The Cabinet’s Metal Band of 2012: Grave

The Swedish death metal band Grave will always have a special place in my heart. Their 1994 album “Soulless” was the first metal CD I ever bought, they were one of the first metal bands I saw live, and they were the first metal band I played for my girlfriend Vicki on one of our first dates.  That was over seven years ago, and she’s still around, so she must have understood it was all in good fun when I raised the horns and grunted along to “I’m soulless to the core. I’m six, six, six. I am your death; I am the crucifix, on which you are nailed!” 

However, although Grave, Carcass, Slayer, Comecon, and a few other bands led me to the edge of the abyss in the mid-90’s, at the time I didn’t quite have the nerve to take the plunge and become a full-fledged metalhead, so I stepped back and took comfort in a mix of British rock and indie rock bands that were easier on the ears and less frightening and had much more meaningful lyrics.  By the early 2000’s, the pit had opened again, and this time I didn’t even try to resist.  Now, when listening to music I no longer wanted it to give expression to whatever emotions I was feeling or vocalize my political views; I preferred it to provide me with the kind of escape I experienced when watching science fiction, horror, and fantasy movies.  No music does this better than metal.

I descended slowly, so it wasn’t until last year that I revisited Grave.  The occasion was the summer release of their tenth studio album, “Endless Procession of Souls,” and it was clear from the opening tracks that the Grave I first encountered in the 90’s is alive and well.  The album’s tone is set with “Dystopia,” a thirty-second instrumental consisting of slow, heavy riffs delivered from thick, down-tuned guitars.  It sounds like a dirge for souls marching to hell, and it’s followed by nine songs in which vocalist/guitarist Ola Lingren rejects God and grunts about death, dying, and the afterlife.  Grave play slower than most younger death metal bands, but the songs on EPOS have just enough groove to avoid droning together into one slow grinding monolith.  It starts strong as “Dystopia” bleeds into “Amongst the Marble and the Dead,” a relatively fast-paced song in which Lingren pleads, “Let me rot, amongst the marble and the dead,” seeming to adopt the perspective of a member the undead.  Tracks like “Winds of Chains,” another faster-paced song that narrates the earth’s purging of humanity through a series of natural disasters, keep the album interesting by adding variety through tempo-changes and variations on the album’s themes.  The album’s heaviest song is the title track, which closes the album and horrifies listeners with a doom-laden vision of the afterlife.  It’s also one of the best songs Grave have ever recorded.

 

Grave are unique among the Swedish death metal bands that began releasing albums in the late 80’s/early 90’s because they have preserved their original sound with only minor adjustments.  Characterized by thick, down-tuned characters, slow, heavy riffs, and a touch of groove, it’s a sound worth preserving.  However, the vocals are what make Grave stand out for me.  Vocals often (some would say always) ruin death metal.  When offering your blackened soul to Satan, your gift won’t be accepted if you have the harmonious voice of an angel, but in too many instances, death metal singers sound like Cookie Monster and the vocals don’t flow with the music; they run alongside it trying to catch up.  By contrast, Lingren employs a raspy grunt that is appropriately evil, complements the music, and renders his lyrics intelligible.

Hearing EPOS was liked reconnecting with an old friend.  Wondering what Grave had been up to since the mid-90’s, I started working my way through their back catalog.  They disbanded in 1997, but regrouped two years later, and they’ve released six albums since 2002, all of which have been well-received.  I’ve made it through only the two direct predecessors to EPOS, “Dominion VIII” (2008) and “Burial Ground” (2010), both of which feature everything I love about Grave, but neither is as strong as EPOS.  “Burial Ground” suffers from poor production, and the guitars are unintentionally fuzzy, particularly at high volumes, which is the only way to play Grave.  Like EPOS, it ends with a long title track (continuing a trend that started with “As Rapture Comes” (2006)) that is the best song on the album.  It also contains one of my favorite lines from a metal song:  “I was lost, but now I’m loooooooost!”  The higher production value of “Dominion VIII” captures Grave’s thick guitars better than “Burial Ground” and contributes to a better album.  “Dominion VIII” also has more stand out songs, particularly “Fallen (Angel Song)” and “Annihilated Gods,” both of which alternate speed with grooves and thus demonstrate that the band is not a one-trick pony in its approach to rejecting God.  The strongest song is again the title track, which closes the album with Lingren grunting about hell.

