I got this book at a used bookstore while visiting Seattle last week, and read the whole thing between the hours of 10pm Thursday and 430pm the next day, including 5 hours of sleep and plenty of airport bullshit. It's a quick read, especially if you like these kind of underground-rock-music-story books. This is actually the first 'history-of-metal' books I've read, besides I guess The Dirt by Motley Crue. I've read like all the 'history-of-punk' books and most of 'Our Band Could Be Your Life" etc, but I've been so into metal, death metal especially, for the past few years that I thought I should get a bit more of a footing on the historical nitpicking that music nerds like me like to engage in.
It's all introduced by a short essay by the legendary BBC 1 DJ John Peel, who was an early champion and enthusiast of death metal, before starting things off with a bold name for the first chapter: "Punk is a Rotting Corpse." Of course this is the title of an old-school Napalm Death song, but it's a good starting point to remind modern metalheads, who are often quick to bad-mouth punk rock, that much of death metal and especially grindcore is rooted in hardcore punk and the anarcho movement of early 80s England. That is one important concept, lost on much of today's generation I feel, that this book highlights quite well right early in the book. What I also found interesting was the boredom bordering on contempt that many of the early artists showed for the thrash metal scene; it was refreshing because the thrashers of the time were always lamenting how the ubiquitous 80s pop/hair-metal scene was too mainstream or whatever, but the death metallers are just so much further removed from that level of popularity that they don't even mention the MTV metal of that era once in the whole book. Instead it's Metallica and Megadeth, then in what today's crowd considers their golden years, that these guys are tired of.
To be bluntly honest, however, the latter chapters of this book in which the mainstream music world attempted to co-opt death metal into 90's alternative-rock sensibilities really made me look at some of these bands a lot differently than I had in the past. For this I am grateful for the book's candor in showing how many of these bands who tout a really underground personality or whatever really went for the big time in a totally unabashed way, something that has been completely forgotten by the modern death metal and metalcore scenes. Kids today paint bands like Morbid Angel and Obituary and such to be the epitome of underground, but the deals Earache and Metal Blade and Roadrunner and basically all the labels and bands of the early to mid-90s made with major labels really stand as strong evidence against such claims. And it's disappointing, because I too wanted to see all these guys as underground stalwarts, but even the supposedly anarcho-founded Napalm Death was on a major label in 1995. These chapters alone should be enough to color the fantastical obsessions many new kids in the scene have with these older bands.
While this book gives some crucial history of an often overlooked or misunderstood genre of metal which has very few other full works focused on it, and it certainly details the history of Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, and Carcass pretty closely, there are some glaring problems of omission if you ask me. First are the pictures. There are alot of characters in this book, many of whom shift through various bands as the years go by, but almost every picture just says something like "an early Nihilist lineup" or something, never really identifying who in the lineup of raggedy metalheads is who. Some captions would have been helpful in cognizing who it is we're reading about.
That's a minor gripe compared to the lack of attention many other crucial bands receive in this book. My main problem is the somewhat skim outline of the band Death's history. While Chuck Schuldiner is a prominent figure in some of the opening chapters and I did actually learn a thing or two about his travels and influence in the American scene, very little about the band's lineup changes or overall contribution to the growing technicality in the music is mentioned. This is odd, given that Death's famous logo is featured on many a shirt of some keystone players throughout this very book's pages. Much more is said about the lesser-known, less-important pre-Death demo band Mantas. The same goes for the legendary grindcore band Repulsion, who gets referred to as such only a couple times while the demo version of the band, Genocide, is the point of much focus.
The shrift in detail is apparent for other top-notch bands like Deicide, Cannibal Corpse,Vader, Entombed and Terrorizer as well, but it borders on straight up insulting in the cases of Sepultura and Suffocation. Sepultura, one of the most important metal bands in history and by far the most successful Latin American band of any genre in the American and English markets, is not even interviewed and is brought into the fold by telling the stories of Roadrunner Records' newfound success with them and of a record producer having a tough time in Brazil recording their classic "Beneath the Remains" album. They aren't really given a spotlight of their own, and even though the author notes that when they were introduced to the Northern music scene people were interested because of the whole Latin American aspect he doesn't delve into the question of how the scene might have developed in Brazil or the different musical approach the band took.
