Part_5

Thrash metal spawned yet another subgenre of metal that was to be the most extreme ever: death metal. Hellhammer's Apocalyptic Raids, Death's Scream Bloody Gore, and Possessed's The Seven Churches marked the beginning of a gender of music destined to never attain commercial success. Guitars became as heavy and downtuned as possible, tempo changes went from breakneck speeds to grindingly slow aggression, double pedaling almost became a rule for drummers, and vocalists switched from screaming to uttering guttural growls that were barely intelligible. Venom's Welcome to Hell had subtly predicted death metal's rise, and the new bands just reassured it. Acts such as the groundbreaking Celtic Frost continued death metal, but due to a new interest of metal bands in metalcore, death metal was losing ground.
Then came Sepultura, Obituary and Morbid Angel to resurrect death metal. Sepultura's precise and exacting Beneath the Remains, along with Obituary's brutal Slowly We Rot, revived the long-dead interest of metal fans and again established death metal as a strong branch of metal, propelling the existence of a slew of new bands and resurgence of old ones, such as Malevolent Creation, Cannibal Corpse, and Fudge Tunnel; as well as the progressive Believer, Pestilence, Atheist, and Cynic (the latter three forming the core of the so-called jazz-death metal scene). Furthermore, the subgenre strengthened itself in Sweden, where the brutal Entombed began a strong death metal tradition that featured slight hints of melody and bands such as Dismember, Edge of Sanity, Pan-Thy-Monium, and Hypocrisy. However, death metal also stagnated into boring repetition. Against the background of success for bands such as Morbid Angel and Deicide, along with the technically renewed approach of Death on Human, Individual Thought Patterns, and Symbolic, most new bands had nothing new to offer, but instead chose to rehash everything done before and therefore help begin carving death metal's tomb again.
During the last half of the Eighties, death metal would in turn churn out the most radical of its variations, grindcore, which would eventually become a separate musical identity in and of itself. Grindcore's most representative exponent is unquestionably Napalm Death, which virtually eliminated harmony and melody in albums such as Scum, Harmony Corrupted, and Utopia Banished. The subgenre seems to be the absolute frontier of heavy metal, as it thrives on deconstructing music and as such is probably its most radical form ever, that is, if it can be called music. Because of its nature, grindcore is usually just glanced upon by bands such as Scorn, while bands that originally formed part of the scene, such as Carcass, Godflesh, Treponem Pal, and Pitchshifter, have all chosen to move towards less radical musical directions.
Meanwhile, during the early Nineties, bands such as Tiamat, Therion, Sentenced, and Cemetary began moving away from their previous death metal sound in order to pursue diverse musical avenues, including progressive, doom, and classic metal. This in turn influenced other bands to create yet more diverse and musically complex death metal, which, along with the groundbreaking and NWOBHM-flavored Carcass album Heartwork, has been one of the main reasons behind the relatively recent New Wave of Swedish Death Metal. A movement started by At the Gates, Dark Tranquility, and In Flames, it mixes the strength and vocals of death metal with a considerably melodic approach that draws from the likes of Iron Maiden. The general style is in fact described as what would have happened if Iron Maiden had played death metal instead, and has become all the rage in the death metal scene; a result of catchier songwriting, an excellent execution on behalf of the musicians, and its overall sense of melody.
On the other side of the coin is black metal, a branch of death metal that began as an underproduced and noisy type of music ("black" being a connotation of Satanic imagery) as far back as the first half of the Eighties with Bathory. Although bands such as Slayer and Venom are called "black metal" at times due to their Satanic imagery, it was until Bathory that black metal truly took shape, with high pitched growls and snarls, "blast-beat" drumming, extremely distorted but normally tuned guitars, an utter lack of melody and subtlety, and a nihilistically Satanic or pagan ideology being at the forefront of the subgenre. Soon after the first wave of black metal was starting to brew in the underground, with its most extreme and important exponents hailing from Norway and consisting of acts like Immortal, Darkthrone, Burzum, and the savage and undeniably influential Mayhem. Although the Norwegian Inner Circle was plagued by an infamous and certainly not recommendable legacy of murders, incarcerations, and Church burnings, it was also the start of what was to be a rapidly expanding underground movement that was to take the fundamental elements such as savagery and corpse paint from its initiators.
It was thus that the second wave of black metal, which is still present today and has easily become the most popular, began a few years into the Nineties, with bands such as Satyricon, Dark Funeral, Emperor, Dimmu Borgir, and the English Cradle of Filth bringing in keyboards, a much greater sense of melody, and a host of new influences, such as Scandinavian folk music, into the mix. And although this second movement has left the wave of crimes of its predecessors in the past, the music remains savage, uncompromising, and with little commercial appeal, despite the expansion of borders that it is currently going through. Meanwhile, black metal legends Samael and Bathory have long since moved away from the cliche's of the subgenre, the first always having been a highly unique and unorthodox black metal offering with a slower and much darker approach that in recent years has brought in an enormous electronic influence to its style; a transition that began on the innovative Passage.