Death Metal

Rock 'n' roll has always had a dark side: a fascination with the macabre, a thirst for blood, and a lust for breakneck speed. Death metal is the ultimate virtuoso expression of this dark side, and as such it's one of the most fascinating and twisted worlds ever sculpted by electric guitars and drums. Get yourself acquainted with the genre's universe of controlled chaos via pioneers Slayer ("Raining Blood") — their 1986 album, Reign In Blood, was a death metal landmark — and Florida's Morbid Angel, summoning heavy thunderclouds of diabolical noise on early-'90s single "God of Emptiness". Death metallurgists, meet thy Goatwhore, in Next Steps.

A host of death metal bands would build on Slayer's blinding fury and make it even darker and moodier. Radical detuning resulted in the music's famous crushing guitar sound, and the use of blast-beats with guttural vocals made for a sound that was even more brutal than the thrash and speed metal that inspired it. Earn your death metal wings here by laying your eardrums at the mercy of vegetarian gore-grinders Cattle Decapitation (and the excellent protest tune, "Humanure") and "blackened" death metal specialists, Goatwhore ("Alchemy of the Black Sun Cult"). The father of death metal growls from beyond the grave, in Deep Cuts.

Here you'll find some of the most athletic musicianship anywhere: riffs of stygian complexity compete with labyrinthine drum patters, often at a pace so blindingly fast — or hideously slow — it's hard to believe that actual humans are creating this suffocating nightmare in sound. Add some monstrous vocals, and you have music that's absolutely deranged, yet insidiously mathematical and precise. Return to the genre's roots here with Death — whose frontman Chuck Schuldiner (R.I.P. 2001) has been called "the father of death metal" — and sample recent work from Sweden's Entombed: "Warfare Plague Famine Death" from 2007's Serpent Saints.

Death metal's lyrical content hovers somewhere between graphic horror-movie imagery and the occult (or, in Carcass' case, an encyclopedia of medical procedures gone horrible awry). Yet for all its violent energy and morbid musings, the genre is often imbued with a graveyard sense of humour and a healthy dose of absurdity. It shares a common quality with most extreme art in that the music and imagery are so outrageous that it's infectious . . . if one has a taste for the extreme. These Essentials offer the perfect framework for exploring the death metal canon, from Venom — kicking in here with "Sons of Satan" from 1981's Welcome to Hell, an important work that helped lay the foundations for the genre — to "melodic death metal" heroes, Amon Amarth ("Cry of the Black Birds").