You Suffer: Grindcore, Death Metal, and their Offshoots

Extreme Noise Terror in their heyday.

In a recent post I discussed the evolution of English hardcore, from punk to anarcho-punk to crust punk and D-beat.  At the same time this evolution was occurring another major punk-metal hybrid genre was evolving out of anarcho-punk, hardcore, and NWOBHM, and that was grindcore.  Grindcore, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is arguably the most extreme, and most unlistenable, genre of music ever created.  Songs tend to be short, sometimes humorously so (including a Guinness book official world record of two seconds for the song that gave this post its title, “You Suffer”), and almost unthinkably fast, often making Metallica’s early work sound like Black Sabbath in comparison.  All the instruments are played at faster-than-light speed as a giant wall of brutal noise, and the vocals are growled and guttural and essentially undecipherable. 

Any talk of grindcore has to start with Napalm Death.  More a revolving musical collective than a band, Napalm Death have had a bewildering number of lineup changes over the years, with members leaving, returning, and leaving again. Napalm Death started in 1982 in Meriden (near Birmingham), England, initially heavily influenced by first-wave anarcho-punk bands like Crass and Discharge as well as by crust punk and D-beat bands like Amebix and Flux of Pink Indians.  They went through several lineup changes before recording their first full-length album, Scum, which was released in 1987.  Even at this early stage in their evolution their sound was almost uncategorizable.  “Multinational Corporations”, for example, consists of shimmering high hat and an atonal skirl of guitars that almost sounds like avant-classical.  “Instinct for Survival” is more typical of their sound, a whirlwind of machine gun drumming, an impenetrable wall of guitar noise, and growled, evil, unintelligible vocals.  It’s as if they have distilled hardcore punk and extreme speed metal down to only its most audially indigestible bits:  speed, noise, incoherence.  Scum has other songs (including the title track) which intersperse breaks where the tempo slows to a Metallica-like chug before erupting back into a cyclone of noise. 

The album I have the most material from is 1994’s Fear Emptiness Despair.  The songs here are much longer, typically lasting three to four minutes, and the wall of noise has resolved into recognizable, if still difficult to, listen to riffing and chugging.  “Twist the Knife Slowly” is reflective of this evolution; swirls of staccato drumming, huge, ponderous riffs and the still-unrecognizable vocals.  “Plague Rages” is another standout, an almost catchy, lurching riff starts this song out on a good track and the tempo here isn’t too extreme; it kind of reminds me of a slightly sped up version of Slayer’s “South of Heaven”.  Good stuff man.  “Fasting on Deception” sounds like the sonic equivalent of a firestorm, swirling and apocalyptic.  The only other song I have is off 1999’s Words from the Exit Wound:  “Repression out of Uniform”, which isn’t much of a departure from any of the above. 

Another English grindcore pioneer was the wonderfully named Extreme Noise Terror from Ipswich.  They formed in 1985 and quickly followed the lead of Napalm Death in making songs that were extreme to the extreme.  However, they were distinct for having two singers, for having more of a punk than metal feel to their music, and for writing lyrics that reflected more of an anarcho-punk standpoint of anti-establishmentarianism, particularly on songs like “Fucked-Up System”, the anti-meat “Murder” and the pro-environmental screed “Raping the Earth”.  Like Napalm Death, their sound evolved over the years to a more sophisticated take on noise and atonality.

A band that also slotted between crust punk and grindcore is Sore Throat.  Formed in Yorkshire in 1987, their sound (particularly on songs like “The Crossover (Is Over)” and “Noise Not War” hovers between that of Napalm Death and that of Amebix or even the Exploited.  Most songs off their album Unhindered by Talent have been uploaded to YouTube for your listening enjoyment.

Interestingly, at the same time Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror and their ilk were solidifying their sound in England, a couple of bands across the world were also moving in similar directions but from a completely different angle.  Repulsion were a metal band that formed in Flint, Michigan in 1985 and the next year recorded a demo that sounds astonishingly like the music Napalm Death eventually released on Scum one year later.  This is coming from a yet-more-metal place than even Napalm Death but the basic sonic template—guttural vocals, short songs (most barely top a minute in length), blasts of noise, 200 bpm drums, etc.—is all there.  This work was eventually released in 1989 and while the production is quite poor in comparison to Napalm Death’s early work, the songs otherwise stand up pretty nicely in comparison; Napalm Death even covered “Maggots in your Coffin”. 

