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I think it's pretty safe to say that absolutely fucking nobody sounds like Macabre. There are tons of bands that aim for a twisted and uncomfortable atmosphere, but almost nobody sounds as completely fucking whacked out as this unbreakable Chicago trio. They're another example of a band kinda figuring out death metal way ahead of the game, but they're unique in that, like Napalm Death, they came from a more Carcass-influenced grindcore background, and they're a bit less renowned in modern history because they're the total opposite of prolific and release an album basically once per generation. Their lone 90s album, Sinister Slaughter, is seen as their definitive release and I really can't argue with it (though Dahmer is extremely close). Everything the band is about, all of their unmistakable quirks and oddities, everything is on full display here. The homage to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band except with the assortment of famous people being replaced with infamous serial killers, mass murderers, and cult leaders, really kinda drives home the band's darkly comedic approach to the horrors of real life. Every track is about one of these real life monsters, from the pop culture touchstones of John Wayne Gacy and Richard Ramirez, to some more lesser known villains like Howard Unrah and Daniel Rakowitz, and the guys bring all of their obscene madness to the forefront with glee. Probably their most notable feature is Corporate Death's vocals, which can sometimes present themselves as traditional death growls, but more often are some completely fucking deranged screeching. I don't really know how else to describe it, he just sounds completely mental with this high pitched, almost childlike and inhuman wailing. It's that childlike insanity that helps the band stand out so much, because they also include weird singalong nursery rhyme type segments into the tales of slaughter and murder. "Vampire of Dusseldorf" is an all time classic thanks to this. I wish there was a way to really put to words just how deranged everything sounds, but there's really no way to adequately describe hearing a toy piano play a little jingle to the tune of "I'm going to strangle you / and I'll slit your throat too" before Corporate Death's eyes just flare out into perfect spheres and he screeches like a possum before breaking into some of the most intense and focused deathgrind ever written. I really should just do a full review for this, because there's so much more I want to say (I haven't even touched on how Dennis the Menace is seriously on par with Pete Sandoval as a drummer or how deceptively skilled they are and only showcase it in short snippets of frantic shredding), but I'll just cut it short. I really think I may have ranked this one too low, because I can't think of a single flaw as I type this.
Varg is one of the most infamous figures in black metal history, being the public face of the wild tales of church burnings and murder that gave the scene so much mystique at its height. He may have since added yet another hat to his head by also being the face of weirdo neo-pagan white supremacy that proliferates the scene as well, but I really can't deny just how god damned influential and flat out fucking good he was at his peak. All of Burzum's pre-prison albums are classics, but none stand as high to me as his 1994 monument, Hvis lyset tar oss. I'll admit that of the album's four tracks, I'm really only here for two of them, but they are so fucking good that this finds itself ranked as their best album anyway. Opener "Det som en gang var" really is Varg's defining track to me. His real skill in the black metal scene was turning hypnotic repetition into overwhelming atmosphere, and while it may have reached its logical conclusion one album later, this opening 14 minute wave of darkness and misery is simply unmatched in the genre. The heavy synth lines over the top of the almost agonizingly repetitious riffs perfectly encapsulates that feeling of coldness that every single 2nd wave band was trying to capture, and at no point does it drop below the level of "instant classic". The two shorter tracks in the middle are no slouch either, being the more "traditional" tracks full of tremolo riffs and blast beats that Norway made damn sure to solidify as they foundation of the genre itself. Going from the sheer frigid atmosphere of the opener to these two furious tidal waves only makes them hit harder. And then the final track just rounds everything out perfectly, with "Tomhet" exemplifying its own title. "Tomhet" is just... empty. After a half our assault of icy hell, the album closes on another 14 minutes of pure ambience. And just... fuck it works so well. After all that, for this to have a denouement that lasts a full third of the album's runtime just puts everything into perspective. It's so helpless and miserable, with no ounce of levity or anger or... anything really. "Tomhet" is the sound of pure emptiness, nothing matters anymore, all life is shit and we're all going to die. One of the definitive black metal albums ends with nothing but synth. Not one screech, not one guitar note, not one percussive hit, nothing. It just ends with nothing. And really, conceptually, isn't that what black metal was always trying to do anyway? This is what happens when you take hate to its logical nihilistic conclusion. There is no hate purer than hate for yourself, and there is no purer expression of that than simply wanting to wither away and die. Hating so much you can't even hate anymore, so you just lie down on the side of the road and wait for the light to take you as your body withers away into soil.