Grave’s three most recent albums have been on heavy-rotation on my iPod since December, and I expect they will stay that way for the rest of this year and will soon be joined by a few more.  I’m ashamed to admit that I missed Grave when they played in Charlotte in August, but there’s every reason to believe they’ll keep releasing albums and touring for the immediate future.  However, even if EPOS ends up being their last album, they will have earned an honored place in hell.  

Metal Album of the Week: Death - The Sound of Perseverance

With so much good death metal coming from Sweden, it’s easy to forget that the subgenre had its origins not in the cold, dark, subarctic climate of Scandinavia, but in the sunny state of Florida.  Although its exact moment of birth will always be debated, most enthusiasts of the genre credit Death’s 1987 album “Scream Bloody Gore” as the first true death metal release.  Birth is always painful, and in this case it’s painful for the listener as well.  Despite its significance in metal history, I find it almost impossible to listen to “Scream Bloody Gore.”  I know most metalheads cite the first three Death albums as three of the best metal albums ever released, but for my ears the pain continues until the fourth album, 1991’s “Human.”

Death’s sound was clearly evolving through the first three albums and with each release the music sounded less and less like poorly recorded noise.  But with “Human” there is a much more noticeable shift away from the raw brutality that characterizes the first few albums toward the technical and more melodic metal of Death’s later releases.  I’m not sure which album is considered the first technical metal album, but Death are often credited with playing a founding role in this subgenre as well.  They continued developing their sound throughout the 1990s, and their evolution ended only with the death of Chuck Schuldiner, the band’s singer, lead guitarist, founding member, and creative genius, in 2001.  The band’s final release, “The Sound of Perseverance,” which is more of a melodic, technical metal album than a death metal album, displays Death at their most refined and stands among the best metal albums ever released.

Before discussing “The Sound of Perseverance” in more detail, I should say more about Chuck Schuldiner as it’s inaccurate to write simply that he founded the band and provided its creative energy.  Schuldiner was Death.  He obviously benefitted from the work of several very talented musicians, but the other members were essentially hired help, and the line-up changed with each album.  Schuldiner wrote all the music and lyrics, which means that if Death created both death metal and technical metal, these subgenres were largely the product of one man’s brain.  I don’t want to exaggerate Schuldiner’s role in metal history.  He had help not only from the musicians who worked with him but from all the metal bands that came before Death that laid the groundwork for the emergence of the death and technical metal subgenres.  But while it is a stretch to claim that Schuldiner single-handedly created two subgenres of metal, it’s also true that it’s difficult to overstate his influence on heavy metal.

It’s easy for non-metalheads to form the impression that all metal songs are about death, destruction, and Satan because many of them are, and this was certainly true of Death’s earlier songs.  But their lyrics evolved with their sound.  Whereas the first few albums featured Schuldiner growling songs like “Regurgitated Guts,” “Baptized in Blood,” and “Open Casket,” “Perseverance” has him shrieking “Spirit Crusher,” “Story to Tell,” and “Flesh and Power it Holds.”  As their titles suggest, the songs on “Perseverance” are mostly about emotional pain. 

