DAVE GROHL LISTENS TO DEATH METAL?

You should buy the Reign in Blood and South of Heaven CDs from Slayer. I think you will enjoy them. Listen especially to Lombardo's drums.

Aja... this is your dad speaking! Go to your room, close your eyes and repeat 7,547,189 times this mantra:

jojo fries, jojo fries

I don't know what death metal bands Mr. Grohl listens to but the ones I have heard have all been from Scandanavia. One of my students used to listen to the stuff on the bench when I had him rotating through the clinical phase of microbiology. Junk like Emperor.

I shall see you Wednesday!

Edge of Sanity's 'Crimson' is probably my favorite death metal album.

Does this mean they sound like LIVING COLOUR?

I don't know much about metal, so these may not be "death metal" proper, but I enjoy them.

What did I say?

Sepultura - Arise & Chaos AD
Morbid Angel
Death
Deicide
Obituary
Napalm death
Cannibal corpse - the bleeding
Meshuggah - pre "chaosphere"
Dillinger escape plan
Mastodon
the Haunted
Nile - black seeds...

and so on

Title of thread in case link doesn't work: Opeth/Nile/Tiamat Vs Fudge Tunnel/Godflesh/Squarepusher. Who Pushed Boundaries Of 'Extreme Music' Further?

Death Metal

vocals: grunt or growl or low bellow, but do not shriek or sing
guitars: churn/distort/grind/chug-chug often in a no-wave kind of way; guitar solos are important & insane, owing quite a bit to Eddie Van Halen but eschewing the blues-based/melodic model i.e. they like the parts Eddie did where he was on the high E all the way up at the end of the fretboard

bass: follows the drums

drums: double-kickdrum preferred. Style owes a lot to Dave Lombardo. Lotsa crash cymbals. No drumkit too huge.

Thematically, death metal revels in scenes of blood, social disorder, war themes, sci-fi/horror - again stuff that Slayer didn't necessarily originate, but of which they historically are the leading exponent. The death metal stereotype is macho guy in a black Hanes muscle-T with a glower on his face. Death metal bands do not wear makeup and think poorly of bands who do.

Black Metal has a much more traceable history than death metal: Venom coined the term & are the forefathers of the genre. The path leading to Norway is a long story, but the bottom line is that Black Metal is an essentially Norweigan phenomenon with exponents throughout the world. Black Metal is a much more explicitly ideologically driven thing than death metal, which could lean left or right, be sexist or not, etc. Black Metal:

I. Began by praising Satan a lot, but became interested in the pantheon of pre-Christian Europe

Ia. a lot of black metal guys, taking their anti-Christian/pro-pre-Xity-Europe bent to the next logical level, got really into Nietzsche

Ib. and took their cobbled-together philosophical outlook ("Judeo-Christianity robbed Scandinavia/Europe of its native traditions") and ran with it, famously burning down centuries-old churches

Ic. there's a whole genre called NSBM - "national socialist black metal" - you do the math, I can't be bothered with such bullshit

II. Which is not to say there isn't plenty of GREAT black metal, 'cause there is, and as plenty of these guys have read up on their nineteenth-century French lit. & pre-surrealist texts, some of 'em do what they're trying to do i.e. freak you out while they rock your socks off. The singing tends to be this haunted-house shrieking or raspy-throat post-coughing-fit forced wheezing that sounds silly a lot of the time but can be pretty effective sometimes (Immortal works for me). The death metal guys find black metal singing as ridiculous as the black metal guys find death metal grunting. Black metal bands often wear costumes: chain mail, pseudo-medieval leather gear, and most famously corpsepaint: white pancake makeup and blackened eyes, lips etc., stuff that seems to have originated with Alice Cooper or the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Death metal guys are quite disdainful of the whole corpsepaint thing and I can't say as I blame them.

Black metal is supposed to be all about "pure brutality" etc. etc., eschewing blues/rock structures, but plenty of great black metal is (not)surprisingly endebted to Foghat, Deep Purple, and especially Black Sabbath: riff-heavy, just lots faster. To my ears the nearest musical relative of black metal is the sort of speed-punk that was popular in the early eighties - the stuff called "Discore," you know, like Discharge, Dischange, Disfear, etc. The drums especially, given the ideologically-driven imperative toward a "raw" sound in black metal (though there are plenty of over-produced black metal bands, and this is big bone of contention among listeners: what's more important, the "rawness" or the overall effect? it's a very old argument on new-ish turf), are surprisingly rock-and-roll quite often. Especially on the stuff coming from the excellent Northern Heritage label in Finland. However there is a whole other school of black metal that's really into synth sounds.

Death metal bands I dig a lot: Morbid Angel, Hate Eternal, Gorguts, Kataklysm, Vital Remains, Nile, Behemoth, Decapitated

Black metal bands I dig a lot: Antaeus, Immortal, Clandestine Blaze, Enslaved, Abruptum (on the basis of one album, but their lead singer is a dwarf in corpsepaint: c'mon, now)

There's a lot more to metal than death & black, the catch-all term people use now is "extreme" metal (for example: what's Mastodon? not death or black metal, but certainly heavy as fuck). This whole description is very disorganized and tries to touch on the major points, probably failing more than it succeeds. I stand amenable to correction on all points by Siegbran who knows more than I do. Like, lots more.

Thanks for your answers!

Stop calling Dave Mr. Grohl!

