by Ian Christe
Meanwhile, England’s Earache Records attracted Morbid Angel, Nocturnus, Carcass, and a prolific panoply of others to a label roster anchored by flagship act Napalm Death. Though not as well organized as Roadrunner, Earache had marketing power great enough to break new bands based on brand recognition, ushering in the era of designer labels just as Sub Pop Records was striking it rich with grunge. Earache also fed the collector impulse of its customers with picture discs, singles, and special releases in a way that was savvy and a little nostalgic for the rarity of NWOBHM and hardcore punk records.
As the music grew more sophisticated and difficult, so did its representations. Occult symbols proliferated as Deicide and Morbid Angel delved into arcane, witchy texts to find ever more convoluted symbolic expressions of the death metal mind-set. With hundreds of bands looking to stand apart, band logos became cryptic, unreadable semaphores. Lyricists went far beyond the thesaurus abuse of typical songwriters, appropriating the most fearsome and unacceptable language from medical dictionaries and old religious documents—a typical early Carcass opus was titled “Embryonic Necropsy and Devourment.”
Such gurgling blasphemies and imperceptible iconography were intended to be 100 percent immune from any kind of mass acceptance—even Kerrang! initially dropped the ball, awarding Death and Deicide one-star reviews for their recording debuts. Yet despite the egregious obscenity acting as an insurance policy against corruption, the music business eventually beat a path to the doors of death metal. A dozen of the world’s most intense bands entered short-lived recording deals with major labels, as record executives wondered aloud whether the caustic rumblings of the metal scene could cough up another “surprise” success à la Metallica.
Morbid Angel was the first to go public, signing with Giant Records in 1992 and hiring Metallica producer Flemming Rasmussen to record the uncompromised Covenant. Soon afterward Cannibal Corpse went to Warner Bros., and South American act Sepultura was bargained away from Roadrunner to Epic Records. As part of a far-reaching alliance crafted by Earache, the bands Carcass, Cathedral, Napalm Death, Godflesh, and Entombed all became part of the megaconglomerate Sony/Columbia roster. “We were never naïve enough to think we were going to become the next Metallica,” insisted Jeff Walker of Carcass to AntiMTV.com—but if Metallica could thrash its way multiplatinum, these bands might have at least a chance of grinding to gold.
The first death metal group to trespass into the Billboard chart was Cannibal Corpse, which processed rawer influences into a manufactured, powerful version of the sound. As singer Chris Barnes took the “Cookie Monster” death metal vocal style over the top, songs like “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt” played shock value to the hilt. “For me, Cannibal Corpse went too far,” says Dee Snider, who had defended heavy metal against the PMRC in 1985. “I read lyrics that literally said, ‘I fucked a nun in the ass,’ and I said, ‘What the fuck is that?’ It’s not a fantasy, it’s just heinous. They’ve sold hundreds of thousands of albums, which is a little disturbing, but then again, does anyone really know the lyrics?” Nonetheless, comic Jim Carrey found the over-the-top bravado hilarious and hired Cannibal Corpse to appear in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.
From the dirt of the grass roots the popularity of death metal piled up steadily. When Cannibal Corpse blighted Billboard, those hundreds of thousands of album sales represented not general music-buying audiences but a formidable number of exclusively pledged metal fans. These were cultivated consumers who would more likely seek out demo tapes and underground LPs than buy other popular music—and they were richly rewarded for the search. By the end of the 1990s, Earache Records claimed that both Napalm Death and Morbid Angel had sold more than a million albums apiece—tallied not in smash-hit gold records but in handfuls of steady releases seen by fans as nothing less than mandatory.
In need of a nerve center, metal fans in the early 1990s could barely have hoped for a better chronicle of the tumultuous scene than Metal Maniacs, a quasi-corporate music magazine run with the heart of a fanzine. Published by Sterling/MacFadden, whose other titles included the newsstand fodder Yo! and Country Hits, Maniacs was launched during the late 1980s as an infrequent offshoot of the glam-centric pinup magazine Metal Edge. An early issue captured metal icons Ozzy Osbourne, Gene Simmons, and Vince Neil in lewd poses. When a new editor, Katherine Ludwig, entered the picture, she immediately changed direction. “The former editor’s idea of what should go in the magazine was a pinup of Blackie Lawless in a diaper,” she says. “I was into having a magazine that didn’t talk down to people.
