In September 1990 a band from Kolbotn drove to Stockholm and made a death metal album at Sunlight Studio with Tomas Skogsberg producing. In August 1991, back in their own town at Creative Studios with Erik Avnskog engineering, the same four men made a black metal album. Peaceville released the first on 14 January 1991 and the second on 26 February 1992. Thirteen months between them, one line-up, and almost nothing held in common.
Darkthrone are the control group this argument never had to invent. Soulside Journey is a Swedish death metal record made by Norwegians, down to the guitar tone Skogsberg had already handed to Entombed and Dismember, and A Blaze in the Northern Sky is the record from which the whole Norwegian scene took its face. Between the two sessions the players learned nothing and acquired nothing. They took things away. What was removed, and why the removing was the entire point, is the comparison in full, and it runs a great deal deeper than the growl and the shriek that everybody reaches for first. Where each of these records sits in the sequence is set out in the history of death metal.
Frequency, and what a guitar is for
Begin with where each music puts its weight on the spectrum, because the rest follows from that one decision. Death metal lives underneath. The guitars are tuned down, the picking hand mutes the string against the bridge so every note lands as a blunt event rather than a ringing one, the bass is present as a separate instrument, and the kick drum is engineered to be felt as an impact before it is heard as a pitch. Black metal lives above. The guitars often sit in standard tuning or near it, the chords are voiced high with open strings sounding under them, nothing is muted, and the bass is frequently inaudible by choice. A death metal record is built to be heavier than the room it is played in. A black metal record is built to sound like something happening outside the building.
The riff is assembled differently too, and that difference survives when the production is stripped away, which is the test of whether a difference is real. A death metal riff is a rhythmic object before it is a melodic one: chromatic, moving by half step, refusing to come home, and cut into segments that stop dead so the drums can reset the song underneath. A black metal riff is a cell of four or eight bars repeated until the repetition becomes the argument, usually built from a line that does resolve, often a minor key figure a folk musician would recognise on sight. Death metal writes in blocks. Black metal writes in loops.
| Parameter | Death metal | Black metal |
|---|---|---|
| Register | Tuned down, weight in the low mid | Standard or near it, weight in the treble |
| Picking hand | Palm muted, notes stopped | Unmuted tremolo, notes left ringing |
| Riff shape | Blocks, chromatic, unresolved | Loops, melodic, resolving |
| Drums | Close miked, kick as impact, fills as punctuation | Set back, cymbal wash, blast as a bed |
| Voice | Below pitch, pushed forward in the mix | Above pitch, placed behind the guitars |
| Subject | The body and what can be done to it | Everything except the body |
What each one refuses to pay for
The lazy version of this comparison says that death metal is produced and black metal is not, and it is wrong in both directions. Death metal bought clarity because clarity was the content: a riff of that density is inaudible in a wet room, so the Florida bands spent money at Morrisound Recording in Tampa to have every stopped note arrive separately, and the Swedes spent almost nothing at Sunlight and got one saturated guitar tone that did half the songwriting before a note was chosen. Two opposite budgets, one shared aim, which was that you should hear exactly what the guitars are doing.
Black metal refused clarity for a reason, and it refused it from inside proper studios rather than from any lack of access to them. Emperor and Mayhem both worked at Grieghallen in Bergen with Eirik Hundvin, who set a pair of Schoeps overheads above the kit and hung curtains around the drums to kill the slapback the big room would otherwise have given him, and who put an ordinary dynamic microphone on the vocal because the singer needed to move rather than because nothing better was on the shelf. Thin was a specification, delivered by an engineer capable of the opposite. That is why records made in a bedroom and records made inside a concert hall complex ended up on the same shelf without embarrassment, and it is why where this sits in the story matters more than any equipment list.
Death metal writes in blocks. Black metal writes in loops.
The subject, which is the difference nobody hears first
Death metal is about the body. Anatomy, murder, disease, forensic vocabulary, the campaign histories on the Bolt Thrower records, the Egyptology on the Nile records, and on the later Death albums the mind treated as one more organ that fails. Underneath the horror it is a materialist music: the body is the whole account and there is nothing standing behind it. Black metal is about everything except the body. Land, cold, theology, the self, and in its worst wing the nation. It is a religious music even when the belief on offer is a refusal, which is why its records behave like liturgy, putting repetition where a death metal record puts a change.
Real Death Metal should be something normal people are afraid of, not something mothers can listen to.
Euronymous, Slayer Mag, issue 8, 1991
The sleeves carry the same split without a word on them. A classic death metal cover is a painting of an event, commissioned, crowded and legible from across a shop. A classic black metal cover is a photograph with the contrast destroyed, a figure in a wood or a ruin, and a logo drawn so that reading it is not the point. One genre wants you to look. The other wants you to fail to see.
The ideological asymmetry has to be stated plainly, once, because writing about either music without it produces nonsense. Black metal in Norway built its aesthetic rules out of what its musicians believed, and the scene backed that with church arson from 1992 and with a killing in Oslo in August 1993 that put Euronymous in the ground and Varg Vikernes in prison. A wing of the genre later carried the same misanthropy into open racism and produced the NSBM scene, recorded here as fact and given no further room. Death metal ran its confrontation in another direction and against other institutions: shops, distributors, customs officers and a German register of banned records. One fight was about what may be sold. The other was about what may be worshipped.
Where the two are the same band
The border is real and it is crossed constantly, usually by the better bands. Dissection recorded Storm of the Light's Bane between 17 and 30 March 1995 at Hellspawn and Unisound, produced it themselves and had it out through Nuclear Blast on 17 November of the same year: black metal in its theology and its cold, melodic death metal in the twin guitar writing that Gothenburg was working out a few hours down the same country. Behemoth came up in the Polish black metal underground and arrived at a death metal apparatus without ever putting down the older subject matter. Belphegor have built a career out of refusing to choose. Further back, Bathory and Sarcofago are claimed by both family trees with equal right, and the war metal bands out of Canada and Australia took the low end from one parent and the theology from the other.
What the comparison is finally worth is this. It stops each music being marked against the other's paper. Judge a black metal record on production values and it fails every time, which tells you nothing. Judge a death metal record on atmosphere and most of the canon fails, which tells you nothing either. The two grammars were built to solve different problems, and the only useful question about any record is which problem it thought it was solving. The next line to draw is younger and angrier, running between a genre and its own descendant, and it is drawn in death Metal vs Deathcore.
