Sluncho's Metal 101: Death Metal

Good:

Fear Factory - Demanufacture

Fear Factory, for some sad fucking reason, are an incredibly polarizing band. A pretty sizable chunk of the "true" metal community do nothing but bitch about these guys, making a pile of nonspecific complaints about the vocals and never really doing much but yelling because they don't fit their exacting definition of what "real" metal is. I guess I can sort of understand the ire the band has attracted, as in all honesty some of their later efforts get into pretty shaky territory (U2 and Nirvana covers, really fucking atrocious rapping, etc.), but there is no denying that they once were one of the most exciting bands in the American death metal scene.

Technically their third LP, Demanufacture was the second full-length release by the band (after the shelved Concrete and interesting but messy Soul of a New Machine) and represents the group at the top of their game in every regard. The rhythm section of Raymond Herrera and Christian Olde Wolbers is mechanically precise, throbbing like pistons over the fat, grinding riffs of Dino Cazares. The heavy/clean vocal split on Soul felt kinda awkward, with vocalist Burton C. Bell being quite plainly a better singer than death grunter, but here he manages to strike a near perfect balance between the two. His growls are closer to the bark of a drill instructor than the usual Cookie Monster mumbling, and his clean vocals have a bit of extra bite to them as well. Yet more changes to the sound come in the form of a much larger presence of synthesizers and post-processing on the instruments, cultivating a good blend of thrash metal precision with the ugly, metallic noise of industrial (and a splish-splash of ambient electronica influence, mostly prominently on the incredibly long Aphex Twin-inspired outro to the dirge-y "A Therapy for Pain"). It's different from the usual death metal song and dance, but that's a damn good thing. The scene has so little imagination these days.

Bad:

Six Feet Under - Maximum Violence

The first few times I listened to Six Feet Under I was completely convinced I was listening to a joke band. Tragically, they're about as unironic as they come. The lovechild of wretched ex-Cannibal Corpse vocalist Chris Barnes (a fucking terrible growler who mucked up the band's most musically impressive albums with his incoherent gargling) and his juvenile obsession with cursing and murder (even for a death metal vocalist this guy is really hung up on the cheesiest of shock material), Six Feet Under play what can be generously described as "early CC minus the speed and technical prowess" and more accurately described as "complete fucking shit". When they're not spitting out atrocious covers of AC/DC songs (yeah, you read that right), they're recording numbers like this winner here. If you can sit through the whole thing without chuckling then you've earned yourself a no-prize, my friend.

Overlooked:

Opeth - My Arms, Your Hearse

Now I'm sure you're thinking "Sluncho, what the fuck, man? Since when were Opeth overlooked?", and trust me, I know, it seems like a pretty idiotic statement at first blush. But the thing is it's true, they are. Most metal fans know them for what, "Ghost of Perdition"? A song that's been in mainstream videogame soundtracks and thrown on every "good metal" comp ever? Ghost Reveries was a good album, yeah, but half the folks out there didn't give half a shit about this great band till it dropped and I'd bet a fair chunk of those folks never bothered to go back and try some of their other stuff. They probably sat through maybe five minutes of Damnation before turning it off in disgust because their new heroes were "some fucking hippie folk faggots".

Opeth were repping Sweden in a big way long before then, and this was the album that introduced them to me. Growing up one of the first real classic metal bands I got into was Celtic Frost. I dearly loved To Mega Therion, spun it pretty much every day. Like so many other kids, I searched around on crap old p2p clients (fuck yeah, Kazaa) for more similar stuff constantly, and one day I found a cover of "Circle of the Tyrants" (my favorite CF song) by these guys called Opeth. And by god, it was an eye-opener. It was like the same thing but a thousand times better, crushingly fucking heavy, the vocals were demonic and it even had atmospheric piano to add to the tense mood. I grabbed as much Opeth as I could find, and they kept delivering. "Demon of the Fall", "April Ethereal", it all felt so new. The songs were long, complex, dark in more ways than just being loud and having spooky vocals. I spent the next several years championing Opeth as the best thing to come out of Sweden in music history, eagerly snapping up everything they released. Even as they got progressively proggier I kept coming back for more. When they really broke into the mainstream, I was kinda falling away from metal, and by the time I got back into the game people kinda stopped caring about the classics. I really hope the next generation of headbangers will revisit masterworks like this.