Boy it sure is lucky that every time I have a really dark and depressing album on this list it gets followed up by something speedy and entertaining. Artillery's By Inheritance is exactly that and more, and it's survived as their last truly worthwhile release. Even though they've had a decently received comeback in the last decade (along with every other moderately popular 80s metal band), they've been a shadow of their former selves, and I think their 1990 opus is their real zenith. It's hotly debated amongst old school thrash fans if their earlier, rawer releases are better than the polished and melodic entry here, but for my money By Inheritance simply has almost all of their best songs. The A side in particular is unbelievable in how many classics it throws at you in a row, and the B side, while less dynamic, is almost equally stellar. Where Artillery excels to me is their ability to shove melody to the forefront without sacrificing one ounce of primitive savagery. A track like "Life in Bondage" showcases that with aplomb, while "Bombfood and "Don't Believe" lean in much harder on the melodic side of things, with "Khomaniac" and "Beneath the Clay" neatly blending the two styles. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the second group there are among my favorite half ballads ever written. "Bombfood" in particular has a chorus that just blows me away, and the bridge and final verse in particular sum up so succinctly why I can't stand uncritical soldier worship like what Sabaton does or the very real culture of obligatory bootlicking in America. Fuck sake guys, war sucks, it's like the worst shit out there. The powers that be don't care about you. The orders you take won't do you no good, so why don't you split? You ain't nothing but bomb food.
Oh don't look so surprised. I've written 22 fucking reviews for Gargoyle, of course they're gonna show up here. Japan's greatest secret was on fire for pretty much their entire career, and during the She-Ja era here they were arguably at their peak. This is his swansong, and it delivers some of his all time tightest guitar playing, and the rest of the band falls in line with some of their best written material ever. Their peak weirdness would hit a bit later on albums like Natural and Gaia, but Tenron is in pretty close contention for the title of their best album to gleefully indulge in the proggy weirdness of their 2nd phase while retaining the blistering power/thrash of their early era. The band had a bit of a strange development, since they were frantic thrash with violins and funky party songs from the get go, got weirder as they went along, and then near the midpoint of their career they started streamlining and just got heavier and heavier until Gargmageddon when everybody except Kiba abruptly quit. At this point, they were firing on all cylinders creatively and never really let their metal roots fall to the wayside. "Doumu Lullaby" is one of the happiest and most entertaining funk honky songs they ever wrote, yeah, but contrast that to "Wa ga Tousou" or "Haretsu Ganbou" to see just how wide the breadth of their creativity was. Those two songs rip to unbelievable degrees. "Ame Ni Mo Makezu" contains arguably She-Ja's most impressive solo, and "Shinpan no Hitomi" is one of the finest examples of their occasional power metal leanings that they'd also express later down the line on "Kaze no Machi". I could namedrop every single song and tell you why each one is amazing, but then I'd just be here all day and essentially wind up rewriting my review. Just know, Gargoyle is one of the greatest bands of all time, and Tenron is an excellent example as to why.
I give Overkill a lot of shit, but there's no denying that these Jersey Boys have a couple albums that are top fucking tier, and Horrorscope is one of them. Like most thrash bands that ruled in the 80s, their first 90s album was one of their darkest and most aggressive. I've always seen this as sort of a sister album to Kreator's Coma of Souls, but the big difference between them, and the reason that Overkill is featured here instead of the German stalwarts is because this just sounds a million times heavier. Overkill's strength and ability to stand out from the crowd during the thrash boom came down to three factors, and all of them are in top form here. Blitz's vocals are the same venomous snarl he's always made his trademark, D.D. Verni's bass is bright and lively, and they were one of the thrasher's most overtly proud of their punk roots. Tracks like "Thanx for Nothin'" really hammer that last one home, and it's an obvious highlight as a result. This is also the album where they got the gloomy doom/groove passages to work exceptionally well, because "Skullkrusher" was just slow and boring and their next eight or so albums would all be asinine sluggish groove mistakes, tracks like "New Machine" and the title track here are the perfect marriage of those stomping slow parts and their signature manic speed. Really, this album is tight as fuck, and that's a quality that I never thought they were exceptionally skilled with. They work best when they're just unleashing their manic punk rock attitude, but somehow they took that wild-eyed frenzy and focused it into a singularly metal riff attack and delivered their most consistent offering even to this day. "Frankenstein" is a bit of a stinker but it's a filler instrumental cover track so I can easily overlook it, because everything else is just god damned vicious. "Coma", "Blood Money", "Life Young, Die Free", "Bare Bones", "Nice Day... for a Funeral", just every single track is a home run and I'm honestly stunned that Overkill never managed to make this sound work again, because from here on out they start a nearly two decade long streak of dull mediocrity. But here? On Horrorscope? They were poised to easily crush the 90s harder than any other thrash band in the game.
