Tag Archive death metal

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Music I Like – Death Metal Mold

It’s supposed to be a compliment when someone say’s “They broke the mold with that one.” It implies that no one else will ever be quite like it. But the truth is, most of the time, we’d rather hang on to the mold and keep making more things like the first one. Death metal (and near-identical twin, blackened death) is one of those things. A good death metal band can not be distinguished from other good death metal bands using words. They are all born from the same mold. But the ear can hear differences within the formula that make some stand above the others. Here a few albums in the death metal mold that I like.

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Edda of Angist

EddaAngist

 

Angist is one of my favorite death metal bands, in large part due to Edda’s inhuman growl that sometimes give way to an eerie black metal wail. Although they don’t play live terribly often (the local scene just isn’t big enough to support a ton of heavy metal shows) I have had the good luck to see them perform each of the three times I’ve been to Iceland. This photo is from the first time – an official Airwaves show at a bar called Amsterdam in 2012.

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Turandot is Death Metal Opera

Turandot at Seattle Opera

Turandot staged at Seattle Opera, 2012

I often harp on the irrelevance of genre distinctions, but even I have to admit that some musical tastes are incongruous; for example, opera and heavy metal. ‘Bel canto,’ after all, is simply the Italian for ‘pretty song,’ and let’s face it, metal includes a lot of ugly, ugly music. Opera is classical, classy, appealing. Heavy metal is brutal, thuggish and off-putting.

And yet… and yet…

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