“Flesh and Power it Holds,” the album’s best song and probably the best song Death ever recorded, was probably written after a break up.  Unlike the pussies on the radio who whine about their broken hearts and beg their babies to come back to them, Schuldiner’s anguished lyrics accurately convey the pain of a failed relationship:

Passion is a poison laced with pleasure bitter sweet
One of many faces that hide deep beneath
It will take you in
It will spit you out
Behold the flesh and the power it holds

But above all, he was a guitarist, and “Flesh” features lots of intricate guitar work, layered sounds, and unconventional structures.  Lacking any musical background, I’m ill-equiped to discuss the technical aspects that make this song, and the album as a whole, so great.  I’ll just add that it’s a great metal song, acknowledge that I can’t provide an adequate explanation of why, and invite you to listen for yourself:

Other songs on the album approach its theme of emotional pain from different perspectives and all of them display Schuldiner’s musical talent at its height. Highlights include the album’s opener, “Scavenger of Human Sorrow,” about one who takes pleasure in spreading hurtful lies; “Spirit Crusher,” which encourages listeners to “stay strong and hold on tight” when faced with one who is “human at sight, monster at heart;” and “Story to Tell,” which rages against attempts to reduce a person to a story after a relationship has failed.  If you’re starting to think that Death was more emo than metal, never say this to my face, but also be aware that unlike the hardcore emo bands that Death’s music inspired, they never wallowed in the pain.  They channeled it into anger.

Better than any other Death album, “Perseverance” demonstrates not only the band’s technical skill, but also its uniqueness.  With its complex guitar work, it solidifies Schuldiner’s status as a metal god, while its dark lyrics about real horrors that we all experience make it accessible to metalheads like me who understand the greatness of the music even if they can’t explain it. 

Next:  Goatwhore – Blood for the Master

Metal Album of the Week: Asphyx - Deathhammer

If I had to pick a favorite subgenre of metal, I would have to say death metal, even though most of it is unbearable.  But I like my metal evil, and next to black metal, it’s the evilest, and even bad death metal is better than most good black metal, which sounds like a bunch of noise mixed with the ramblings of a humanoid reptile.  Death metal’s deep, growling vocals; thick, downtuned guitars; and fast drumming that relies heavily on double bass work together to create more fitting soundtracks for the Chief Rebel Angel.

The death metal that I usually find most appealing is melodic death metal—bands like Amon Amarth and Entombed are two good examples—but I’m always on the lookout for any death metal that doesn’t follow the blast-beat, Cookie monster formula popularized by bands like Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel.  “Deathhammer,” the latest album from the Dutch band Asphyx, is a notable example of a recent death metal album that offers metalheads something different.  At the beginning of the title song, vocalist Martin van Drunen announces, “This is true death metal, you bastards!” and it’s hard to argue with him, but what makes this album so enjoyable for me is the way it mixes the deep growling vocals and thick guitars of death metal with the slower tempos, heavy riffs and touch of melody more characteristic of doom metal.  Asphyx’s style of metal is thus often referred to as death/doom.

The album’s mix of death and doom results in a sound that provides an appropriately dark and brutal atmosphere for the lyrics that focus mostly on the horrors of war.  This is pretty standard for the subgenre, but what makes Asphyx unique is the powerful vocals that are somewhere between throaty screaming and raspy growling and remain surprisingly intelligible.  “Deathhammer” has a nice variety of mid-to-fast tempo songs and slower, doom-laden tracks, and thus avoids the common problem in metal of sounding like one long, droning song.

One of the album’s best songs, “We Doom You to Death,” displays a bit of wittiness in the word play of its lyrics and also shows that Asphyx don’t take themselves too seriously.  The song is a perfect hybrid of death metal and doom metal, and although the title might suggest that it’s about sentencing someone to death, it’s actually punning on “doom” and “death” to make a statement about the kind of metal Asphyx plays.  I usually detest metal songs that are about metal, but this one works because of the clever way the lyrics and music work together.  It also provides a nice break from the rest of the album’s gloom.

The brutal sound of “Deathhammer” makes it great music for cleaning the bathroom, washing dishes, or doing any kind of cleaning that involves scrubbing.  In fact, it wasn’t until I listened to the album while cleaning the bathroom that I truly appreciated it.  To get rid of mildew, try the third track, “Minefield.”  After 7 minutes of this slow, grinding tale of soldiers trapped in a mindfield, the grout in your shower will be white again.

Next:  Death -  The Sound of Perseverance