Ludwig tailored Sterling/MacFadden’s fan model to fit the hungry metal underground, combining the mass-market approach of Circus with the information overload of Metal Forces. Pen-pal listings in the magazine were converted to “Shorts,” a collection of hundreds of ads for tape traders and amateur bands. The color pinups mandated by the publisher were subverted to feature untraditional icons like the drum-machine pioneers Godflesh or the decimating girl bassist Jo Bench of Bolt Thrower. In addition there was a lively letters section, which became a forum for debating everything from scene politics to abortion rights. “I also liked to get in something about vegetarianism, hemp, feminism, and freedom of speech when I could,” says Ludwig.
As a first-time editor, Ludwig resisted the degree to which record-company publicists could set agendas at music magazines. Against the wishes of Carcass’s handlers, a typically controversial story on the band took up the issue of its members’ belief in the ethical treatment of animals. To Ludwig, the public-relations people appeared afraid that the plant-eater tag would ruin the reputation of a band whose gory 1988 Reek of Putrefaction meat-collage album cover had been banned in England. “I don’t think a lot of people really got what Carcass was saying,” says Ludwig. “They took them at face value and didn’t get the irony, the obviousness, of the meat.”
Ludwig found that metal fans were dying for a public dialogue that gave dimension to their love of music. “I got the feeling that a lot of kids were starved for someone older to treat them like human beings that might possibly have something to say,” she recalls. “A lot of the readers were kids who felt they had nothing but metal, the same way I had felt about hard rock and then punk rock when I was growing up in the 1970s. I felt like I had an obligation to them not to glorify sexism or cruelty; basically to be conscious of the fact that someone was listening. I got marriage proposals. I got phone calls at home. Later on we started getting hate mail. Someone called it Metal Brainiacs, which I didn’t really take as an insult.”
Not only fans responded. Though the freelance budget was a puny three hundred dollars per issue when the magazine began, there was no shortage of writers happy to support something intelligent. Three prominent metal singers—Kevin Sharp of Brutal Truth, Mark “Barney” Greenway of Napalm Death, and Michael D. Williams of Eyehategod—became regular and surprisingly insightful contributors. Staff writers included Borivoj Krgin, a metal encyclopedia who helped discover and promote the career of Sepultura—the Brazilian band that later turned to Katherine Ludwig for help writing lyrics.
Metal fans showed their loyalty by pumping circulation during Ludwig’s five-year tenure to a peak of 90,000 in 1995, matching higher-profile alternative music magazines like Raygun. Even better, as Metal Maniacs survived on subscriptions and sales in 7-Elevens the editorial department remained more beholden to the fans than to the advertisers. It proved that seemingly unwieldly underground metal could be lucrative for anyone who would champion it wisely and creatively. The broad scope of the magazine continued after the departure of Ludwig, but its two very unusual exclamatory subheads slid off the covers into memory: NOT FOR EVERYBODY! and IT STANDS ALONE!
As death metal giants took their place alongside traditional heavy metal heroes in European magazines and at summer festivals, interesting new heavy-death fusion by the likes of Germany’s Bethlehem and Tiamat and Finland’s Amorphis began tying together the decades. After death metal had nearly purged rock
and roll from its bloodstream, the Swedish syncopation fiends in Entombed even brought back some boogie, turning guttural melodies and blast beats toward sinister hip motion. The imitative but satisfying Dismember likewise let detuned guitars, hoarse vocals, and agile guitar slip around in a wet stew of well-engineered sonic gore. Entombed, Dismember, At the Gates, Grave, Dissection, and In Flames—these energetic administrators of the regional Götheborg, Sweden, sound emphasized power alongside grotesqueries and lured many willing mainstream rock fans down to depths of death metal.
