More Death Metal I Like

I listen to so much death metal, especially of the melodic and doomy varieties, but also the technical and the old school. And maybe it makes me a bad metalhead, but sometimes I’m just not interested in phylogeny.

{Cue yet another nonexistent gif: John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank ordering an empty omelette: I don’t want a semantic argument, I just want the protein!}

I just want to share cool death metal that I’ve found. So here it is.

Officium Triste

Latinish band name? Check. Fine art album cover? Check. Piano intros? Check. Doomy pacing? Check. Subterranean growls that wash over you like a loofah sponge? Check. Officium Triste have all the ingredients for a perfect death-doom album, and that album is The Death of Gaia.

.

Haunter

When death metal is described as having a cavernous sound, it often means it sounds like they put a pillow over the mic while recording – muffled and dull. But Haunter sounds like they recorded in a cavern. You hear echoes from distant walls and even the water dripping from stalactites. For some reason, the music on Sacramental Death Qualia makes me thing of The Mummy. Does that irrelevant association count as a qualia? I’m not sure. But I’ll keep listening.

.

Trauma

You know what, Trauma? Y’all picked an unGooglable band name (what with predating Google, I guess) but you had me at “Polish death metal.” Ominous Black grabbed me by the throat and banged my head for me.

.

Sweven

Swedish death metal, on the other hand, rarely makes my favorites list, even though to many people it’s the only kind. Why does Sweven work for me better than most Swedish death metal? I don’t know, maybe it’s the way the clean guitar tones in the quieter bits of The Eternal Resonance balance the almost too close to hardcore vocals. I can’t explain it. The heart wants what the heart wants.

.

Putrescine

I first discovered Putrescine when someone blogged about Reek of Putrescine last year. As you can tell by the referential album title, (that’s Carcass, BTW, not The Princess Bride) they are not trying to do anything new stylistically. Why mess with what works? By the time I got around to writing about them myself, they had two more releases out. The latest, Fading Flame, is more of the same. Bonus points for being explicitly antifascist. Nobody wants to have to figure out the lyrics to know where you stand.

.

Phalanx

Growing up in Arizona, heavy metal meant thrash (or, in all honesty, also butt rock) but I haven’t listened to it since I graduated high school. As you might expect, even death metal bands in LA have an element of thrash. Golden Horde by Phalanx taught me that death with a dash of thrash is music I like.

.