Maybe you should wait `til he says it's okay to call him "Dave".

2.1.3.5 death metal

When society seemed even more hopelessly fallen into
acceptance and worship of its own collapse, the
conventional tonality and "save the world" messages of
speed metal and its ancestor, heavy metal, became too
trite and ridiculous for the newest generations of
alienated youth.

Discarding harmony and nihilistically embracing the
chromatic scale as law, early death metal bands espoused
beliefs in the evil and orderless, the chaotic and the
painful. Their rhythmic violence and insistence upon
wildly-constructed and atonal guitar solos made them an
instant target of both critique and shameless ripoff.

The first wave of this technique, from Slayer (1982),
had its roots in the old-style metal of Judas Priest
evolved to become faster, ripping-strum styled
metal that shifted with muscle over rigid, ambient
repetitive beats.

However the second wave -- Possessed (1985), Morbid Angel
(1986), Deathstrike (1985), Rigor Mortis (1988) -- were
more obscurely and bizarrely formed from raw innovation
and chromatic scales. (It is worthy to note that Slayer's
"Reign in Blood," of 1987, is an impressive musical
definition of death metal that is often overlooked for its
lack of "growly" vocals.)

As the decade waned and humanity seemed further flung
into the pit of materialism, death metal reached toward
the progressive and explored the extremes of melody (At
the Gates), ambience (Obituary), percussion
(Suffocation), atonality (Deicide), and microtonal music
(Atheist). Simultaneously however the bulk of death metal
shifted toward a more percussive and chromatic style,
composing their material visually from power chord forms
along the bottom three strings of the guitar.

By 1992 the peak had been reached, and afterwards
soundalikeness pervaded all but the most
individually-conceived bands. The overuse of death
metal's nihilistic inventions -- chromatic open phrasing
and chaotic soloing -- had made that genre, like hardcore
punk a decade before, the anti-commercial musical
breakdown that in the end made it easier for ripoffs to
dress up rock n roll in new production values to create a
new product flow to meet a genre-identified need.

In addition, a horrible trendy underground had developed
around the idea of righteousness and moral good;
consequently, they bankrupted death metal's ideals by
conforming to mainstream expectations, and their music led
itself back toward the dogmatic, tendentious, and most of
all judgmental system of scales and harmonies.

Back into the blues, there was suddenly a clear peak --
significance and value -- arbitrarily imposed by scale
structures that truncated the value of the music and made
its ability for chaos limited to aesthetics only. A
fatalism had invaded metal, once again; that which plays
with the aesthetic of power must serve its time in the
hell of that paradox.

The average person does not even realize what the Jews are up to

Dude. Please.

I don't know, I went to school with the guy, I know he's better than this...it's a personal issue. Sorry.

Do you weigh over 250 lbs?

How serious do you think I was when I posted that section? How helpful is it for people who want to know what Death Metal is?

That aside, I think I've elaborated on my views on SRP before...I've had rather good contacts with him over the last seven years, and the FAQ is highly interesting because it overanalyses the genre/superword "Metal" to a rediculous degree. It has been obvious that he's increasingly obsessed with attacking Judeo-Christianity wherever he perceives it, but as long as I factor this in, I'm not that bothered.

From the archives:
Letter from coolest 15 year-old in DC, Dave Grohl, in 1984 to Seattle band Aerobic Death for comp tape:
http://twitpic.com/3y132c

I was the most uncool 15-year old in the DC area in 1984.

i was 11 and nowhere near the DC area

I was the best 6 year old in the whole world, so I was reliably informed by my parents.

being 15 = only excuse for listening to death metal

(sorry j0hn)

I can't help it if my youth is eternal

This week, a friend of mine is in close proximity to Dave Grohl because of her job. She and Dave became total bros immediately, and have been swapping mixed cds with each other. Here's what Dave's made so far...

http://i.imgur.com/9Me6DCC.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/3al4EAJ.jpg

"head 2 head" lol

I know he gets a shit ton of grief but I like Dave.

Ha, he must really be into Bleeding Rainbow and that Andrew Gold song, he was talking both of those up on the WTF Podcast recently. He seems like such a cool bro.

Andrew Gold!

Gotta appreciate Cannibal Corpse followed by The Zombies.

Yeah, Cannibal Corpse -> Zombies -> Dead Can Dance = inspired!

does dave get a lot of grief? i don't care for his songwriting, but he seems like an affable dude. and a great drummer obv.

I may be conflating the Dave hate with the Foo Fighters hate, but it seems he gets a lot of stick from certain quarters.

xp Yeah, don't understand that. My goodwill for Foo Fighters ran out a long time ago but he seems like such a sweet, generous guy and those mixtapes just confirm that.

those mixes look awesome

feel like a lot of it comes from ppl who are sick of hearing about how nice he is. not me I hasten to add. would listen to that CD, kudos for picking the Ween song I like also

btw, they first realized they could be friends when, during a production meeting, LL Cool J came up and they both immediately started talking about the visible deodorant chunks in his armpits during his MTV Unplugged episode. #BFFs

Friend mentioned above buys joke Morrissey t-shirt for Grohl, morrissey-solo message board dorks lose it: http://www.morrissey-solo.com/content/1387-Dave-Grohl-in-Morrissey-shirt

Anybody over the age of 14 who wears graphic joke t-shirts probably has nothing of value to say to anyone.

would make a good smiths lyric.

50 today