Reviewing Fleshgod Apocalypse's Agony in 2011, Max Lussier of The NewReview praised the playing and then said the orchestration left the guitars muddled and lost in the shuffle. Hold on to that sentence, because it is not a complaint about one record. It is the entire problem of symphonic death metal stated in a single line, and every band in this piece either solved it or did not.
The problem is physical rather than artistic. A guitar tuned to B or C, played through a high gain amplifier, occupies the lower middle of the frequency range and fills it completely. A string section wants the same ground. Put eighty players and four metal musicians in the same mix without a plan and you do not get a bigger record, you get mud with a violin drowning somewhere inside it. Everything the good bands do follows from working around that, and the rest of the family is laid out in the wider story.
What the orchestra is actually for
There are only three honest answers and the bands sort themselves by which one they pick.
The first is doubling. The strings play what the guitars play, an octave up or down, for weight. It is the cheapest option and the one that produces the mud, because two instruments playing the same line in the same register do not add up, they cancel.
The second is counterpoint. The orchestra gets its own line, moving against the riff rather than with it, usually placed above the guitars where there is empty air. This is what a trained composer does with the material by reflex and it is why the best records in this corner tend to have someone with a conservatory education in the credits.
The third is the choir, which is the trick that works most reliably. Voices sit high, they carry a chord without needing much level, and against a growl they give the contrast the wing is looking for without a note of clean singing anywhere. A choir over a blast beat is one of the few genuinely new sounds extreme metal produced after 1995.
Volume is not size. An orchestra buried underneath a guitar is not an orchestra. It is a rumour of one.
Therion left death metal in order to do it
The Swedish band who talked themselves into this first did it by walking away from the genre entirely. Therion formed in 1987, took their name from Celtic Frost's To Mega Therion, and spent the early nineties making death metal: Of Darkness... on Deaf in 1991, Beyond Sanctorum on Active in 1992, Symphony Masses: Ho Drakon Ho Megas in 1993. Then Christofer Johnsson signed to Nuclear Blast and made Theli, recorded at Impuls Studio in Hamburg between January and March 1996 and released that August, with members of the North German Radio Choir on it.
What Theli proves is the limit of the idea. It works, and by the end of it there is barely any death metal left in the band: the choir has taken the melodic role, the growl has retreated, and Therion spent the next twenty five years as a symphonic metal band rather than a death metal one. That is the risk this wing runs. Bring in an orchestra and the orchestra will try to run the record.
Athens: a composer, and a real orchestra
The Greek band solved it properly, and they solved it by hiring people. Septicflesh recorded The Great Mass between July and September 2010 across three studios, Devasoundz in Athens, The Abyss in Sweden and Smecky in Prague, with Peter Tagtgren mixing and mastering. Christos Antoniou, the band's lead guitarist, wrote the orchestral parts himself, and they were performed by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir under the conductor Adam Klemens, with Stanislav Mistr running the choir. Season of Mist released it on 18 April 2011. Forty three minutes.
The difference a real orchestra makes is not richness, it is separation. Players in a room bleed into each other's microphones and sit in a space, so the string writing lands in front of the guitars instead of on top of them, and the low brass can take the weight the guitars are already carrying without a fight. Metal Hammer put the record ninth in its ranking of the best symphonic metal albums ever made. It is the reference point for anybody attempting this now.
Italy: the orchestra as a second rhythm section
Fleshgod Apocalypse took the opposite route and it is the more aggressive of the two. Agony came out on Nuclear Blast on 9 August 2011, produced by Stefano Morabito, forty nine minutes and twenty six seconds long, with Tommaso Riccardi on vocals and rhythm guitar, Cristiano Trionfera on lead, Paolo Rossi on bass and clean vocals, Francesco Paoli on drums, and Francesco Ferrini listed as a member of the band for pianos and orchestral arrangement. It reached number eighteen on the American Heatseekers chart.
Ferrini does not write a counter-melody so much as a second rhythm section. The strings hammer the accents the guitars are hammering, the timpani sit under the double kick, and the pair of them arrive together like a door coming off its hinges. It is enormous and it is also exactly where Lussier's complaint bites: at that density, something has to lose, and often it is the guitar detail. The band have spent every album since adjusting the balance rather than abandoning the method.
It is worth saying plainly that this is not a softening of the genre, whatever the presence of violins suggests. The aim of an orchestra here is impact, not prettiness, and in that respect these bands are nearer to the ones who throw away every ornament in pursuit of raw force, which is what Is War Metal, than they are to anything on the melodic side of metal.
The smaller shelf
| Band | Country | The record | How the orchestra is made |
|---|---|---|---|
| Therion | Sweden | Theli (1996) | Choir singers hired in, keyboards for the rest |
| Septicflesh | Greece | The Great Mass (2011) | Written by the guitarist, played by a philharmonic orchestra and choir |
| Fleshgod Apocalypse | Italy | Agony (2011) | A pianist in the band, orchestral parts arranged and sampled |
| Hollenthon | Austria | With Vilest of Worms to Dwell (2001) | Samples of classical repertoire cut into the arrangements |
| Ex Deo | Canada | Romulus (2009) | Keyboard orchestration plus guests from other extreme bands |
The other names are worth knowing because they show the range of what counts. Hollenthon began in Austria in 1994 as a project of Martin Schirenc, who already had a death metal band of his own, and every one of their records on Napalm cuts sampled classical material into the writing rather than commissioning new parts. Ex Deo started in 2008 as a side project of the Kataklysm singer Maurizio Iacono, built entirely around Roman history, one album per subject: Romulus in 2009, Caligvla in 2012, The Immortal Wars in 2017 on the Punic Wars, The Thirteen Years of Nero in 2021.
One boundary is worth drawing before you go looking. Symphonic black metal is a separate thing with a separate purpose, and the orchestra there is generally used for atmosphere and grandeur rather than as a rhythmic weapon. This wing wants the strings to hit. The other route to the same scale, reached with machines instead of players and with a completely different set of problems in the mix, is industrial Death Metal.
