ oldest artists refuse to progress out of the genre or, in some cases, even travel far beyond their band’s original stylistic approach.
“We decided that even if the scene disappeared, we’d keep on playing death metal,” explains Dismember frontman Matti Kärki. “All of us felt that if we were going to change the music, we might as well change the name of the band as well. As for the other bands [who’ve left death metal behind], well, we never thought of them—their band, their problem. But in the end, staying faithful has served us well.”
“I’m gonna tell it to you like this,” says fellow Swede and Unleashed frontman Johnny Hedlund. “If I were finding myself in a situation one day where I didn’t like death metal as a music form—maybe wake up some morning and say, ‘This is too aggressive. I don’t like this anymore—I’m just too darn old.’ I would not play it anymore. I would not record another record, but that doesn’t seem to happen. It’s pretty strange, because my entire society here in Sweden has been telling me ever since I was 14 years old that this is gonna stop. Now I’m 35 years old, and I’m working on the next record. It doesn’t stop. So I’m pretty excited about that, because especially back in ‘96 to ’97, when interest was really low for death metal, I was thinking, ‘Maybe this is the end. Is it really that tragic?’ So I don’t see where it would suddenly just die, because it can’t die more than in ‘97. So from that I think we take quality steps upwards. I don’t think we would tour like crazy for six months in a row, like we could back in the early ‘90s, but we can still do quality shows now.
“And I wouldn’t go so far to say that death metal has to be an extreme underground movement for eternity,” he continues. “Times can change. AC/DC started up back in the ‘70s, and they still play to full houses in Stockholm with 16,000 people watching. I think that can happen to death metal as well, but there is no doubt that it will not happen to 10 or 15 bands. Maybe one or two bands that could stand out and make something serious for a number of years, it’s not gonna be enough with ten years. I think maybe in another, five, six or seven years, we will know.”
“Me and a few of the other guys in some of the bands, we’ll talk about the state of death metal a lot, actually, when we’re on tour together,” says Cannibal Corpse bassist and co-founder Alex Webster, “and I don’t think most people feel these songs that we write. They hear it, but they don’t feel it. They don’t get the emotion out of it that we do. They don’t feel the brutality. It just goes over their heads. There’s only a certain kind of person that death metal reaches. I don’t think it could ever be true death metal if it’s for everybody. I would love it if it was—I would love to play music this brutal and be a millionaire. Anybody that says they don’t wanna make money playing something they absolutely love is a liar. But it’s not gonna happen if you’re into death metal. You gotta be into it because you love it, if not you’re gonna end up giving up on it when it’s not cool anymore. A lot of that happens. A lot of bands that were into death metal just because it was getting a little more popular in the early ‘90s, what are they doing now? A lot of them are gone or changed their style drastically.”
“I think death metal was meant to stay underground,” offers Incantation founder and frontman John McEntee. “Death metal is only death metal if it’s extreme, and I can’t see the mainstream ever accepting death metal in all its savage purity. I feel that if it’s compromised it’s not death metal. It needs to be in the underground, where there are no limits to how extreme it can be. If someone is concerned with being mainstream, then start a boy band.”
Still, the motivations driving these band
s to persevere are often unclear to the artists themselves. For some, it’s a way of avoiding a typical adulthood, while for others, it’s a necessary, therapeutic part of their everyday lives.
“The reason why I play angry music is because I’m an angry person,” Hate Eternal’s Rutan explains. “Some people play death metal because they just appreciate heavier music, but for me, it’s more deep-seated. From childhood, it’s a very deep-seated rage that exists within me, and playing death metal is my outlet. Playing death metal gives me the opportunity to live like a normal person. Before I played guitar, I got in trouble with the law. I got in fights. I was a fucking wise-ass. And once I started playing guitar, I was able to focus my negative energy into a positive attribute, and that’s what totally changed my life.”
“We are like kids—like old kids,” says Immolation’s Dolan, a nearly two-decade veteran of the scene. “Of course, we have full-time jobs and a lot of responsibility. But there’s that balance. We still have that passion. And we do everything in our power to make it work. I couldn’t envision life without this. But believe me, it’s not a lucrative business. We really don’t make any money. If we come home with a few hundred dollars after being out on the road for a month, it’s a lot. But I love it—traveling and going to Europe. My mother has never been to Europe in her life. She’s 70, and she’s so excited for me, because she’s never seen Europe and I have a chance. It’s priceless. It doesn’t matter if we go out and we don’t make a dime, it’s not about that. And I still have that 15-year-old in me when it comes to this band.”
Other artists, such as Deicide’s Glen Benton, offer more succinct reasoning.
“It’s hard, man, very hard to keep doing this,” he says. “I thought many, many times of letting it go. But what else am I gonna do, go work at Checkers?”
But for genre progenitors Napalm Death and Morbid Angel, the constant desire to innovate and expand are key reasons they have managed to persevere—in one form or another—for over 20 years. And it’s a similar progressive and uncompromising nature that still propels them, despite a clearly limited audience for such extreme music.
“It’s still about the feeling of the music,” says Morbid Angel guitarist Trey Azagthoth. “I feel there’s definitely some more exploring I need to do, but I can’t really force it. It’s not like going to work at some mundane job. For me, it’s creating something from nothing. I keep going back to the original concept of even making a band and why do I wanna do it. I wanted to make a glorious impact on this universe. I really wanted to do something big. I know that we haven’t sold millions of records and all that, but I would never take away from the extremity of the music to do that.
