The decade's roster splits four ways, and once the split is visible the whole ten years reads differently. There are the architects, who wrote the rulebook and then had to live inside it. There are the workhorses, who kept hold of the rope while the industry walked off with the other end. There are the bands who widened the map until the genre stopped being an American export. And there is the class who came up after the money had already gone, who never saw a major label chequebook and therefore never spent a night mourning one.
Sort the decade that way and the names arrange themselves. Sort it by chart position and almost nothing arranges at all.
The money story behind the sorting, the arrival of the majors and their exit, is the business of the chapter on 90's death metal bands and what the industry made of them. This is the roster itself. If you want the wider frame around it, forty years of death metal in one place runs from the first record to the current crop.
The architects
Three bands wrote the rules everybody else worked inside, and all three paid for the privilege by being measured against their own early work for the rest of their careers.
Death is the strangest career of the lot, because Chuck Schuldiner ran the band as a rotating workshop rather than a gang. Spiritual Healing in 1990, Human in 1991, Individual Thought Patterns in 1993 with Gene Hoglan behind the kit, Symbolic for Roadrunner in 1995 and The Sound of Perseverance for Nuclear Blast in 1998: five records, five substantially different line-ups, one writer. No other band in the genre changed personnel that often without losing its identity, and the reason is that the identity was never in the personnel.
Morbid Angel ran the opposite system, a fixed core and a titling scheme that told you where you were in the catalogue at a glance, the albums marching through the alphabet from Altars of Madness onward. Blessed Are the Sick in 1991 slowed the band down and made the riffs stranger. Covenant in 1993 put them on a Warner subsidiary. Domination followed in 1995, David Vincent left the following year, and Steve Tucker sang on Formulas Fatal to the Flesh in 1998, a harder and colder record than the one the major had paid for.
Suffocation supplied the third rulebook and got treated worst for it. Effigy of the Forgotten arrived on Roadrunner in October 1991 with Scott Burns engineering, and it fixed the low tuned riff, the half time collapse and the drumming of Mike Smith as a permanent part of the vocabulary. Then the label refused to send them back to Florida. Breeding the Spawn was cut instead at Noise Lab in West Islip with Paul Bagin producing, out in May 1993, and the songs are buried under a recording that Frank Mullen has called an absolute disaster. Decibel later put it top of a list of death metal albums ruined by their own production. The band recovered with Pierced from Within in 1995 and then broke up in 1998 anyway.
The workhorses
The second group did something less glamorous and more consequential: they kept the format working while the press looked north and the labels looked elsewhere.
Deicide put out their debut on R/C on 26 June 1990, cut at Morrisound in March with Scott Burns, thirty three minutes long and with no interest whatsoever in being liked. Legion followed in 1992 and got shorter still. Once upon the Cross in 1995 and Serpents of the Light in 1997 kept the same schedule in a market that had stopped rewarding it. Obituary ran the same treadmill through The End Complete and World Demise and finally stopped after Back from the Dead in 1997, which is what exhaustion looks like on paper.
Bolt Thrower deserve a paragraph of their own, because they were the least fashionable band in the decade and the hardest to argue with. Formed in Coventry in September 1986 by Gavin Ward and Barry Thomson, three sessions for John Peel behind them, they made War Master in 1991, The IVth Crusade in 1992 and ...For Victory in 1994 for Earache, then walked to Metal Blade for Mercenary in 1998 after American touring stopped paying and the label stopped pushing. They never sped up to keep pace with the technical wing and never slowed down to chase anybody's radio. The tank on the sleeve was not a joke and the tempo underneath it was not either.
Immolation were dropped by Roadrunner after Dawn of Possession, signed to Metal Blade and made Here in After in February 1996, which is better than anything the bigger company had paid for. Incantation, run by John McEntee out of New Jersey through an almost comic sequence of singers, put Onward to Golgotha on Relapse in May 1992 and spent the rest of the decade making the same argument at the same tempo. Vader did it from Poland, The Ultimate Incantation on Earache in 1992, then De Profundis and Black to the Blind, touring a continent that the American slump barely touched.
They never sped up to keep pace with the technical wing and never slowed down to chase anybody's radio.
The bands who widened the map
By 1992 the genre had stopped being a Florida product with foreign imitators, and the roster is the proof. Dismember released Like an Ever Flowing Stream through Nuclear Blast on 28 May 1991 and then had to defend themselves against an obscenity charge in Britain over the lyrics to "Skin Her Alive", which they won, and which sold them more records than any advertisement would have. Grave and Unleashed filled in the rest of Stockholm for Century Media.
Further out, Hypocrisy gave Peter Tägtgren a platform and eventually a studio of his own, Sinister carried the Dutch end after Pestilence and Gorefest had gone, and Amorphis put The Karelian Isthmus out through Relapse in 1992 before walking away from straight death metal entirely on Tales from the Thousand Lakes two years later. Demilich made one album in Finland and vanished. The centre of gravity had moved, and it never moved back.
The class who came up in the dark
Here is the group the folklore forgets, because folklore says the middle of the decade was empty. Cryptopsy recorded Blasphemy Made Flesh at Piranha Studio in Montreal in April 1994 and put it out on Invasion on 25 November, with Lord Worm on vocals and Flo Mounier playing drums like a man being paid by the note, then made None So Vile two years later.
Krisiun, three brothers who had been at it since 1990, got Black Force Domain released in 1995 and Apocalyptic Revelation in 1998 before Century Media took them on. Dying Fetus, formed in Upper Marlboro, Maryland in 1991 by John Gallagher and Jason Netherton, spent two demos and five years reaching Purification Through Violence, out on Pulverizer on 6 August 1996, and only became a touring proposition once Kevin Talley joined the following summer. Nile went from a self released EP in 1995 to Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka on Relapse in 1998 by way of a label that folded underneath them. Hate Eternal were assembled in 1997 out of Morbid Angel and Suffocation personnel and delivered Conquering the Throne in 1999.
Not one of those five bands was signed on the strength of a market. They were signed by people guessing with their own money, which is the arrangement that produced the best records of the decade's second half.
The decade in eleven debuts
| Band | Debut | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deicide | Deicide | R/C | 1990 |
| Suffocation | Effigy of the Forgotten | Roadrunner | 1991 |
| Immolation | Dawn of Possession | Roadrunner | 1991 |
| Dismember | Like an Ever Flowing Stream | Nuclear Blast | 1991 |
| Vader | The Ultimate Incantation | Earache | 1992 |
| Incantation | Onward to Golgotha | Relapse | 1992 |
| Demilich | Nespithe | Necropolis | 1993 |
| Cryptopsy | Blasphemy Made Flesh | Invasion | 1994 |
| Krisiun | Black Force Domain | Dynamo | 1995 |
| Dying Fetus | Purification Through Violence | Pulverizer | 1996 |
| Hate Eternal | Conquering the Throne | Earache | 1999 |
Read the label column downward and the decade explains itself without a single sentence of commentary. Two majors' subsidiaries at the top, then Nuclear Blast and Earache and Relapse, then names that most readers will never have bought anything else from. The infrastructure got smaller and more stubborn as the ten years went on, and the bands who arrived late arrived into a business that had already shrunk to fit them.
Which leaves the obvious question, and it has a longer answer than the folklore allows: why death metal declined in the mid nineties is a matter of distribution, press attention and arithmetic rather than any failure of the records themselves. The bands above kept making them the whole way through.
