The Album by Album Challenge: The Death Metal Edition

One of the many questions I get asked a lot is, “Hey Brainfart. How come you don’t like Death Metal?” Every time I answer this fucking question I sound like an old man. “Arrrhh, it’s too loud. I can’t understand the lyrics. Why does the singer sound like Cookie Monster? Why is it so goddamn fast? GET OFF MY LAWN!” I know right? I sound like I’m 75 or something.

After some time of reflecting on this, I decided to present myself with a challenge. I went to the Facebook page (www.facebook.com/thegreatsouthernbrainfart) and I asked my fellow Fartheads to recommend some death metal albums to listen to. After a day or to, I whittled down the list to FIVE ALBUMS and in Album by Album Challenge form, I listened to each of these albums front to back. Below are my thoughts on each of the albums that I listened to. I hope you’ll enjoy my foray into the world of death metal for the first time ever.

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Carcass – Heartwork
Release Date: October 18, 1993
Highlights: Buried Dreams, Carnal Forge, No Love Lost, Heartwork, Embodiment, Arbeit Macht Fleisch, Blind Leading the Blind, Doctrinal Expletives,

This album has to be without a doubt the single most diverse death metal album I have heard yet. It’s a riff lover’s dream and in this album I really hear a lot of classic influence. Carcass seems like they took all their influences such as Maiden, Sabbath, and even some classic Merciful Fate and just created a really unique album. The songs are really awesomely played and even the kind of whacked out vocals of singer/bassist Jeff Walker really isn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, it really lends itself to this kinda of music and is a nice change from the cookie monster thing that just grates on my nerves after a while.

Song for song this album just slays. All the songs have a groove to them that is sadly missed in death metal. Most death metal if not played at 100 mph it’s played at the speed of dripping molasses but with Carcass, songs like “Heartwork”, “Buried Dreams”, and the stellar ”Arbeit Macht Fleisch” are prime examples of a band that refused to be pinned into a corner and pigeon holed into what everyone thought a death metal band should sound like. 20 years later, “Heartwork” is not only a classic piece of death metal awesomeness but an amazing, precise, and thought out heavy metal masterpiece that tore down boundaries and proved that an album like this can be embraced and loved by just about any fan of heavy metal music.

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Morbid Angel – Covenant
Release Date: June 22, 1993
Highlights: Rapture, World of Shit, Blood on My Hands, Angel of Disease, Sworn to Black, God of Emptiness

Morbid Angel was a band that was HUGE within my circle of friends who were into this kind of music. I remember one of my friends taking me to see them at the Masquerade when they toured for the “Domination” album. I remember seeing them live and just not really getting it. As the years have passed and I’ve been exposed to more forms of metal and death metal included, I feel I can listen to this album and understand it a bit. “Rapture” is a cool song and “World of Shit” was cool with all of the different changes and what not and “Vengeance is Mine” totally reminded me of Slayer. “Angel of Disease” is the song of all of them that really surprised me the most as it sounded like something I could’ve heard on Venom’s “Black Metal” or “At War with Satan” albums. The closing “God of Emptiness” is such a great song and I really dug the epicness of this song and even heard a touch of early sludge metal in there as well.

Covenant as a whole really blew me away and opened my mind to Death Metal. While it might not be the most melodic album I’ve never heard, it is definitely a very dynamic album. I even really didn’t mind the vocals so much and they didn’t bug me at all to be honest. I’m starting to understand that these kinds of vocals are very much a part of the delivery of this type of music. This was a really cool album and this one without a doubt will get some repeat listens from me.

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Into Eternity – Buried in Oblivion
Release Date: February 10, 2004
Highlights: Splintered Visions, Embraced by Desolation, Beginning of the End, Spiraling Into Depression, Buried in Oblivion, Black Sea of Agony, Morose Seclusion

Now this is something really cool and unique here. Somehow this band has managed to do some really cool shit mixing progressive metal and death metal. I felt like I was listening to a Yes, Dream Theater, and Carcass all at the same time and this was something I really found myself enjoying quite a bit. Epica was the first band I ever heard use this mix of clean vocals and death metal growl vocals and while I like Epica, Into Eternity really seems to do this far better. The mix of the vocal stylings really creates a unique dynamic but it’s the clean vocals with harmonies that take it into that more progressive stratosphere. The title track is this absolutely gorgeous classic guitar piece that once again took me into that progressive world with some really amazing clean vocals. What a great change of pace for this album. It’s almost as if it was a chance to just take a break and catch your breath before the album continues slamming my face with “Black Sea of Agony.”