Suffocation gets even less focus, even though the author accurately dubs them "one of the most-imitated bands of the era" in speaking of early 90s death metal. There are exactly 3 paragraphs regarding Suffocation scattered throughout the book despite the fact that they are one of the few really relevant bands from the NYC scene and their drummer is often credited with creating a whole new type of now-popular blast beats. The fact that they had 2 black guys in the band during a time when black metal bands often spoke of fascism and racism could surely have warranted some discussion. I don't know I've always seen Suffocation as one of the absolute most important bands in death metal history and this book would certainly not convey that to your average reader.
What makes the lack of focus on extremely important bands like Cannibal Corpse, Death, and Suffocation even more frustrating is the nearly-defensive attempt that is made in one of the closing chapters to bring mainstream nu-metal band Slipknot into the book's end as an example of how death metal's influence can be seen in current mainstream metal acts. While I won't deny the slight death metal tendencies said band may possess, and my own current bandmates are the kind of rabid Maggots who would try to do the same thing were they the ones writing a history of metal, it's pretty fucking stupid to dedicate almost 5 pages of pictures and interview testimony from otherwise respectable members of the death metal community giving the band quiet praise especially if you're gonna shrimp out on the real death metal bands. That whole section pissed me off.
To be fair, it may be possible that many of the things I see as omissions are results of the book's overriding focus on the reeeally-early days of death metal, so both the author and many of those being interviewed may not have a completely working understanding or appreciation for the newer breeds of death metal. While I myself am not the biggest Swedish melodic death metal fan, there's no denying it's overwhelming influence on today's styles and it may have needed more than a quick mentioning of At The Gates, In Flames, and Dark Tranquility (by the way why the fuck does it continuously mislabel them as Dark Tranquillity?? who was doing the editing for danzigssake?). Their inclusion of Earth Crisis and Converge in discussing death metal's influence on hardcore during the 90s is a healthy addition and I really appreciated the balanced review given to my subgenre of choice, but it doesn't exactly capture the complexity of the two scenes coming together that ended up producing today's extremely productive metalcore and deathcore genres. On another genre-related note, the term 'blackened death metal' may not have been in circulation the way it is today when this book was published in 2003, so the discussion of black metal would be tempered by such novelty.
The importance of bands like Suffocation and Gorguts (a band the book, or at least one of its interviewees, pretty much derides) may be more apparent now with the advent of such genres as deathcore and blackened death. But it is kind-of a shame that really great late-90s/2000s bands like Krisiun, Brutal Truth, Decapitated, Cryptopsy, The Locust, and Nasum are only given about 2 pages for all those names combined, while other amazing acts like Necrophagist, Today Is The Day, or Dying Fetus etc are not mentioned at all.
All shit talking aside, the author of this book clearly went to great lengths to secure interviews with a plethora of the key members of this very elusive underground scene to construct a mosaic discussion of how the England, Florida, California, Sweden, and European death metal scenes emerged.This is a story that has not been so fully brought together before. With so many bands and record labels and promoters and shifting members in all the bands from all these different parts of the world and different social modes of operation, of course it would be difficult for this guy to include everything that everybody wants to hear. An introductory essay even claims as much and it may be near-impossible to ever really write the true complete story of death metal, just as it is for any other full-fledged genre of music.
Ultimately, this is a pretty good primer for those of us who like the music alot but don't know the backstories of the bands, or those of you out there who might be peripherally interested in death metal or extreme music in general and would like to know where to start in the never-ending journey into the hell that is the underground meta/punk/hardcore/etc scene. I think this is a book that has alot of potential but it should be revised and updated to take into account the massive spike in popularity death metal has received in recent years due to the rise of deathcore and blackened death, and to expand in the areas I noted above because it seems a bit of an injustice to talk so much about Napalm Death (an anarcho punk band at heart) and not give ample time to the many other groups who embody the idea of death metal a little more clearly.
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