Meanwhile, groups like Montreal’s Kataklysm, Wyoming’s Monastat 7, and New Jersey’s Human Remains invigorated fans with mind-clearing scientific chaos, standing out as jaw-hangingly unique even in an atypical atmosphere. In 1989 saxophonist John Zorn, a fixture of the New York avant-garde music scene, had launched Naked City, a jazz-influenced death metal genre study featuring himself, guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Fred Frith, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, and drummer Joey Baron. That group took basic extreme metal tenets—blast beats, gurgled vocals, and chaotic guitar—and intentionally rearranged them in a tightly structured formal context. The results measured up well—though they were somewhat academic in comparison to the inspired amateurism of death metal in its purest forms.
To claim superiority at the pinnacle of heavy metal’s long evolution, death metal could not sit still for one hyperactive, overstimulated second without stretching toward new revelations. While Napalm Death presented a string of unusual side projects, the like-minded Painkiller, Brutal Truth, and Mr. Bungle expanded the scope of sonic assault in a headstrong, almost surreal way. In 1991 John Zorn joined bassist Bill Laswell and Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris to form Painkiller. Though it began as a contest in abrasive non sequiturs similar to those of Naked City, the project quickly evolved beyond sonic extremes into a black-hearted form of ambient electronic dub. At the invitation of Laswell, Mick Harris next guested on a 1993 album, Sacrifist, by Praxis, oddly joining Parliament-funkadelic icons like Bootsy Collins with a battery of bloodcurdling screams. “I’m always down for a bit of that,” says Harris. As such departures found wings, they untied death metal from the pentagram.
Departure from death metal: Brutal Truth
(Relapse Records)
Continuing to leap ahead musically with a flickering attention span, death metal branched out in the mid-1990s into computers, noise, opera, and the avant-garde. Brutal Truth’s creative crossover fantasies coupled singer Kevin Sharp’s overview of the genre as metal columnist for the CMJ music journal and bassist Dan Linker’s frontline experience as a founder of Anthrax, S.O.D., and Nuclear Assault. Super, piercing speed freaked out atop slow, distorted lurching while cover versions of songs by Celtic Frost and the eccentric jazz composer Sun Ra put the band in outer space. One crushingly original example, the song “Godplayer” from Need to Control, pounded over the gurgling, deep-end belch of a didgeridoo, a four-foot-long tube of Aboriginai Australian heritage, whose drone gave any grinding bass on earth a run for the money. Says Yamatsuka Eye of the experimental Japanese band Boredoms, “Brutal Truth play so good in Osaka, I cry.”
AVANT-GARDE METAL
As death metal took conventional music to the outer stratosphere with its whirling speed and intensity, a number of musicians abandoned the tightly wound structure of the music and experimented with abstractions of its founding elements. Among the success stories of death metal fusion were the classical exploits of Master’s Hammer, the jazz screech of 16-17 and Painkiller, and the weirdness of Pan-Thy-Monium and Old—bands in which the influence of Voivod became essential. In many cases these were some of the first metal bands to be seen wearing glasses. In other cases, as with Masters Hammer, the mixed-up metal influences were part of an exit strategy, the sign of metalheads leaving crumbs behind as they disappeared into strange new dark forests of experimentation.
Head Cases
Arcturus, La Masquerade Infernale (1997)
Breadwinner, The Burner (1994)
Flying Luttenbachers, Revenge (1996)
Master’s Hammer, Slagry (1996)
Naked City, Naked City (1989)
Old, Lo Flux Tube (1991)
Painkiller, Execution Ground(1995)
Pan-Thy-Monium, Khaos and Konfusion (1996)
16-17, Gyatso (1994)
Treponem Pal, Treponem Pa/(1989)
Concurrently, Faith No More singer Mike Patton took advantage of his celebrity clout to resurrect and promote Mr. Bungle, the Frank Zappa-influenced crossover band he formed during the halcyon days of Cryptic Slaughter and Hirax. After an infantile 1991 debut CD, subsequent outings showed a team of thrashers who had outgrown their genre, tackling disco, electronics, and lounge music in a gory, scatological package. “So many people are so turned off with what they’re doing, but they’re so tasteful and so ingenious,” praises Shawn Crahan of Slipknot, an eclectic band formed in the early 1990s. “Watching them, you also realize, ‘Hey, this is the guy who sings in Faith No More and made some of my favorite songs ever.’ It’s quirky and it’s way out there, but so few people can do it from their heart.”
