Sound of the Beast

by Ian Christe

  Once ignited by the furious, annihilating speed of grindcore in the late 1980s, the massive death metal conflagration pushed everything else into oblivion. The final traces of heavy metal that still resembled traditional rock and roll were utterly obliterated by the new masters—the triumvirate of Death, Morbid Angel, and Deicide. Born around the time of Black Sabbath’s debut, these musicians lived nearly their entire lives in the era of heavy metal. They built their sound from the complex, high-speed explosions of Exodus and Kreator, not the rudimentary blues scales at the base of common rock.

  Though its sound was a constant propulsion often likened to a hailstorm, death metal was not an antimusical assault. Nothing could top the basic speed of grindcore, but death metal expanded the fastness with something artful. The heavy metal guitar-hero culture of the 1980s trained a huge pool of players in the techniques and methods of screaming strings and pure excitement. Death metal brought these musical chops to the fore, as guitarists expressed emotional turmoil through wild shredding and gesticulating solo breaks. With constant acrobatic hammering upon two huge bass drums, drummers blazed neck-snapping breaks and polyrhythmic rolls like one-man percussion ensembles.

  To appreciate the music, fans first had to accept a merciless sonic signature: guttural vocals that were little more than a menacing, subaudible growl. James Hetfield’s thrash metal rasp was harsh in comparison to Rob Halford’s heavy metal high notes, but creatures like Glen Benton of Deicide tore out their larynxes to summon images of decaying corpses and giant catastrophic horrors. This created a nearly insurmountable barrier to entry for the casual listener. “I’m not a big death metal fan,” admits Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. “I like the music, the riffs, but as I’m more of a melody singer, it kind of leaves me in the cold.”

  A drastic mutation of the metal gene, death metal was an ugly duckling overlooked in its infancy and mocked in its adolescence as extreme and ridiculous. Yet as much as thrash metal was a substantial second wave of heavy metal, so death metal represented a third evolutionary stage. When it finally rose to the fore in the early 1990s, death metal elevated metal songwriting to a brutal new level of melodic depth, compositional prowess, and technical skill.

  Few took this mission as far as Morbid Angel guitarist Trey Azagthoth. “Some people think death metal is all about a sound,” he says. “They think if you get a heavy, distorted guitar and growling vocals, you’ve got death metal. Death metal is a feeling—it’s not just a sound. The way the rhythm attacks and moves is what matters. I mixed up a groovy extreme—a chaos, a madness, a bunch of piranhas that would be jumping out of the speakers and chewing you as you listened. That’s what I wanted to pursue with my playing. I wanted to get something that was like listening to Black Sabbath on an eight-track tape that was dragging or a warped record. Like a storm moving forward, something triumphant.”

  DEATH METAL

  The musical pinnacle and stomach-churning depth of heavy metal, death metal bands used speed and intensity to squeeze an album’s worth of ideas into a single song. All of the bombastic flash of prior forms was amplified considerably, from guitar solos, double-bass drumming, and occult-inspired imagery. While Deicide and Cannibal Corpse remained steadfastly addicted to power, others, such as Napalm Death and Morbid Angel, evolved into technical and interesting new forms of expression. Hair flying and fingers wrestling with chaotic chord combinations, band members took to wearing sweatpants onstage, an indicator of their athletic, atheistic sound. Because many death metal bands hailed from Florida, this wardrobe was mocked by European metal purists as “retirement wear.” Yet the bands flailed on, in search of extremes as impenetrable as their own band logos.

  The Insalubrious

  Brutal Truth, Need to Control (1994)

  Cannibal Corpse, Tomb of the Mutilated (1992)

  Carcass, Heartwork (1994)

  Carcass, Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious (1991)

  Death, Scream Bloody Gore (1987)

  Deicide, Once Upon the Cross (1995)

  Dismember, Indecent & Obscene (1993)

  Morbid Angel, Blessed Are the Sick (1991)

  Morbid Angel, Formulas Fatal to the Flesh (1998)

  Mortician, Hacked Up for Barbecue (1997)

  Napalm Death, Fear, Emptiness, Despair (1994)

  Sepultura, Arise (1989)

  Sepultura, Chaos A.D. (1993)

  While heavy metal was born in England and thrash metal had its heart in San Francisco, the seeds of death metal were planted throughout the world. The phenomenon was a pure product of the tape-trading underground. Cultured on grotty little demo tapes decorated with skeletons, blood, and guts, early death dealers sent listeners hunting for maps: Possessed from San Francisco, Deathstrike from Chicago, Slaughter from Toronto, Necrophagia from Ohio, Cryptic Slaughter from California, Sepultura from Brazil, Sodom from Germany, and Repulsion from Michigan. For this widespread metal minority the post office served as site for sacred rituals until the bands were ready for concert halls.

