I was rambling in the Death Metal thread about how far the genre has come, so I'll repost what I said there before going on.
Listening to this album (the new Vital Remains) today got me to thinking about just how much death metal has evolved throughout it's twenty-odd years existence. Though Morbid Angel's early works were extraordinarily ahead of their time, particularly in retrospect, the likes of Deicide, Obituary, pre-Human Death and the Stockholm bands were deceptively simple. Entombed, Dismember, and Unleashed, for example, all Swedes, took a great deal of influence from hardcore, especially the d-beating, Scandinavian strand: the rhythms they employed were lifted straight from Anti-Cimex and Discharge, tweaked here and there for added weight and metalosity (my word, trademarked me, 2007). No wonder they were possessed of such sheer, unbridled energy. Even the American bands did it (think Obituary and Scream Bloody Gore) and I don't think it was until Suffocation released Effigy of the Forgotten in '91 that death metal really started to become blazingly and flatteningly technical. Today, death metal is easily one of the single most complex forms of music being played anywhere in the world; the Vital Remains album I just talked about, not to mention the recent work of bands like Nile and even Cannibal Corpse, is prime evidence. I mean, fuck, death metal, which began much like punk in regard to its ethos of fastest, loudest, most extreme has actually evolved (who woulda thunk it?) to the extent that it now may lay claim to some of metal's, and indeed music's, most talented virtuosos. Today, death metal incorporates classical and jazz influences (though the case could be made for jazz's presence as far back as Atheist in '91), and even melody and hooks and sophistication. That's a far cry from Slowly We Rot and Left Hand Path, both perennial favorites of mine.
Then there's black metal, which started out inconspicuously enough with the thrash- and punk-flavored likes of Bathory, Hellhammer, and Sodom. The beauty of black metal's second wave, as I've described extensively elsewhere, was that it was the first subgenre to incorporate ambient/atmospheric elements (Mayhem, Immortal, Ulver) and, apart from a few exceptions in death and doom metal, to look outside the confines of metal and punk/hardcore (from which metal inevitably took impetus) and draw influence from musics which were, at first glance, a far cry from metal (Burzum, Emperor). Some bands, on the other hand, adopted the outlook of "progression of regression," (Darkthrone) that of brilliantly and completely reinterpreting and reinvigorating the classics and understatedly calling it blatant ripping off (not the other way around). Now, you find innovative bands like Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord, Drudkh, and Negura Bunget, who, in the grand tradition of generations past, have warped the boundaries of metal beyond the point of recognition.
I'll stop and let someone else expound on the likes of grindcore and doom. I feel like thrash has little relevance here since most of the purveyors thereof are either relics from the 80s (Destruction, Sodom, Kreator), are playing something not entirely or not at all thrash (Slayer, Metallica), or are rehashing the same old shit (Municipal Waste).
Listening to this album (the new Vital Remains) today got me to thinking about just how much death metal has evolved throughout it's twenty-odd years existence. Though Morbid Angel's early works were extraordinarily ahead of their time, particularly in retrospect, the likes of Deicide, Obituary, pre-Human Death and the Stockholm bands were deceptively simple. Entombed, Dismember, and Unleashed, for example, all Swedes, took a great deal of influence from hardcore, especially the d-beating, Scandinavian strand: the rhythms they employed were lifted straight from Anti-Cimex and Discharge, tweaked here and there for added weight and metalosity (my word, trademarked me, 2007). No wonder they were possessed of such sheer, unbridled energy. Even the American bands did it (think Obituary and Scream Bloody Gore) and I don't think it was until Suffocation released Effigy of the Forgotten in '91 that death metal really started to become blazingly and flatteningly technical. Today, death metal is easily one of the single most complex forms of music being played anywhere in the world; the Vital Remains album I just talked about, not to mention the recent work of bands like Nile and even Cannibal Corpse, is prime evidence. I mean, fuck, death metal, which began much like punk in regard to its ethos of fastest, loudest, most extreme has actually evolved (who woulda thunk it?) to the extent that it now may lay claim to some of metal's, and indeed music's, most talented virtuosos. Today, death metal incorporates classical and jazz influences (though the case could be made for jazz's presence as far back as Atheist in '91), and even melody and hooks and sophistication. That's a far cry from Slowly We Rot and Left Hand Path, both perennial favorites of mine.
Then there's black metal, which started out inconspicuously enough with the thrash- and punk-flavored likes of Bathory, Hellhammer, and Sodom. The beauty of black metal's second wave, as I've described extensively elsewhere, was that it was the first subgenre to incorporate ambient/atmospheric elements (Mayhem, Immortal, Ulver) and, apart from a few exceptions in death and doom metal, to look outside the confines of metal and punk/hardcore (from which metal inevitably took impetus) and draw influence from musics which were, at first glance, a far cry from metal (Burzum, Emperor). Some bands, on the other hand, adopted the outlook of "progression of regression," (Darkthrone) that of brilliantly and completely reinterpreting and reinvigorating the classics and understatedly calling it blatant ripping off (not the other way around). Now, you find innovative bands like Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord, Drudkh, and Negura Bunget, who, in the grand tradition of generations past, have warped the boundaries of metal beyond the point of recognition.
I'll stop and let someone else expound on the likes of grindcore and doom. I feel like thrash has little relevance here since most of the purveyors thereof are either relics from the 80s (Destruction, Sodom, Kreator), are playing something not entirely or not at all thrash (Slayer, Metallica), or are rehashing the same old shit (Municipal Waste).