On a similar postmodern metal journey was Switzerland’s 16-17, a crisp grindcore combo sponsored by Apple Computer, with tearing saxophones in place of guitars. Another highbrow strain of mayhem came from the Prague group Master’s Hammer, which ventured from operatic black metal toward modernist electronic music. On Slagry they covered Carl Czerny, Otto Katz, and Giuseppe Verdi, mixing bits of metal, folk, and musique concrète into an abstraction of death metal. The bewildering result had nothing to do with evil but demonstrated that metal breeds more than its share of visionaries—living up to the funny slogan of the band’s French record label, Osmose Productions: “Extreme Artists Make Extreme Music!”
A hearty number of metal fans in the mid-1990s also seized upon Japanese noise. As the moniker indicated, these recordings were produced using piles of distortion pedals and modulators to create layers of feedback and white noise, presenting a purity and freedom of form impossible in commercial music. While producing the Nirvana album In Utero, guitarist Steve Albini traveled to Japan to play with the metallic noise act Zeni Geva. “There’s just so many layers to how fucked up Japanese bands are” Albini says. “All rock music in Japan seems to start with a Western influence; then, due to their isolation and enthusiasm, and crappy equipment and environment, they end up making these really idiosyncratic adaptations of this Western music. A heavy metal band that is really into Pantera might also be really flamboyant and queer looking, and have sort of a Liza Minnelli front man.”
Metal fans had experienced a long, multitiered acceleration and acclimation to increasing returns of heaviness. Now, using death metal as a base, they were looking for the same intensity of expression in all forms of music. Two tape-trading friends who founded the label Relapse Records, Bill Yurkiewicz and his partner Matt Jacobson, signed Japanese noise bands like Merzbow and Masonna to complement the grindcore and death metal acts in their roster. “We started off as total metalheads,” says Jacobson, “and a lot of people that we know were the same. It was just a natural progression to become fans of the industrial and noise stuff.”
While acoustic and indigenous music found favor, noise music was an irresistible challenge to the listener—a total blackout. “We see it already, the people that were into early Napalm Death and Carcass are listening to [Japanese noise performer] Masonna,” says Yurkiewicz. “Death metal can only go so far being brutal, and the Japanese noise bands just reduce them to nothing within the first five seconds. People always want to keep going one step further.”
While death metal proliferated and superstimulated the true believers, the scene was large enough so bands could survive nicely catering to the core audience. For established aboveground music companies, however, the subterranean caverns proved too treacherous to navigate. There was almost no hope of radio or video play to begin with, and widespread resistance among bands to changing for the sake of commerce only made
the situation worse. Death metal bands were pursuing their selfish individual thrills, and past a certain point all the record company could do was pay the bills and hope for the best.
As might have been expected, given the extremity of the milieu, the major-label Earache/Columbia Records pact fell through within a year, largely as a result of incompatible business cultures. Soon Napalm Death, Entombed, Carcass, and Cathedral were once again independent bands in the Earache stable. After its separate deal with the major label Giant disintegrated, Morbid Angel also returned to Earache—after selling just short of a million albums during three years in corporate cahoots. Though not what the partners had once hoped, the unification of corporations and cultural destroyers remained historic.
Dumped from the majors, the big death metal acts found themselves still contractually beholden to their original independent labels. Even in the notorious sphere of record-industry contracts, the agreements signed by metal bands appeared especially harsh. After experiencing artistic success and earning a gold album on Epic Records, Sepultura reverted to Roadrunner, honoring a multialbum contract signed when they were still teenagers living in South America. “I think most metal indies try to sign bands long-term,” explains Road-runner executive Monte Conner, “because when you’re talking heavy metal, there’s a lot of development. It takes five or six years sometimes. If you’re going to sign a band and invest all this money up front, you need to ensure that you’ll still have the band on your label when they finally become profitable.”