  Often credited as the original death metal band, the band called Death rose from the muggy swampland of Florida in the early 1980s. They began as Mantas in 1983, the product of fifteen-year-old “Evil” Chuck Schuldiner’s guitar and Kam Lee’s outrageous screeching voice, and—though few had seen them perform—soon became as heavily shared by tape traders as any well-established act in metal. Epitomizing adolescent horror, the intro to their inspired 1985 “Infernal Death” demo was a sludgy riff over rolling drum tubs, while Lee screamed “Die! Die! Die!” as shrilly as possible at the top of his lungs. It sounded like a torture session in a suburban basement, the graphics looked like a kinder-gartner’s Halloween project, and it all worked terrible wonders.

  Terrifying original logo for the band Death

  With hotheaded “Evil” Chuck taking over vocals after quarreling with Lee, the 1987 Death debut LP, Scream Bloody Gore, emulated hardcore punk. It also evoked the dark moods of horror sound tracks from the drive-in zombie and cannibal horror films of George Romero, Italian director Lucio Fulci, and Florida’s own gore pioneer, Herschel Gordon Lewis. Schuldiner urged a unique cruelty from his B. C. Rich guitar— coupled with his growing technical skill, the effect was creatively lethal. Meanwhile, the band’s roster, a victim of Schuldiner’s erratic administration, rotated with such consistency that the band staffed its own farm-team band, Massacre, led by guitarist Rick Rozz—that released three albums of its own on Earache and Combat.

  The international attention afforded Death following its debut turned the Tampa area into a death metal hotspot. Also home to Deicide and occasionally to North Carolina transplants Morbid Angel, the Sunshine State soon gave sanctuary to Hellwitch, Obituary, Brutality, Cynic, and Atheist. Maybe the boundless energy came from the water—as Ponce de León believed centuries earlier during his doomed search for the Fountain of Youth. In any case the climate was a torrid cauldron for musical agitation, an unholy promised land as far from the cool mist of grunge Seattle as geographically and philosophically possible.

  The strangely synthetic southernmost U.S. state became a global magnet for metal refugees. Cannibal Corpse relocated to Tampa from Buffalo in the summer of 1994, and Malevolent Creation soon headed south from Buffalo as well. Gargantuan drummer Gene Hoglan, a former Slayer roadie, left his faltering group, Dark Angel, behind in Los Angeles and moved to Florida to serve his time in the influential Death. For most, career opportunities did not necessarily abound, but Florida was an address with death metal cachet. Furthermore, these were musicians whose connection to the metal world was stronger than their allegiance to their hometowns. They wanted to be near the original source—even if the action was still mostly in the mind.

  Life in Florida did not revolve around any significant social scene, but dozens of bands had their albums produced or engineered by Scott Burns and the staff at Tampa’s Morrisound Studios. Formerly a hangout for the early Metal Blade act Nasty Savage, the commercial studio transformed into a death metal gateway. V
irtually every death metal act with a recording contract journeyed south for a splash of the Morrisound mystique. As death metal became a popular curiosity, the name attracted other odd characters. “Warrant recorded here, Savatage also, and a week ago Bon Jovi called to mix some stuff for a live EP,” said Burns in the Dutch magazine Watt. “We even didn’t have time for them because Morbid Angel and Death were already here.”

  Though Deicide was not always as dexterous or evocative as Death or Morbid Angel, death metal found its perfect spokesman in Deicide’s vocalist, Glen Benton—a maniac willing to freshly brand his forehead regularly with an upside-down cross. He boasted of raising his infant child a Satanist, and his playing was just as impassioned and wild as his image—the way he strained physically with his bass as if wrestling with a mule. At a 1995 Long Island show where an unlucky stage diver was taken away by ambulance during the opening band’s set, Benton quipped heartlessly to the crowd, “I heard someone tripped over Satan’s dick and broke his neck.”

