Death Metal

Rock 'n' roll has always had a dark side — a fascination with the macabre, a thirst for blood, and a lust for velocity. Death metal is the ultimate virtuosic 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.

Death metal originated with bands like Carcass, Morbid Angel, and Entombed, who took the blinding fury of Slayer and made it even darker and moodier. Radical detuning resulted in death metal's famous crushing guitar sound, and the use of blast-beats mixed with guttural vocals made for a sound that was even more brutal than the thrash and speed metal that'd inspired it.

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.

Death metal's lyric content hovers somewhere between graphic horror-movie imagery and the occult (or in Carcass' case, an encyclopedia of medical procedures gone horribly awry). Yet for all of its violent energy and morbid musings, the genre is often imbued with a graveyard sense of humor 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 (and actually aesthetically beautiful) . . . if one has a taste for the extreme.