“It’s about the paradigm shift,” he continues, “the breaking the rules to do things our own way. We’ve been the first in death metal. We’ve paved the way, and even with getting our videos played on MTV. I’m so proud of that. I look back and think we’ve done some really cool things. I wanna continue doing it, and that’s why I get so much fun out of it. And people getting inspired by our stuff and maybe paving the way for other bands as we’ve done, I think it’s wonderful. That’s when I go back to being the instrument—making things work in a good way.”
For Napalm Death, their position as grindcore forefathers remains intact. In early 2003, the band even began repairing the publicly acrimonious relationship with former longtime label Earache Records, ultimately burying the hatchet with a best-of compilation called Noise for Music’s Sake that Earache released in mid- 2003 with Napalm’s full cooperation. But more importantly, the band’s relevance and the influence they exert on extreme music continues to be as strong as it was nearly two decades ago.
“I feel part of the furniture, almost,” says Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway. “And I’m very proud of the name and the ethos. It’s very difficult to get away from this. The day you did, you know you’d miss it so terribly.
“But I’ll be brutally honest,” he continues, “at different times I’ve felt that I’d really like to quit. I’ve felt that being on tour, because I find it a very lonely environment. When I’m out on the road I miss my family very much because I’m on my own. I don’t have a girlfriend or a wife, and because of the situation it just makes me feel really supremely fucking lonely at times, and that’s got to me. That’s made me question the validity of what I’m doing, but when it comes to the crunch, the dawning of the realization of why you’re doing it comes to your head. And I think about all the good things that we’ve achieved, the awareness that we’ve raised, the benefit stuff that we’ve done, and that makes me swell with pride. We’ve just always had this sense of pride. We would never let anyone grind us down. There’s been so many people that have hated the very existence of Napalm Death, and the point is, we thought, ‘Go and fuck yourself. We’ll just carry on and do it until it irritates you so much you can’t deal with it anymore.’ I’ve always taken on board a Motörhead song called ‘Don’t Let ‘em Grind Ya Down.’ And I always took that phrase to heart, and I just thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s just keep on doing it.’ And there never seems to come an end point. From time to time, I think everyone in the band, we all question what we’re doing and should we not do it anymore. And we still will—in the near future and the distant future. But we keep on finding that extra impetus to carry on.”
“There are times when it can get pretty low,” offers Shane Embury, the longest tenured member of Napalm Death. “Without jumping on a soapbox, I don’t exactly make the greatest living from what I do, and that doesn’t really bother me. I’m not one of these people that runs around screaming that the music industry owes me a living. Besides, I just meet people along the way that vibe me up, really. I could be at the bottom and think, ‘Fuck this. I’m going nowhere. I’m getting a real job,’ And then two minutes later I’m with a friend doing a project in his 8-track studio in Birmingham, and there’s no monetary value or anything to that, I’m just doing it for fun. That keeps me happy.”
Life After Death
Irving Azoff: Folded Giant Records in the late ’90s, but is still one of the most powerful figures in the music industry. Manager of Jewel, Van Halen, and the Eagles.
Jeff Becerra: In 1988, Possessed split. A year later, Becerra was shot during an attempted robbery and left paralyzed from the waist down. Currently works in the health care industry and resides in California.
Justin Broadrick: After Godflesh disbanded in 2002, formed new band Jesu. Also a member of a number of electronic and indie hip-hop projects, such as Final and Techno Animal.
Mike Browning: Provides drums and vocals for extreme metal act After Death. Still resides in Florida.
Richard Brunelle: Currently guitarist of death metal band Paths of Possession. Still resides in Florida.
Karl Buechner: After the demise of Earth Crisis in 2001, formed metallic hardcore band Freya.
Nick Bullen: Formed Scorn with Mick Harris in 1991. Was dismissed from the group in April 1995 after assaulting a bar patron with broken glass (he was sentenced to six months in prison for the attack). Currently designs online learning tools and spearheads the dark electronic project Black Galaxy.
Scott Burns: Retired producer now works full-time as IT Consultant/Application Developer. Still resides in Florida.
Scott Carlson: Reformed Repulsion for a few live dates in 2003. Currently plays guitar in garage rock band The Superbees.
Max Cavalera: Split from Sepultura in 1996. Immediately formed marginally successful nü metal band Soulfly.
Steve Charlesworth: Continues to play drums in a number of punk and hardcore bands after the breakup of Heresy. Currently works with post-punk act Wolves of Greece.
Mitch Dickinson: Currently works in the IT field. Plans to record a new Unseen Terror album soon with Shane Embury. Also recently started an underground record label called Purist Records.
Oscar Garcia: After the demise of the original Terrorizer in 1988, formed grindcore band Nausea. Still resides in Los Angeles.
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br /> Lou Giordano: Now a high-profile rock producer who has recorded albums for Goo Goo Dolls, Belly, Sugar and Sunny Day Real Estate.
Mick Harris: Continues to record ambient electronic music as Scorn as well as Lull. Currently employed as a music technician at Hallesowen Technical College in England.
Dave Hewson: Although Slaughter officially broke up in 1990, Nuclear Blast Records remixed and remastered their Strappado LP and Not Dead Yet/Paranormal LP in 2001.
Pete Hurley: Left Extreme Noise Terror in 1995. Currently resides in England.
David Kahne: After leaving Columbia Records in 1995, returned to work as a producer. Has since produced albums by and performed with Paul McCartney, Sugar Ray, Tony Bennett and Stevie Nicks.
Erich Keller: After a 15-year silence, reformed Fear of God in late 2002. However, the band disbanded once again in January 2004.
Borivoj Krgin: Currently operates heavy metal news website www.blabbermouth.net. Resides in New York City.
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