  Deicide (left to right): Eric Hoffman, Steve Asheim, Glen Benton, Brian Hoffman (Roadrunner Records)

  Deicide’s brutal bluntness and hardcore-influenced song-writing on 1990’s Deicide and 1992’s Legion were steeped rich in evil mood. Guitarist brothers Eric and Brian Hoffman were barbarian virtuosos with obscenely muscular builds, pulling off superhuman feats of eerie musicianship while secreted behind veils of bleached-blond hair. Bug-eyed drummer Steve Asheim bore the weight of the band’s tremendous power, struggling against all physical laws with insane mathematic agility. On their crowning triumph, 1995’s Once Upon the Cross, with its anthemic title track and the rousing “They Are the Children of the Underworld,” Deicide drove the impact of early Slayer fully ten years deeper into hell.

  Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax had disavowed Satanism early in their careers, but death metal was all about the mythic interpretation of Satan. The music was a frenzied, chaotic, and amoral depiction of total lust and abandon. The fascination with evil was cultivated by younger metallers weaned on the goats and pentagrams of Venom’s Welcome to Hell, Slayer’s Hell Awaits, and Possessed’s Seven Churches. “Vomit on the cross, and burn the book of lies,” urged Morbid Angel on “Unholy Blasphemies.” It was a liberating expression of pure abstraction—similar to when free-jazz musicians in the 1960s em braced Eastern religions that distanced them from traditional gospel-derived music.

  One of the first bands to delight in a hard satanic image was Possessed, a mid-1980s group of California high-schoolers. “It was basically the draw of Satan—it was cool,” says singer/bassist Jeff Becerra of the allure of the dark side. “It was definitely not drugs, because we were too young, and we weren’t really into that. We knew of Venom and Black Sabbath, but it was just before Slayer. Everybody was into the occult in a way but didn’t know too much about it. It just looked cool, and it was tough. And of course we were all Catholic except for Larry Lalonde.”

  Depicted in countless extremely provocative examples, the demonic imagery was a metaphor that ripped listeners out of complacency in order to raze the past and begin anew. “Satanized, crucified, feel the wrath of suicide,” sang Glen Benton on Deicide’s first album. Transformed by violence, listeners could almost feel their flesh being ripped apart by overwhelming death metal music—yet this violent imagery was never more than an abstraction. Playing a form of music as difficult as death metal required discipline, artistic sensitivity, and physical endurance that was anything but an act of negation. Metal fans did not take religion quite so literally.

  Satanism as practiced by most heavy metallers had very little to do with black candles and incantations. In fact, their beliefs were astoundingly in tune with red-blooded American values—only their voices were more self-aware and honest. “I don’t believe in any inherent right and wrong,” says Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth. “I believe everyone has the right to put together their own formula that makes them feel great. All these values and beliefs we have are supposed to be put together like a computer, so we can run efficiently and be happy. The bottom line is, life is a game to be enjoyed.”

  As their popularity grew in the early 1990s, the original Florida bands evolved into more florid displays of the death metal form. Death’s labors reached a pinnacle with 1993’s Individual Thought Patterns, where Schuldiner’s pioneering sound was extracted into a nightmare of solos, weird chord structures, and studio experiments. The songs would crouch into a low growl, then spring out in a wild, flailing attack that throbbed with bizarre genius. Neighboring bands Atheist and Cynic also channeled their unholy spirit into instrumental proficiency, branching out from basement-noise roots to play laboriously finessed, progressive death metal.

  Hot on the trail of Death came Morbid Angel with a brilliant streak of albums. The first two records—1989’s Altars of Madness and 1991’s Blessed Are the Sick—formed a canon of Satan-infested madness and unrepentant skill, including the trinity of deathly tracks “Thy Kingdom Come,” “Chapel of Ghouls,” and “Blasphemy.” The following two releases—1993’s Covenant and 1995’s Domination— were slick, professional, and masterfully disarming. The sublime religion of the unexpected that permeated Morbid Angel’s music would be phenomenally refreshing in any genre. The band had a second beginning following the departure of longtime front man David Vincent, and every song on 1998’s formidable Formulas Fatal to the Flesh flew in eight chaotic directions at once.

