For the last half of our weirdo metal exploration, we’re going to leave the avant-black metal scene in Scandinavia and head all over the world for avant-death and avant-grind bands.

A very quick discussion of “black metal,” “death metal,” and “grindcore” is probably in order. There are differences in sounds, lyrical approaches, and historical origins of each macro-style. If a person wants to dive deeply into these distinctions, the following is pretty oversimplified, but hopefully this will be a helpful level of information to help folks who are just getting into these kinds of “extreme music” styles.

Death Metal

Musically, death metal grew out of more “traditional” metal music genres, particularly thrash. The lyrics and associated imagery tend to deal with morbid/graphic/deathy stuff. Vocals are generally “death grunts,” snarled or grunted yelling at a relatively low pitch range. Being closer to traditional metal’s evolution, these bands are generally highly technically proficient musicians, and you’ll likely hear a lot of guitar soloing on most death metal records. This music started to form into a “proper” subgenre in the mid 80s, with quite a lot of bands working in the style by the late 80s and early 90s.

Black Metal

With some origins in the early 80s, the music I hear most commonly referred to as black metal mostly started in Scandinavia in the early 90s. Lyrically, the approaches tend toward paganism, Satanism, and “evil” stuff. Musically, it’s fast crazy stuff, occasionally with flourishes of classical or folk music forms. The music is generally a little sloppier than the standards for death metal, with some exceptions. The BM scene seemed to embrace the use of synths and orchestral instruments a little more than death metal. Vocally, one expects relatively high-pitched shrieks and wails. Production values on BM recordings were often very low-fi. It’s also worth noting that many BM acts don’t/didn’t play shows, as the music was done by one or two people overdubbing themselves. And many BM bands went with the corpsepaint look.

Grindcore

Grindcore started in the mid-80s, influenced largely by punk and hardcore music. Napalm Death is probably the most well-known example of early grind. I find this genre somewhat hard to separate from death metal, as many elements overlap: the violence/gore imagery for lyrics and art, really fast playing, death grunts (though some grind bands seem to grunt even lower than the “average” death metal grunt), etc. A few clear differences: grind songs tend to be very short. You don’t hear much in the way of guitar solos. They tend to be somewhat sloppier than death bands, and play somewhat faster. But there are many overlaps, and many bands whose work fits into both genres equally.

So there’s a quick primer. One more thing I’d like to note before diving into more bands is how the word “jazz” is used on occasion to describe/review the work of these avant-extreme bands. From reading many reviews and descriptions of this sort of music to find all of these bands, aspects of their work is frequently described as “jazz” by these reviewers. Just to be clear, what these reviewers are calling “jazz” doesn’t have a lot to do with legit jazz playing. Sometimes they seem to be referring to bands’ approaches to rhythm. Other times they’re referring to moments where the bands actually play some kind of swing jazz material, but often these are very short and very amateur sounding—they’re useful for evoking a contrasting atmosphere in the music, but not thoroughly conceived passages by themselves. And other times the bands clearly do have some legit familiarity with jazz, and it comes through with what I’d describe as a “fusion” sensibility. I bring this up both for clarification so some Miles Davis fan doesn’t lose his lunch in surprise by checking out these bands, and also because I find a certain irony here: many of the reviewers who are quick to throw “jazz” out as a very broad catch-all term are the same people who revel in dissecting sub-sub-subgenres of metal down to every note. But enough about that: onto the music!

Death

Not totally new to me, but they belong here because I’d kind of avoided them. When I was younger and I wanted to hear some death metal kinds of music, I went for Morbid Angel, whose drums and guitar riffs are much more “brutal” to my ears. But going back and giving Death another chance during this search for new-to-me music, it seems to me they’re more of a “progressive” band than a death metal band in many ways. It seems like other people are noticing that context now, too—prog sites have added their discography for discussion in that light, which is something no one would likely do with Morbid Angel or Deicide or bands like that. The grunty vocals place them in the Death category, but outside of that, there are some cool compositional ideas going on, with interesting instrumental passages outside of the usual “guitar solo,” and more musical contrast between harsh and delicate sounds than bands like Morbid Angel explore. My only complaint—a lot of the songs kind of sound the same after a while. But maybe that’s just my ear always wanting things to freak out and mutate.

Cynic, Atheist, and Pestilence

I never heard these early 90s bands the first time around, but they’re all somewhat related stylistically, and have even had overlap of band members, notably bassist Tony Choy. All three of these bands are really good, and I’d highly recommend them to anyone who wants to hear what I perceive as evolutionary step between Death (the band) and modern “technical death” bands. They all have what sounds to me like a strong grasp of music in general, including legit jazz, and they’re all very good musicians, technically speaking. I’m finding describing them kind of hard without making comparisons—if you can imagine the sound of earlier death metal bands like Death mixed with some of the prog-jazz guitar rockers like Alan Holdsworth or Scott Henderson, that’s getting somewhere in the ballpark. I like all three of these bands a lot. Of the three, Atheist sounds the most “normal” to me, with lots of technical guitar solo passages. Cynic’s “Focus” album is my favorite of the output of these bands, with some weird mechanical vocoder-sounding effects on the vocals and weird electronic/synth sounds somewhat prominent in the mix. Pestilence sits somewhere between Cynic and Atheist, stylistically, and did a lot of great work, too. Interestingly, all three of these bands lay dormant for much of the last decade, but all three have reunited in the last few years. Rumor has it that Cynic and Pestilence may be recording new material for release in ’08. Atheist reunited for a tour, but it sounds like that’s the extent of their recent work.