I’m curious to hear from the more hard core Death Metal fans about what they think about this album. Something in my mind tells me to prepare for screams of things like, “That band is shit” or “HAHA! THAT IS NOT DEATH METAL!!!” Either way, I thought this was a really fantastic album and this one definitely blew me away and grabbed my attention. I feel like this kind may not be the die hard Death Metal that I’ve been listening to for this whole challenge but it did offer up another side of this multifaceted genre and proving to me that not all Death Metal is created equal.

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At The Gates – Slaughter of the Soul
Release Date: Blinded by Fear, Slaughter of the Soul, Cold, Into the Dead Sky, World of Lies,
Highlights: November 14, 1995

Listening to this album I can see why it’s considered a classic. This album reminds me an awful lot of Carcass’ Heartwork album. The singer’s voice sounds almost identical to Carcass’ singer and I actually kind of dig this kind of singing. It’s a departure from the low, rumbling Cookie Monster sounding vocals. The opening track “Blinded by Fear” is a total face melter and it totally caught me off guard. I really didn’t know what to expect and by the time was starting to wrap my head around it the 2nd song “Slaughter of the Soul” was slamming me upside the head. “Under a Serpant Sun” was without a doubt my favorite song on this album as I feel like these guys really exercised some serious dynamics in not just tempo changes but even mixing in some really hauntingly wicked clean tone guitar playing that created this sense of tension that I totally dug. “Into the Dead Sky” is a pretty amazing instrumental tune that showcases the band’s versatility and also the fact that these guys are Iron Maiden fans without a doubt.

While I found myself really digging some of these tunes a good bit, by the ½ way mark of this album it all just started to sound the same. The songs just all started to run together and started losing their ability to stand out on their own to me and keep my interest. With that being said, there is something in here and for someone like me I can find it if I just look and listen a bit below the surface. Listening to this album I can really hear the influence of bands like Iron Maiden and other NWOBHM bands that have been thrown into a blender with bands like Slayer and Megadeth. Being that these guys are considered to be one of the band at the forefront of this metal movement, it’s cool to hear how this sound was generated from a few distinct types of metal and combined together to create a genre all it’s own. Pretty exciting shit to be honest.
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Death – Human
Release Date: October 22, 1991
Highlights: Suicide Machine, Together as One

It’s virtually impossible to even talk about Death Metal and not mention the band Death. Other than the fact that they had one of the most bad ass band logos ever, I really didn’t much more about these guys. I do know that they are without a doubt legends and forefathers of the genre. There is no denying that guitarist Chuck Schuldiner was a monstrous guitarist and is considered by many to have pioneered that growling style of “singing.”

Unfortunately, aside from a couple of songs, I just didn’t find much that I dug about this album. I don’t know what it was. I found myself liking bits of the music here and there and even his vocals weren’t all that bad but I just didn’t feel that the songs themselves did much for me. Maybe it’s kind of the same way in how a lot of the early NWOBHM bands don’t really connect with me at all. I understand and value the importance of their existence and their contributions but the songs just didn’t do much for me. They all just seemed to kind of run into each other and not really differing much from the other which actually made it quite hard to listen to. Sorry but this one just didn’t do much for me.

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So there you have it. So did my outlook on death metal change? Ya know, somewhat. I didn’t notice this until piecing this thing together but none of these bands have a logo that looks like a giant shit pile of twigs.  How odd is that?  Also, I’m still not sold on the 100mph blast beats upside the head cookie monster thing but what I did learn was that for me to think that all death metal bands are like that was a completely unfair assumption. I didn’t love everything I heard on these albums (with the exception of Carcass and Morbid Angel) but I did find something in each of these albums that I could appreciate and even find myself getting into. If this challenge did anything for me it was that it reminded me not to be so quick to judge a band just based on a genre tag. Not all death metal is created equal and that right there folks is the lesson in it all.