Whisky a Go Go, Los Angeles, 5 December 1998. Four men set up on a stage built for the Sunset Strip and a tape runs while they play thirteen songs. Chuck Schuldiner sang and played guitar, Shannon Hamm played the other one, Scott Clendenin was on bass and Richard Christy was behind the kit, and what came off that desk turned out to be one of the two or three best live documents this music has produced. Almost nothing else in the format works out that well. It is worth understanding why before anybody spends money on one.
Death metal has an uneasy relationship with the live album, which looks strange for a music played almost entirely in small rooms to people standing close enough to touch the monitors. The audience is not the problem. The problem is that these records were assembled in studios, and most of what makes them sound the way they sound does not survive being carried out of the building. Nearly every live album the genre produced arrived in the second half of the nineties, for reasons that had very little to do with music and a great deal to do with what happened after the boom.
Why the format fights the genre
Take the two rooms that built the sound. At Morrisound in Tampa the vocals were layered, the kick drums were triggered and the guitars were tracked more than once so the riff arrived as a solid object. At Sunlight in Stockholm the guitar tone was a distortion pedal pushed past sense and a room that flattered it. Neither of those things exists on a stage. What exists there is a house PA built for rock bands, a low end that turns to mud below the third row, and a drummer who has to produce a blast beat with his own two feet in front of people who paid to watch him do it. The first casualty is always the bottom of the kit. The second is the guitar, which stops being one wall and becomes two men.
Then there is the money. A live record costs a label almost nothing, arrives without a writing session behind it, and counts against the number of albums a band owes. That is why so many of them cluster in the years when advances were shrinking and tours had stopped paying for themselves. Judging these records means separating the ones made because somebody had a tape worth releasing from the ones made because a contract said five.
The ones a contract paid for
Roadrunner released Obituary's Dead on 21 April 1998, sixteen songs and sixty two minutes taken from a performance on 10 September 1997, and the band named it after the joke everybody had already made about the word live. It is the sound of a group who had been playing this material for a decade, which is both its strength and the reason AllMusic gave it two and a half stars out of five. Nothing is revealed. Everything is confirmed.
Earache put out Morbid Angel's Entangled in Chaos in 1996, eleven songs in thirty nine minutes drawn from the touring behind Domination, and issued it in Europe, which made it an import and an expense anywhere else for years. Its value has almost nothing to do with the mix. David Vincent left the band shortly after it appeared, so this is the last recorded evidence of the line-up that made three of the most consequential records in the genre, caught doing the job in a room rather than in front of Scott Burns.
Deicide taped When Satan Lives at the House of Blues in Chicago in 1998 and Roadrunner released it on 20 October that year: seventeen songs in fifty five minutes, Glen Benton playing bass and singing, Eric and Brian Hoffman on guitars and Steve Asheim on drums. Kerrang! gave it four stars, AllMusic three, and it is the only one of the three contractual albums that plays like a band trying to win something. The tempos are faster than the studio versions and stay there.
The one that sold, and what it proved
The best selling live record this genre has is also the one with the clearest purpose. Metal Blade released Live Cannibalism on 19 September 2000, most of it captured at The Rave in Milwaukee on 16 February that year with five songs taken from the Emerson Theater in Indianapolis the night before: twenty songs in sixty five minutes and fifty three seconds, George Fisher singing, Pat O'Brien and Jack Owen on guitars, Alex Webster on bass and Paul Mazurkiewicz on drums, plus covers of Sacrifice and Possessed and a video release alongside the disc. AllMusic gave it two out of five and complained that nothing on it was unexpected, which is accurate and beside the point. Webster has said in interview that the band do not go back and repair performances, that Colin Richardson mixed the tapes in England and that what a listener hears is what happened in the room. The record exists to prove the material can be played at that speed by five people with nothing hidden underneath.
| Album | Recorded | Released | Label | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entombed, Monkey Puss (Live in London) | 18 March 1992 | 1999 | Earache | A vault tape, seven years old |
| Morbid Angel, Entangled in Chaos | 1996 tour | 1996 | Earache | The last of that line-up |
| Obituary, Dead | 10 September 1997 | 21 April 1998 | Roadrunner | An album owed |
| Deicide, When Satan Lives | 1998, Chicago | 20 October 1998 | Roadrunner | An album owed, played fast |
| Cannibal Corpse, Live Cannibalism | 15 and 16 February 2000 | 19 September 2000 | Metal Blade | Proof of the playing |
| Death, Live in L.A. (Death and Raw) | 5 December 1998 | 16 October 2001 | Nuclear Blast | Money for treatment |
| Cryptopsy, None So Live | June 2001, Montreal | 2003 | Sold at shows | One night, one singer |
Recorded for a reason
Nuclear Blast released Live in L.A. (Death & Raw) on 16 October 2001, thirteen tracks running seventy one minutes and fifty seven seconds from that December night on the Strip. It was one of two live records put out to raise money for Chuck Schuldiner's cancer treatment. He died on 13 December 2001, less than two months after it reached shops. The playing on it is the argument for the whole format: a band that had been on the road for most of a year, working through material from every phase of the catalogue, with a drummer whose double kick is audibly a pair of feet rather than a setting.
Relapse went back to the same year a decade later. Vivus! pairs the Whisky recording with a set taped at the Dynamo Open Air festival in Eindhoven on 31 May 1998 and arrived on 28 February 2012 in North America, twenty four songs across a hundred and twenty eight minutes. Two rooms, six months apart, the same four men, and the difference between a club and a festival field written into the sound of both.
The vault, the festival and the hometown
The best of the archival releases is the oldest recording of the lot. Entombed were taped at the London Astoria on 18 March 1992 during the Gods of Grind tour, and Earache did nothing with it until early 1999, when Monkey Puss (Live in London) appeared on video and later on disc. The name came off the words written on Nicke Andersson's snare drum. What it holds is a band barely out of its teens playing the Stockholm sound before that sound turned into anything else, which no record made in 1999 could have supplied.
Two other tapes are worth the search. Bloodbath played Wacken Open Air on 5 August 2005 with Mikael Akerfeldt singing alongside Anders Nystrom, Jonas Renkse, Dan Swano and Martin Axenrot, billed at the time as the only concert the band would ever give, and Peaceville released The Wacken Carnage as a disc and a video on 2 June 2008. They went on to tour North America and Europe in 2018 and 2019, which spoils the story and improves the discography. Cryptopsy recorded None So Live in Montreal in June 2001, their first hometown show in four years in front of more than two thousand people, with Martin Lacroix singing. It is the only Cryptopsy release he appears on. The band sold it themselves at gigs from 2003, which is the oldest distribution model this music has and still the most honest one.
A live album flenses the studio off a death metal band and leaves the sinew: the tempo the drummer can hold, the low end the room will carry, and whatever is left in the singer's throat by the eleventh song.
Three of these are worth owning outright. Live in L.A. (Death & Raw) for the playing and for what it was raised to pay for, Live Cannibalism because it settles the question of whether that material can be executed in front of people, and Monkey Puss because there is no other way to hear that band at that age. The rest are documents rather than records, and they are documents of a decade in which the money went, the contracts ran out and the bands kept going anyway. That decade, from the inside, is death Metal in the 1990s.