Gorguts

Also not new to me, I have to bring them up in this context because “Obscura” is such a totally weird and influential album. Here again, it gets called “death jazz” and things like that, even though there isn’t really anything I’d call legit jazz about the album. What I think reviewers mean is how absolutely strange the rhythms on the album are, lurching off in a zillion different directions. The guitars use lots of little whammy, tap, and pinch harmonic sounds as accents to riffs in unusual ways. It’s a great album. The album after it isn’t quite as weird, but it’s really good, too. I can’t wait to hear what guitarist “Big Steeve’s” new band Negativa will sound like. Early reports are its “Obscura” with female vocals! Awesome.

Cephalic Carnage

How did I never hear of this Denver act when I went to freaking MUSIC SCHOOL in Denver? Absolutely amazing high-tech grind/death with occasional flourishes of other styles, and every album gets better than the last. Something about music school was unfortunate—we were so involved in studying music that we often missed truly special music that was happening in our own fair city. Thinking Plague comes strongly to mind in that regard, too.

Carnival in Coal

One of the absolute best finds on this list, this French bad sadly broke up for good only a few months ago. Supposedly they formed to try to become a musical bridge between the music of Mr. Bungle and Pan.thy.monium. They seem to come primarily from a technical death metal discipline, but they’re willing and very able to tackle almost any style imaginable when the need arises. Somewhat out-of-character for many bands of this style, they tend to write lyrics that are very much on the funny, silly side of things. They’re one of those “jokes” that’s so incredibly well done, so precise, though, that one has no choice but to take their music seriously. I love them. For sure they’re musically one of the absolute best things to hear on this list.

Thee Maldoror Kollective

This French band would have been right at home on pt. 1 of this list—they also started as a mostly black metal band that has gradually worked with much more electronic and atmospheric material. If you liked some of the bands like Ulver or Solefald from the first list, you’ll want to explore TMK.

Sigh

I’d only heard very early Sigh, when they were a pretty generic black/death kind of band, and the latest album on The End, which is okay but it came off a little too comical for me. There are about 10 minutes worth of really incredible passages on that latest record, but the rest of it made me cringe a little. Anyway, it turns out that I like the two albums immediately before the latest: Imaginary Sonicscape, and Gallows Gallery. They’re not quite so cringingly cliché in the way they force styles to collide. But I could see some justification in the kinds of criticisms I find people applying to Dodheimsgard being applied more fairly to Sigh: things often sound more than a little forced, and that vibe seems to increase over time. That must be what they’re going for, I guess, in which case they’re succeeding, but it’s just not my cup of tea. Again, though, worth hearing for sure.

Wayd

From Slovokia. They’re coming from the more Death-oriented side of death metal, with more “traditional” gallop drums than like ultra blastbeat playing. Not totally blowing my mind, but they have a lot of potential—they have some interesting moments with saxes and trumpets. They get a little to close to “nu metal” in spots, though. But there is a lot to look forward to—the chord progressions, and the turnarounds at the ends of sections are always really interesting, not at all commercial fauxmetal. Maybe it’s just the drums and the voice; I wish they were either more or extreme or more jazz or something. But again, worth listening to and hearing more about.

Korum

Kind of between Wayd and Death, with a few more technical death leanings than either one. Worth hearing; looking forward to more.

The Elysian Fields

“melodic death” from Greece, not to be confused with the American avant-pop band (who are really great and you should totally check out). The synth sounds are generally really bad, but the music shows potential. They have a bit of a pop-goth influence mixed with some tech, prog, death influences. Not your average band, at least, but not one of my favorites on this list.

Disillusion

Fairly proggy stuff, with some death influence, but again the synth tones are underwhelming, and they have one of those 80s holdover tenor singers that grate on me. The music is pretty interesting and dynamic, but I don’t know how long I could realistically listen to the primary singer.

Coprofago

Chilean folks clearly influenced by Meshuggah, but also very much worth checking out. Actually, I personally like them quite a bit more than Meshuggah, who I’ve always had a hard time getting into. My only complaint is that the jazz-fusion sections they slip into sometimes sound pretty amateur—the drummer and rhythm guitar clearly have no legit background in jazz, and it shows. But hey, a lot of these bands in this list don’t have the legit jazz thing going for them, and it still works. The jazz/fusion elements are more a matter of contrasting textures than literally contrasting styles. Taken in that sense, they’re great.

Cranial Incisored

WOW. Insane Indonesian Grind/Death with wacko moments of jazz, occasional blips of electronica, and the usual pre-song dialogue snippets many grind bands use. No attention span whatsoever. Hard to find in the states, but I need to find everything I can by these folks! Really cool, highly recommended.

Virulence

Boston avant-grind. They haven’t put out much yet, but the 4 song ep floating around is very cool.

Well, that’s a month’s worth of my looking hard for great weirdo metal music I hadn’t heard of. And it became clear to me that there are still a LOT more great bands out there. Hopefully this serves as an inspiration to keep looking for great music. I guarantee you, no matter what the style, great music is being made, if only you’re willing to seek it out.