  After Vincent left Morbid Angel, the band’s worship of the unpredictable took an interesting spiritual twist. Taking over the song-writing, guitarist Trey Azagthoth replaced the band’s virulent Satanism with an inventive fusion—ancient Sumerian mythology from the Middle East and 100 percent American infomercial boosterism by self-improvement gurus Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra (much as the hardcore Bad Brains had cribbed their positive message from a 1970s self-help book). “The truth really happens when you go beyond the analytical mind,” explains Azagthoth, “and you go up to the intuition, and become one with everything through subjective experience, instead of an objective one that creates difference. It’s like going out and experiencing nature without talking about it to yourself. There’s a lot to that.”

  After suffering from constant lineup turmoil in its larval stage, Napalm Death also stabilized and evolved impressively, turning wild moments of hyperactive abandon into wicked, minor-key death metal. Not only was the band influenced by little-known demo bands like Repulsion, but the 1990s version of Napalm Death was itself a product of tape trading—the musicians themselves had been traded from other bands. “I know it’s kind of weird,” says guitarist Jesse Pintado, who left Los Angeles for Birmingham, England, at age eighteen. “I never met [bassist] Shane Embury face-to-face before I joined the band, but we were into the same trip. We were corresponding and made some phone calls to each other. When we would talk, we knew exactly what we wanted to do.”

  The band’s second American guitarist, Mitch Harris, was recruited from Las Vegas’s Righteous Pigs by pen pal and drummer Mick Harris, no relation. “A lot of people don’t understand,” explains Jesse Pintado. “They’ve heard about the underground and corresponding through the mail, but unless they’ve done it, they don’t understand that sometimes that can be really powerful. You can do a lot of things by just writing on a piece of paper or putting your ideas on a tape to another person. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be in London today. That’s a really strong tool.”

  Napalm Death’s 1990 release, Harmony Corruption, was recorded at Morrisound and sounded like a derivative attempt by the band to milk Florida death metal. However, the group quickly synthesized its early grindcore assault with death metal to produce something great. Fear, Emptiness, Despair, their seventh album, started a fresh chapter in the history of a band whose membership half-life had once lasted no longer than an album side. Previous urban hardcore noise blasts were mowed by sophisticated guitar layering and innovative drum patterns. Their dissonance became a conscious component of the composition, not me
rely a side benefit of chaos, and the marriage of intense anger and calculation yielded a masterpiece of passionate, politically minded, negative realism.

  The first several albums of Carcass, formed by runaway Napalm Death guitarist Bill Steer, were too brutal and amorphous to be properly called death metal. Yet the band’s major-label debut, Heartwork, was a brilliant standard-setting accomplishment. It was the Metallica Black Album of death metal, retaining the internal pulse and dynamics of brutal death metal while reducing the number of notes. The album was a meticulously constructed masterpiece that revisited traditional metal harmonies, uniting Iron Maiden and Napalm Death in evolution. All of the bludgeoning melodic progressions that made Carcass a cult favorite were intact, but they seemed to swoon rather than suffocate.

  Where Carcass had buried its technical perfection beneath baffling layers of grotesque wet noise on previous albums, Heartwork shone as cleanly as the skeletal surgical-steel H. R. Giger sculpture on its cover. Prior album covers had been dripping with photographs of raw meat—now the gore was left to implication. Jeff Walker’s deathly vocals were audible without betraying their throat-shredding intent. As could be expected, the band generated some crossover appeal among other adventurers: The hit UK single for “Isobel” by Icelandic waif Björk included a version of the song remixed by Carcass.

  After operating in the underground for many years, death metal bands were selling hundreds of thousands of albums to dedicated fans in the 1990s and represented a tremendous opportunity for independent metal labels. Metal Blade scooped up Cannibal Corpse to complement a roster of balanced metal styles that ranged from the traditional Fates Warning to the gory performance group Gwar. The metal indie Roadrunner Records went whole hog, joining forerunners Death and Deicide with the popular Sepultura, Brujeria, and Fear Factory, plus the heavy-hitting Immolation, Suffocation, Gorguts, Obituary, and Sorrow. “Bands like that were cheap to sign, and they basically sold themselves,” explains the label’s A&R head, Monte Conner.