Darkthrone are honestly one of the bands most worthy of the title of "Legendary". The amount of bands they've influenced throughout their lengthy career is nothing short of uncountable, with Transilvanian Hunger being the album that I'd argue spawned the most shameless clones across the entire history of heavy metal. But we're not here to talk about that album right now, instead we're looking at the first of their "Unholy Trinity", 1992's A Blaze in the Northern Sky. I think this is one of the most important albums in all of the second wave of black metal out of Norway, but not necessarily because it definitively showcases how this newfangled "black metal" was done. In fact, it doesn't at all, there are a lot of holdovers from their death metal days here, with some of these riffs being straight up fucking spine shattering in their weight and aggression. No, what Blaze did was definitively showcase how to successfully transition out of death metal and into black metal. They're like 85% of the way there on this release, and those few holdovers give this album so much fucking flavor, because not many bands in this scene had that "embarrassing" death metal phase laid to tape already like Darkthrone had, and none of them were able to make these disparate influences work nearly as well as they did. "Kathaarian Life Code" is flat out one of the best black metal songs of all time, with the entire ten minute runtime being a ruthless assault on good taste and leaves you battered and begging for more. That jackhammer assault never stops, but it's filtered through pure, wretched filth in the way that only black metal could do. The sound quality here is lo-fi and frankly kind of awful, but that's the entire appeal. This is a group of diseased creatures making music the only way they know how, and it comes off so wretched and horrifying and alien that I really think cleaner production would have neutered the inhuman nastiness. The album just gets colder and more feral as it goes, and at no point does it drop below classic status. I haven't even really touched on the manic mid-range vocals or the punk influence, but there's so much to talk about with Blaze and I only have so much space and have already spent way too long on this section of the list, so I'll rein it in. Darkthrone are legends for a reason, and you can barely go much righter than A Blaze in the Northern Sky.
Simply put, this is the filthiest death metal album ever recorded. I'd just end it here if I didn't want to seem lazy, but man that's really all you need to know. Every single note is covered with ten feet of wet, slopping mud. Actually that's not even correct. Mental Funeral, more than anything else, sounds like dipping your face in a sewer and then getting sludgehammer'd. For a time when death metal was getting more and more polished and tight, Autopsy went full on in the other direction and released something that was just disgusting and filthy. Twisted, alien, macabre, disgusting, these are the words that spring to mind when I hear "Slaughterday" or "Twisted Mass of Burnt Decay". These guys were never really about pushing the boundaries in terms of speed, and were quite content to dial the pace down significantly and just drown you in horrifically sludgy atmosphere. Of course, I don't mean "sludgy" like, Melvins or Crowbar or something. I mean it just sounds like sludge, slime, Ubbo-Sathla, whatever you fancy. Despite the overwhelming atmosphere, Mental Funeral is a very dynamic album, with horrifying shifts in tempo and angular riffs that seem to spawn from the ooze that encases you as soon as you press play. I know I already quoted a better reviewer in the last feature, but I need to do it again because my reviewing peer, Acrobat, puts it much more succinctly than I ever could: "I think the best music can often be judged in terms of the images it conjures in your mind and, in this sense, Autopsy are certainly the death metal band whose work gives me the creeps most often." That's really it right there, Autopsy at this point had completely mastered the art of making music that was both brutally macabre and evocative. That twisted, writhing, cancerous mass of oozing vileness on the cover is the exact kind of thing I see in my waking nightmares when "In the Grip of Winter" plays.
I tend to flip flop fairly often as to which of Deicide's first two albums is better, and at the time of this writing, the self titled is the winner. Years ago, back in high school, I actually sat down with a notebook and a pen, turned this album on, did the calculations, and discovered that Deicide has infinity riffs on it. As the last entry should show, I adore a metal album that can evoke an oppressive atmosphere, but Deicide kind of goes headlong in the other direction and somehow accomplishes it anyway. Every single second of this album is loaded with at least ten concurrent riffs, all of which flashing along at 666bpm, with Steve Asheim proving himself to be one of the most manic and underrated drummers in death metal, and yet at the same time the feeling the album conjures is one of pure fucking insanity. Glen Benton may be one of the biggest idiot assholes this side of Kerry King, but man in his prime he sounded fucking possessed. His signature quirk of double layering his vocals was fully developed already, and he crams the songs with his simultaneous highs and lows to create a disorienting and frankly evil atmosphere. This is sheer audial hellfire, with screaming leads licking fire into your eyeballs and downhill-running riffs that tear you to shreds. This is a short, 30 minute nuke of total devastation that levels me every time I listen to it. At no point does this album dip apart from the short intros to "Carnage in the Temple of the Dead" and "Lunatic of God's Creation", every other moment is one of the greatest examples of early death metal, no matter how much of a joke the band later turned into. Most of the death metal on this list so far has been more from the era or the mindset that was wholly divorced from thrash, which I'm sure has given you the impression that I prefer that style to the one that sounded like thrash being pushed so far past its natural boundaries of speed and heaviness that it became death metal, but that's not true, because Deicide is clearly the latter, and it's fucking incredible.