Another early American grindcore influence was the early 80’s Boston hardcore band Siege.  This band had harsh, deep, growled (but still mostly intelligible) vocals and a wall of sonic noise set against a 200 bpm assault in which it is definitely possible to hear the antecedents of the Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror sound.   What Siege reminds me of is a less coherent, less technically gifted Black Flag; the songs I’ve heard on YouTube (“Life of Hate”, “Conform”, and “Walls”) sound like a ramped-up cross between “Forming” era Germs and Damaged era Black Flag; bewilderingly fast, sloppy, intense, almost incoherent.  There’s even an element of the Fartz and Flipper in songs like “Conform” and “Grim Reaper”, which alternate between almost obscenely fast sections and slow, sludgy parts.  Very weird stuff.  “Sad But True” is also whiplash fast and has some crude, metallic guitar solos and sounds like a crude copy of some of GBH’s work (like “Limpwristed”).  “Drop Dead” is REALLY out there, getting really close to Carcass or even Nasum. 

As mentioned, Repulsion’s sound was much more metal-influenced than either Napalm Death or ENT, and many people consider Repulsion to be more of an example of what was named death metal.  Death metal grew out of thrash metal and black metal.  Thrash pioneers like Metallica, Exodus, and Celtic Frost (“The Usurper” from To Mega Therion is almost brutally elegant in its structure and complex riffage) lent death metal its technical proficiency and song structure while black metal bands like Venom, with their obsession with dark, satanic imagery were obvious lyrical influences.  However, death metal lyrics are characterized less by the demonic imagery of Venom (which was in turn clearly cribbed from Black Sabbath) toward a more gruesome fixation with splatter movies and almost clinical human mutilation, necrophilia, vivisection and violence.

Though they share some similarities, death metal differs from grindcore in three critical ways.  First, the songs tend to be longer, slower, cleaner, and more metallic, with metal-sounding solos. Second, the vocals are usually much more understandable (though this is a matter of degrees and not always perfectly true).  And third, as mentioned, death metal’s lyrics are almost exclusively focused on gore and violence and only rarely if ever move away from these topics, while grindcore will occasionally foray into social topics and anti-establishment screeds. 

Slayer was the first recognizable death metal precursor; on their albums Reign in Blood and South of Heaven they fused the satanic imagery of Venom with more morbid excursions into violence and blood.  I got into Slayer in 1988 after hearing Public Enemy sample the break of “Angel of Death” off Reign in Blood on the song “She Watch Channel Zero” on their It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back album.  I bought Reign and South of Heaven; the title track to the latter album remains my all-time favorite Slayer song of all time for its slow, ominous, heavy character; my favorite part is where it eases slowly, scarily into the heavy chugging about halfway into the song.  At this same junction is one of my favorite lyrics from any punk or metal songs ever:  “forgotten children conform a new faith”.  Araya was singing here about devil worshippers but he could easily have been talking about punk or thrash fans themselves, who followed bands and who often lived lives of quiet desperation on the fringe of society.

Followers took this template and simplified it further, focusing solely on gruesomely violent imagery.  American bands like Death, Possessed, and possibly the most extreme death metal band of all time, Cannibal Corpse, took this violence obsession to almost ridiculous extremes.  Death’s 1987 album Scream Bloody Gore is a crucial link between Slayer and some of the extreme bands that came after them, only the gruesome factor has been elevated.  Songs like “Regurgitated Guts” and “Baptized in Blood” aren’t too different from Slayer’s pre Reign in Blood work, only with less polished vocals.  Death were pioneers in another way:  they were the first of what would in time become thousands of Floridian death metal bands.  Cannibal Corpse songs like “Meat Hook Sodomy” and “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt” would probably be even more offensive if the lyrics were even remotely intelligible but thankfully they aren’t, and make even Napalm Death sound like elocution experts.  Cannibal Corpse he vocals fall somewhere between a belch and a croak and often sound less like human vocalization and more like some extreme piece of musical equipment. 

Another band noted for their extreme song titles was Carcass.  Carcass fell almost perfectly between grindcore and death metal; the songs are longer and the song structures are more complex typically than grindcore, but do not achieve the technicality of death metal and rarely have solos.  The vocals are closer to the growled vocals of Napalm Death, but the song titles are an almost comical alternate take on the ultra-disgusting ones of Cannibal Corpse, combining complex technical medical terms with made-up words to produce song titles that puzzle as much as horrify.  On songs like “Frenzied Detruncation” and “Pyosisfied” it isn’t entirely clear whether Carcass is serious or is making fun of this obsession with gore and mutilation.

