Brutal death metal is not death metal with the gain turned up. It is a different order of priorities, settled in New York between 1989 and 1993, and every item on that list can be measured off a record. Heaviness first. Rhythmic complexity second. Speed third. Melody nowhere on the sheet, and not by oversight.
Hold any album filed under the term against four parameters and it passes or fails in the open: what the riff is built out of, whether tempo is a setting or a switch, what the voice has given up, and how dry the room is. Fail three of them and somebody has mislabelled the record. The rest of this is those four parameters and what each one costs the band that has to play it. For the city that produced them rather than the mechanism, go to the New York chapter.
The riff is a rhythm before it is a run of notes
The quintet from Centereach who had to build the vocabulary before they could use it put Effigy of the Forgotten out through Roadrunner on 22 October 1991, recorded that June at Morrisound in Tampa with Scott Burns behind the desk for five thousand dollars, and what Terrance Hobbs and Doug Cerrito wrote on it had no precedent in the genre: guitars in C standard, two whole steps down, riffs chopped into palm-muted blocks built out of chromatic clusters rather than intervals anyone could sing back, every block cut to a length that fits a drum pattern instead of a phrase. The pitches are almost incidental. What is being written is a rhythm, and the notes are there to give the rhythm a body.
That inverts the arrangement everybody else was working under. A Florida riff of 1989 carried a shape you could whistle after two plays, and the drums followed it. Brutal death metal takes the guitar out of the melody trade altogether and stands it on the line next to the kit, milling figures to a machine tolerance and dropping them on the beat with the kick drum so that guitar and drums read as one object arriving. You do not hum a Suffocation riff. You feel where it lands.
The second consequence is arithmetic. A brutal song does not run a riff eight times and call that a verse. It stacks six or seven distinct figures inside four minutes, each one used twice at most, which is why the form breeds bands who write more music per record than they can comfortably play. Dying Fetus, formed in 1991 in Upper Marlboro, Maryland and signed to Relapse since 2000, built a whole career on that arithmetic, and so did Deeds of Flesh, three men from Los Osos, California who started in 1993, lost a label deal, and founded Unique Leader Records to press their own records. The imprint went on to become the main address for the style worldwide.
You do not hum a Suffocation riff. You feel where it lands.
Tempo is a switch, not a setting
The second parameter is the one most listeners hear first and describe wrongly. Brutal death metal is not fast music. It is music whose default state is fast and whose entire dramatic structure is built on leaving that state without warning. The blast beat runs, the band cuts the tempo in half on a beat nobody signalled, the guitars land on a figure with more silence in it than notes, and for four bars the record stops moving forward and starts moving down.
Ask a drummer which half is difficult and you will get the same answer every time. It is not the blast. Anyone with a year of practice and a metronome can hold a blast at two hundred and forty beats a minute for thirty seconds. The stop is where the money is, because five people have to arrive on the same sixteenth note after a passage that gave them nothing to count against, and if one of them is early the whole figure collapses into noise. I have spent enough hours with a click in one ear to think that is the only technical achievement in the genre worth arguing about.
| Parameter | Death metal, 1989 model | Brutal death metal |
|---|---|---|
| Riff construction | A singable line the drums follow | Palm-muted blocks locked to the kick, chromatic rather than melodic |
| Riffs per song | Three or four, repeated | Six or seven, used once or twice |
| Tempo | A setting, changed for contrast | A switch, thrown mid-bar into half time |
| Vocal | A growl that still shapes words | A chest guttural with the consonants taken out |
| Production | Room ambience, guitars wide | Dry, mid-forward, everything short |
The voice gives up the last thing it had
Frank Mullen is credited with the third parameter, and the credit is deserved for a reason that has nothing to do with depth. Plenty of singers had gone low before 1991. What Mullen did was drive the sound from the chest instead of the throat and then strip out every consonant that would have let a listener track the syllable line, which sounds like a loss and is exactly the point: a voice with no words left in it stops competing with the guitars for the same job and becomes a fourth rhythm instrument, hitting where the kick hits. A music built on impacts needs that. A music built on melody would be wrecked by it.
The register has a floor and a ceiling and both matter. Go up and you are back in the articulated growl of ordinary death metal, where the words are legible and the voice sits on top of the band. Go down into the wet inhaled gurgle and you have left brutal death metal for something else, which is an argument for another day. The brutal vocal sits between those two, still driven by breath support, still phrased in time, still recognisably a man shouting rather than a noise.
The room has to be dry
The fourth parameter is the one bands got wrong for a decade. A riff whose whole content is the moment it stops needs a recording in which stopping is audible, and reverb is the enemy of that: put a hall on the guitars and the block bleeds into the silence behind it, and the silence is the effect. So the brutal sound is close, mid-forward and short. Guitars scooped less than you would expect, because the middle is where the palm mute lives. Snare bright enough to cut a blast. Kick drums with enough attack to be counted rather than felt.
Nobody had the budget to do that properly at first. Breeding the Spawn in 1993 is the standing example of what happens when a band writes for the format and cannot pay for it, and everyone involved has said in print that the record does not sound the way it was meant to. The genre spent the rest of the nineties on small labels and mail order, and the production only caught up in the middle of the next decade, at which point a form that had always been about precision finally got recordings precise enough to prove it. That is also when the arguments about death metal subgenres got loud, because once you can hear everything, you can hear the differences.
Every other extreme genre asks what a riff sounds like. This one asks what a riff weighs.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
Where brutal stops being the right word
Three borders, and all of them are real. On one side is technical death metal, which shares the riff turnover and the tuning but spends its complexity on harmony and metre rather than on impact, and which will happily write a passage no crowd can move to. On the other is slam, which keeps the drop, throws away the blasting and the riff arithmetic, and is a separate music with a separate audience however often the two words get stapled together. Behind both sits deathcore, where the breakdown went back to the hardcore that lent it out in the first place. Read the whole family against the chapter list and the borders stop looking arbitrary.
What the four parameters buy is a music with no radio ambition, no chorus, no hook and no interest in being liked, which turned out to be the most durable commercial position in extreme metal because nothing about it can date. A record that never tried to sound like 1996 cannot sound like 1996. Thirty-five years in, the form is still being played correctly by musicians who were not born when Morrisound took the booking, and if you want the names, they are in brutal Death Metal Bands.
