Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction.Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
Type brutal slam death metal into any shop, streaming service or tag cloud and you get thousands of records under a compound nobody defined and everybody uses. The trade treats it as one genre. The two halves of it are not one genre, they were never one genre, and the join is still visible if you know where to press.
Here is the part that makes the argument interesting rather than pedantic. Brutal slam is not a fusion of two older things. It is the older thing, the undivided original that came out of the East Coast scene at the start of the nineties, and brutal death metal and slam are the two specialisations that grew out of it afterwards. The compound is not a hybrid. It is the parent, sold back to us as a cross.
The four places the two forms disagree
Take the disagreement one axis at a time, because vague talk about heaviness settles nothing and the differences are all mechanical.
Riff construction. Brutal death metal writes six or seven distinct figures inside four minutes and uses each of them once or twice, chromatic clusters rather than singable intervals, the guitar functioning as a second percussion part. Slam writes one figure, palm muted, syncopated so that it lands off the kick drum, and plays it four, eight or sixteen times without alteration until repetition itself becomes the structure. The first method is arithmetic. The second is hypnosis.
Tempo. Brutal defaults to fast and treats the drop as its dramatic event. Slam defaults to somewhere between ninety and a hundred and sixty beats a minute and treats the blast as punctuation, thrown in for four bars to reset the ear. Same two speeds. Opposite defaults, and the default is the whole argument.
Vocals. The brutal register is a chest driven growl with breath support behind it, phrased in time, still recognisably a man shouting even when the consonants are gone. The slam register keeps descending past that floor into a wet, inhaled, pitchless sound with no syllable line left in it at all. You can hear which side of the line a band is on inside three seconds, which is more than can be said for most genre distinctions in metal.
Production. Brutal is recorded dry and mid forward, because a music built on complexity has to stay legible and reverb smears the stops. Slam inverts every one of those choices: lower tuning, the low end left in, the bass audible as a separate instrument and the snare tuned high and left ringing so that one bright thing cuts through a mix which is otherwise all weight.
Same two speeds, opposite defaults. The default is the whole argument.
Why the original counts as both
Now put those four axes against the record everybody is arguing about. Suffocation in 1991 wrote brutal riff arithmetic, blasted as a default state, sang from the chest, recorded dry, and then wrote slam riffs and put them at the centre of the songs. Three of the four axes read brutal. The fourth reads slam. That is not a band sitting on a fence, it is a band working before the fence was built, and the same is true of Pierced from Within in 1995 and of everything Long Island made in between.
The split came from the specialists. Internal Bleeding took the drop and threw away the arithmetic and the blasting. Others took the arithmetic and the blasting and left the drop as a garnish. Both moves were deliberate, both were announced at the time, and by 1999 you had two audiences who wanted different things from the same four minutes. Everything since has been an argument about which half was the point, and the whole of that story starts with one song, which is why the record gets a piece of its own: effigy of the Forgotten and the Invention of the Breakdown.
How the two words got welded back together
The compound is a trade term before it is a musical one, and it comes from three places, none of them a band.
The first is the label copy. A small imprint selling two hundred copies by post has to describe a record in four words that a stranger will recognise, and slamming brutal death metal does more work than either half alone. The second is the tag field. Metal Archives, Bandcamp and every streaming service ask for a genre string, the string gets copied from release to release, and within a few years the compound is on ten thousand pages regardless of what the records actually do. The third is the online scene that carried the mid 2000s revival, where the audience for both halves was the same audience, sitting in the same group, trading the same files.
None of that is dishonest. It is how genre names have always worked, and the people using the compound are not confused about the music, they are describing a shelf rather than a method. The problem only starts when somebody uses the shelf as an analysis and concludes that the two things are interchangeable, which they audibly are not.
The test, in four questions
Put a record on and answer these. It takes ninety seconds and it is more reliable than any tag.
- Count the riffs in the first song. Six or more that never come back is brutal. One that comes back eight times is slam.
- Ask what the band does when nothing else is happening. Blasting is brutal. Grooving is slam.
- Listen to the vocal in the quietest passage. If it is still phrased against the beat it is brutal. If it is a pitchless exhalation with no rhythm of its own it is slam.
- Find the snare. Bright and articulate under a blast is brutal. High, ringing and alone above a wall of low end is slam.
Four brutal answers and the record is brutal death metal. Four slam answers and it is slam. Three and one, in either direction, and the compound is the honest description, which is where most of the modern roster actually sits.
The bands who live on the line, and why they are the best of it
Defeated Sanity are the clearest case. Lille Gruber writes with the riff turnover of a technical band, plays with a jazz drummer's phrasing and then drops the whole apparatus into a slam figure that would not embarrass anyone in Dallas. Katalepsy started at the slam end in Moscow and walked steadily toward the other one across three albums. Ingested did the same in Manchester in the opposite direction, arriving from the heavy end and keeping the arithmetic. Devourment, who built the floor everybody else stands on, put more brutal writing into Conceived in Sewage in 2013 than into anything before it.
A genre name is a shelf, not a method. Read the shelf and you will buy the wrong record about a third of the time.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
So the compound survives because it is useful, and it is useful because those bands exist. What it should never be allowed to do is erase the two things it joins. The music that runs on arithmetic and the music that runs on repetition want opposite things from a room, a mix and a listener, and a form that stopped being able to tell them apart would lose both. Keep the join visible. The roll call for one half of it is in slam Death Metal Bands, and if you can hear why those records are not the other kind, the distinction has done its work.