And now to completely contradict myself, because here lies Suffofuckingcation, one of the greatest metal bands ever to walk this godforsaken planet, and not one single hint of thrash metal remains on their third outing, Pierced from Within. There's a lot of debate amongst fans as to what their best album truly is, but honestly that answer doesn't really matter. Everything they did with Doug Cerrito was top tier DM that still hasn't been accurately replicated. I think it took me a while to understand precisely why they always managed to stand head and shoulders above the thousands of clones they spawned, but god dammit I'm going to quote a better reviewer to make my point for me again, this time the old chum Cheeses_Priced. Though this particular passage is in reference to Breeding the Spawn, it's a very good primer to the band's entire ethos as a whole: "They tend to be pretty good about not playing the exact same bar of music over and over again – but neither do they shift about at random – instead, they deliberately mangle the hell out of whatever it is that they’re playing as they go, offering a number of variations of each idea, making for music with a real sense of depth and complexity." That's kinda their modus oprandi in a nutshell, everything they do is helplessly brutal and at the same time just kinda wrong. They approach death metal with a kind of dutch-angled lunacy and wildly thrash you around, refusing to stay on the straight and narrow, constantly careening off course and tumbling through fields of spiked boulders. The first 20 seconds of the title track demonstrates this perfectly. Those twenty seconds contain just one riff repeated twice, but that riff goes through like six or seven time changes and is presented in such an alien, atonal way that I still struggle to make heads or tails of it. And that never changes, every track is a veritable whirlwind of nonsense brutality that sounds like the most chaotic shit in the world but was clearly written with a lot of love and care. Like, I dunno, random track here, "Brood of Hatred" is almost impossible to follow with it's crazy shifts and turns, culminating in one of the brutalest breakdowns the 90s ever saw. I also consider this to be one of the heaviest albums of the decade from a production standpoint alone. Yeah, it's that typical Scott Burns sound, but Suffocation makes it sound so much thicker. This album has more girth than Mandingo and hits harder than Lawrence Taylor. The fact that this still stands today as one of the heaviest and meanest death metal albums of all time despite not really going full speed all the time really speaks to how hard it hit. Nothing punched harder than this, and the total chaos that leads up to the signature punishing breakdowns only makes them slam even harder. Also, fun fact, this is the only album in history to ever feature two guys named Doug.
Bathory is a tough cookie, because Quorthon had so many good ideas and so many of them hit bullseye, that it's genuinely really tough to pick out a favorite album of his. After much deliberation, I decided that my favorite was either the self titled, both Nordland albums, or this, the classic Hammerheart. Considering the lattermost is the only one actually released in the 90s, it's easy to slot it in somewhere here. Quorthon had one of the most brilliant minds in metal, and the scene is objectively lesser without him. A belief of mine that has been surprisingly contentious is that aesthetic genres don't exist, and that's why despite me obviously being a huge fan of Running Wild, you'll never see me refer to them as pirate metal. However, the one and only exception is viking metal, and even then the term has been so misused that it is used to describe anything from Ensiferum to Amon Amarth. So if you're wondering what viking metal sounds like, Hammerheart is the answer. This pounding, midpaced crunch, larger-than-life scope, and epic breadth is what truly makes an album a viking metal album, and this is the point where Quorthon had fully broken away from black metal and created an entire genre all by his lonesome. This era of Bathory is tough, because it seems caught between oldheads who can't help but totally overplay the amount of Manowar influence on this album and Twilight of the Gods and the younger generation that refuses to acknowledge that Quorthon had ever even heard of Manowar. But it's true, those slow, booming anthems and the overwhelming sense of bigness that Manowar had in the early 80s shines through here pretty strongly, and mixing that with the leftover pagan mysticism of black metal created something so unique that it became its own thing entirely. It's also worth noting that Quorthon is the absolute best worst singer in metal history, and his tuneless yells add so much character to these odes, because he doesn't need to sound skilled in the first place. This is pure feeling, pure emotion, straight from the gut. The massive choirs and rough-yet-gargantuan production brought these songs to life in a way that really hadn't been seen before, and to this day tracks like "Shores in Flames" and "One Rode to Asa Bay" stand as the absolute pinnacle of this niche genre. That's not even mentioning the crushing standouts of the monumentally doomy "Baptised in Fire and Ice" and the awe inspiring "Valhalla". Every single song is a highlight really, I feel bad leaving out "Father to Son" in that previous sentence. I can't get enough of this album on its own and the fact that it was pretty much the first of its kind makes it all the more special. If you ever want to know if what you're listening to is truly "viking metal", simply ask yourself "How much does this sound like mid-era Bathory?"
And that's all for part two! I hope you're all enjoying this as much as I am. Join me again in a day or two for part three to see if doom metal is ever going to make an appearance. Who knows!
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