LORDS OF CHAOS VIII

SOUNDLY TRASHED
The late ‘80’s saw the brief ascendancy of Trash Metal, exemplified by bands like Anthrax, M.O.D., Metallica, and even the more extreme slayer. In Europe, the German groups Kreator and Sodom left a strong mark, along with Swiss ensemble Celtic Frost, who started out as the seminal outfit Helhammer. Sodom toyed with satanic themes on their first few albums, and band members adopted pseudonyms of “Angelripper”, “Witchhunter”, and “Grave Violtor”-the last of these bearing an ominous ring in light of the real life activities Black Metallers would partake in a few years later. Helhammer/Celtic Frost flirted with darker occult subjects for lyrical fodder, but eventually turnd into something resembling a metalized Art Rock band. Like any style hyped incessantly by the music industry, Thrash Metal’s days were ultimately numbered. The genre became too big for its own good and major labels scrambled to sign Thrash bands, who promptly cleaned up their sound and lost their original focus in self-indulgent demonstration of technical ability.
Peter Steele of gothic Metal band Type O Negative (and former front-man of the late 80s neo-barbarian Speed Metal act Carnivore) accurately characterizes Thrash Metal as a form of “urban blight music”, a pale-faced cousin of Rap. His remark is astute and it wasn’t long before Thrash bands like Anthrax actually began collaborating with Rappers and incorporating elements of Hip Hop into their songs. The less compromising underground watched such developments with dismay, and eagerly awaited for its phoenix to arise from the ashes of the now dead Thrash.
Innovation in the larger forms of music have almost always come at the hands of the fans – fans who pick up instruments of their own, determined to do one better over their mentors, or disgusted with seeing their favorite music swamped in the wake of commercial sell outs and corporate record labels meddling in the affairs of the underground. Speaking about the longevity of extreme Metal, Abaddon of Venom observes, “This kind of music always fractures, but the most important thing is that it, from the fans which keeps it together. It’s the power of the fanbase that will always keep it there”.
DEATH THRONES
Concurrently emerging in the both the U.S. and Europe, Death metal was the antidote the underground had awaited, reintroducing a sense of immediacy and danger otherwise lost after the early demise of Thrash. Death Metal took the speed of both Hardcore and Thrash to build its skeleton and fleshed this out with churning, down-tuned guitars and a growling style of singing which provided a dramatic antithesis to the falsettos and high-pitched lead vocals dominating mainstream Metal at the time. Death Metal’s subject matter was not far off from that of the Misfits, but instead of B grade ‘50s horror, one now found the Z-grade slasher movie violence of the ‘70s and ‘80s served up in endless rotation. Songs detailing infinite varities of murder, torture, rape and dismemberment were spewed out from the going Army of Death Metal acts around the globe. The related genre of grandcore, more heavily indebted to the politics of English anarchist and “peace punk” pioneers like Crass and Rudimentary Penni, produced its own massively popular Extreme Noise Terror, Napalm Death and Carcass and the latter are noteworthy for their graphically nauseating cover art on records like Symphonies of Sickness – collaged photographs of butchered meat and human autopsy photos, accompanied by lyrics drawn from text book on medical pathalogy.
The two world capital of Death Metal were the unlikely locations of Tampa, Florida and Stockholm, Sweden. From these extremes of fire and ice, the genre produced its most influential acts, Entombed, Hypocrisy, Dismember and Unleashed from Sweden; Morbid Angel, Death, Obituary and Deicide from the Swampy neither world of Florida. Other areas of the States also spat out bands of notoriety – misogynist gore fans Cannival Corpse from the upstate New York, equally rude and savage Autopsy from California – but the true aforimentioned cities had specific recording studios and record poducers which indelibely shaped the sonic boundaries of the genre. Death Metal eschewed the theatrics of its musical predecssors, instead opting for a “dude next door” look which remainded unchanged on stage or off. Ripped geans or sweatpants, high-top sneakers and plain leather jackets became the Death Metal uniform, and band members were assured of neighbour being recognised by fans of the street since they looked no different than a thousand other sallow-faced urban hoods.
A few exceptions came from the overtly Satanic bands who made up a small segment of Death Metal overall. The flamboyant singer of Deicide, Glen Bentton, Ceremoniously branded upside-down cross into his fore head, threw bloody antralis into concert crowds, and sported homemade armor on stage; fellow Floridians Morbid Angel begain donning paramilitary clothes for their live appearances, courting a neo-fascist demeanor, and reinforcing it with inopportune and illiberal comments on magagine interviews. For the most part however, the genre rested on its laurials of unbridled sonic brutality and lyrical glorification of all things morbid and decaying.
As Death Metal gained momentum, only a few bands from the Thrash days remaind who commanded any respect from the younger generation. Slayer continued to be reverted as godfathers of the scene, and in turn the band kept fans interested as they shifted subject matter from juvenile Satanism to an open-ended fascination with violence in general. Serial killers, genocide, religious persecution and other apocalyptic topics all became grist for Slayer’s lyrical mill. Additionally they often employed the long standing Metal tradition of invoking specters of Nazism and fascism in their lyrics and packagings. Slayer’s fans were dubbed the “slaytanic Wehrmacht”. Nazi eagles were incorporated into the band’s logo, songs were penned about Josef “angel of death” Mengele, and Jeff Henneman adorned his guitar with photos of concentration camp corpses. They gained an added following from neo-Nazi skinheads as a result, but it would be difficult to take much of this seriously upon closer examination of the group – despite his last name there is nothing remotely “Aryan” about lead singer Tom Araya, who in fact comes from a Hispanic South American background.