Another band that has to be mentioned here are Anal Cunt.  A.C., as they’re often called, formed in 1988 in Massachusetts as a joke but continued to form and reform over the years.  They hew to the basic grindcore sound—jackhammer rhythms, crunching gui tars, and incomprehensibly growled vocals; they  stand out from most other grindcore bands because (a) nearly every one of their songs is less than a minute long (most clocking in around 30 seconds), and (b) they have consistently given every single one of their songs the most offensive title possible.  Like the TV show the Simpsons, A.C. are equal opportunity offenders, making fun of just about everything (including themselves, as seen in the song “Everyone in Anal Cunt is Dumb”) with titles like “I gave NAMBLA Pictures of Your Kid”, “Dictators are Cool”, “I Went Back in Time and Voted For Hitler”, “I Like Drugs and Child Abuse”, “Body by Auschwitz”, and their “Is Gay” series—“Windchimes are Gay”, “Caring About Anything is Gay”, “Tim is Gay”,  “The Internet is Gay”, “Pottery’s Gay”, “You’re Gay”, etc.  Anal Cunt also mock many of their peers in the music business with titles like “Extreme Noise Terror is Afraid of Us”, “Rancid Sucks (And the Clash Sucked Too)”,  “311 Sucks”, and “You Went to See Dishwalla and Everclear (You’re Gay)”.  Anal Cunt fill that mysterious niche between G.G. Allin and Napalm Death that nobody thought needed to be filled.  I actually find their schtick to be amusing for the most part simply because it is so offensive; its like if Fear reformed as a death metal band.

Grindcore has diversified in a manner of speaking; people often talk about sub-genres such as goregrind or porngrind.  I have yet to figure out how the former differs from simple grindcore but porngrind is distinguished by the fact that most of its gruesome imagery also works in a sexual element.  Certainly Cannibal Corpse can be considered a pioneer here with their songs like the aforementioned “Meat Hook Sodomy” and “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt”.  Other porngrind bands include Torsofuck; amazingly, their 2009 album Erotic Diarrhea Fantasy, which contains songs like the title track, “Pussy Mutilation”, “Worm Infested Anal”, and “Fistfucking her Decomposing Cadaver” all hew to this particularly crude timbre.  The vocals on these tracks are belched in such a low tone that they sound like a percussion instrument; to even call them “vocals” is actually kind of pushing it.  Similarly, Carnivorous Erection, Gut, and the Meat Shits also explore this same disgusting theme.  Carnivorous Erection occasionally foray into near death metal in their sound.  The Meat Shit’s vocals are much more comprehensible though they also devolve into weird guttural grunts too.  Truly out there are Jig-Ai, a Czech band that skirts between goregrind and porngrind in their subject matter, with a Japanese manga/anime twist as on songs like “Geishas Suck European Cock”.  Gortuary also traffic in dark, metallic fare.  Leaning more on the death metal end are Intestinal Alien Reflux, Atrocious Abnormality, Katalepsy, Abdominal Putridity, and literally thousands more.

Quite honestly, this is where I personally have to draw the line.  I find this entire genre to be abhorrent both sonically and thematically.  The gruesome lyrics would almost be funny in a who-can-top-everyone-else kind of way, but they aren’t.  It simply isn’t original or interesting to think of song titles and “lyrics” so vile, and the playing on many of these albums is mediocre at best, while the utterly ridiculous belched vocals are foolish to the point of self-parody.  Few if any of these bands does anything to distinguish themselves from any of their competitors.  It’s a travesty and a shame that Slayer even shares mention with any of these vile bands.

Other grindcore bands have carried on in the same sonic pathways blazed by Napalm Death, ENT, and Carcass, including Disrupt, Phobia, Rotten Sound, Weekend Nachos, Nasum, and Agoraphobic Nosebleed.  To be truthful, aside from “Engine of Death” by Nasum off their 2004 album Shift, which reminds me of “Angel of Death” by Slayer, and “Black Earth” by Weekend Nachos, I don’t have any music by these bands and it’s really hard for me to see the appeal of them and/or differentiate them from one another.  My “ear” is just not that sophisticated.