Death Metal

Death Metal was born in the beginning of the '80s. It's the extreme outskirt of such controversial metal music such as thrash metal, speed metal and early black metal (in fact the first time that the term "Death Metal" was used was for a German speed metal compilation). The guitars are heavily distorted and fast, the drums are pounding, and nowadays there are some standardized death metal drumming techniques such as the blast beat or the double stroke with double pedal, the bass is heavy as a slap in the face, and the vocals are guttural. In the early days such vocal brutality was instinctive, but ever since the '90s fresh techniques to obtain such vocals were introduced, such as the growl, the grunt, the black metal yell. The pig squeal vocal technique is extremely modern, being born around 2005/2006. What is peculiar, apart from the sound, are the album covers, most often characterised by brutal gore and controversial violence, at times blasphemer. Modern extreme outskirts such as goregrind and porngrind also feature episodes of zoophilia, necrophagia, necrophilia, rape and cannibalism in their covers. Yet with the latest albums from Death many other philosophical subjects were introduced for the covers, often referring to Platonical points of view of our world. Such covers are at times abstract, much like Death's "Individual Thought Patterns" and "The Sound of Perseverance". After the release of the sophomore Obscura album "Cosmogenesis" it has become a trend in the scene to represent the Universe and unknown planets at the edge of their creation or of their ending, much like in the covers of The Last Felony's "Too Many Humans" and Lost Soul's "Descend Into Infinity". Over the years, Death Metal has become a genre so vast, taking hints from classic metal, speed, thrash, black, but also jazz, fusion, progressive, industrial, tekno… Such bands like Cynic expand the concepts of Death Metal so much that in the end also guttural vocals are lost!

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