What is the state of death metal? What is death metal and what is not? EXHUMED weighs in

The following are excerpts from EXHUMED on the history of death metal and the state of death metal. This is posted on the band's site.

I don't remember exactly who I was talking to, but I was looking back on my days as a rabid Death Metaller from '90-'94 or so, and I was saying that after around '94 I lost interest in the Death Metal scene and got heavily into Thrash Metal and Crossover from the '80s. They responded, with a healthy degree of good natured ribbing, that '93-'94 was when I “gave up on Death Metal.” That sentence kind of hit me like a glass of cold water in the face. I would say I've done many things in my life, but one thing I never felt that I did was “give up on Death Metal.” I felt like by '93 and '94 Death Metal had lost the vast majority of what made it interesting to me. The bands that intrigued me the most (Carcass, Entombed, Repulsion, Carnage, Terrorizer, Napalm Death, Death) had either moved on creatively to other styles of music or hadn't existed for a few years at that point (except for Autopsy, who were on the verge of splitting up by then). I felt like Death Metal had given up on me. With the rise to prominence of Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel (I suppose they had always been prominent), and Suffocation – who, by '95 represented the last high-speed bands standing (Obituary had become quasi-groove metal by the time World Demise hit and Napalm Death was dabbling heavily in industrial metal), the punk-infused, loose and nasty form of Death Metal was in short supply. Unleashed and Grave had both slowed their sounds down by the mid-90s, and even Slaughter of the Soul, one of my favorite albums of the period, owes more to Dark Angel than it does to the obscure Death Metal of the band's earlier period. Certainly record labels had given up on Death Metal – with the exception (mostly) of Relapse, but even they were well on their way to creating an aesthetic that would enable them to sign a band like Neurosis (which was sincere, as well as a savvy business move). Not the best time to be a Massacre and Necrovore fan.

Of course, the host of mediocre, uninspired and uninspiring musicians playing Death Metal were far from the only culprits in the demise of the genre's brief commercial peak. Equally culpable (possibly more so) are record labels, with Roadrunner and Earache being the most egregious offenders. Labels, like any other business, were in a race to produce the most predictable return on their investment – a business practice that quickly leads to artistic stagnation. Roadrunner seemed eager to give all of the Death Metal projects to (the admittedly great) engineer / producer Scott Burns, who faced with decreasing recording artist talent, increasing workload, and decreasing budgets, spawned the “Morrisound Sound,” which while it was a good sound (probably because it was a good sound), was subsequently beaten into the ground. Between Dan Seagrave's ubiquitous artwork and Scott Burns' increasingly homogenous production, Death Metal albums were beginning to sound and look frightfully predictable. Your Monstrosity became not too unlike your Resurrection which wasn't that different from your Brutality. The problem with these albums isn't that they're awful – in fact they're actually pretty decent, and these records honestly sound better today than they did 20 years ago - simply because not every new album that you hear sounds like this anymore. The problem is that these bands simply aren't remarkable. None of them will ever have a Slowly We Rot or a Symphonies of Sickness in their catalogs. And in all fairness, I don't know that my band ever will either. I can live with that, but just saying... And if my band had gotten signed in 1991, we would have JUMPED at the chance to record at Morrisound and have Dan Seagrave cover art. Which is one of the many reasons we weren't ready to be signed in 1991. Also, we sounded like crap.

Which brings us to the third, and probably most fatal problem preventing Death Metal from having any breakthrough or sustainable commercial success or aesthetic longevity (as a creative and innovative medium). When your goal is to put out the most extreme, horrifying and over-the-top record and you succeed (even if only in your eyes), there's no place to artistically go from there. You can either a) broaden your style, b) repeat yourself or c) simply quit, like Repulsion did. When you begin at the musical end of the line, with no melody, the fastest tempos your musicianship will allow and the most evil, frightening riffs you can compose, anything else you do is going to be either a slight variation on a theme or a watering down of your sound.

For this reason, to me, Death Metal represents the ultimate endpoint of the entire genre of Rock Music. We have to be realistic and concede that Rock and Roll is a 20th century phenomenon. Lemmy is in his late 60s, and most of the genre's originators are either dead or old enough to be great-grandparents. Current successful rock bands do little more than parrot genre cliches and Death Metal is no different. Taking Heavy Metal and punk to their logical endpoints of gratuitous volume, speed, and power, the genre effectively killed underground metal as a marketable commodity in the United States for decade or more. Certainly its intensity resonated on a larger scale and paved the way for bands like Slipknot and Deftones to bring heavier (still extremely shitty if we're being honest) sounds to larger audiences later on in the 90s, but that's hardly a mark of success. But realistically, Death Metal was never designed to be listenable or sonically acceptable. In fact, it's just the opposite. Not that it isn't musical or doesn't require talent (even though it really doesn't sometimes), but it's supposed to be abrasive, unlistenable and horrifying. It's fucking Death Metal after all.

That's one of the many reasons I have a difficult time listening to the “Death Metal” of the late '90s and beyond. Much of it is simply treading water on innovative ideas that had long since been thoroughly explored by more inspired practitioners (my band's records probably fall into that category) - or it's played by capable, well-meaning, but ultimately boring musicians who have confused “intensity” and “brutality” with the number of beats per minute in their drummer can quietly double-stroke his kick drums at or how many riffs they can cram into one “song.” Or, even worse, it's played by capable and well-meaning musicians who think that Death Metal would sound better if only it were blended with Jazz/Fusion or polyrhythms or dubstep or video-game sound effects or whatever the fuck kind of stuff musician types like to play.

If I could have gotten the Thy Kingdom Come demo just by typing some shit into a computer when I was a kid, I would have literally shit my pants with glee. I just hope that in twenty years, the kids of today will still be as passionate about whatever shit they're listening to today as I still am about World Without God by Convulse.

Read the complete article at:

www.gorefuckingmetal.blogspot.com/2014/08/thoughts-after-reading-extremity.html