Two scenes, four thousand miles apart, working at the same time from partly overlapping sources, producing music that is audibly different in the first bar. This is the comparison, element by element.
The riff
Bay Area riffs are constructed: a figure is stated, varied, answered, and the sequence has a shape. There is frequently a harmonised passage and almost always a section that resolves.
German riffs are chromatic and refuse to resolve. A Kreator figure will move in semitones and land somewhere unsettled, and the next figure will do the same. The effect is of accumulation rather than of development.
The half time drop
The Bay Area wrote one into almost every song, deliberately, so that the room has somewhere to go. It is the most reliable structural device in American thrash and it is a large part of why those records work live.
The German bands used it considerably less. Pleasure to Kill has very little relief in it, and that is the point: the record is designed to be unrelenting rather than dynamic.
The production
The clearest difference and the easiest to hear. American records separate the two guitars hard left and right so you can follow each; German records stack them into a wall where no individual note is legible.
American drums are close mic'd and dry; German drums are recorded in the room with the cymbals bleeding into everything. The American vocal sits on top; the German vocal sits inside.
The vocal
Baloff, Araya and Billy shout in pitch. Petrozza, Angelripper and Schmier rasp with no attempt at a note. That is the single most identifiable difference between the two scenes and the one that determined what each fed into afterwards.
| Bay Area | Teutonic | |
|---|---|---|
| Riffs | Constructed, resolving | Chromatic, unresolved |
| Leads | Harmonised twin guitar | Functional or chaotic |
| Half time drop | In almost every song | Sparing |
| Guitars in the mix | Separated hard left and right | Fused into a mass |
| Vocal | Shouted in pitch, on top | Rasped, inside the mix |
| Fed into | Technical thrash, groove | Death metal, black metal |
What each fed into
The Bay Area's legacy is the technical wing, groove metal by way of Machine Head, and a general standard of musicianship that raised the bar for everybody.
The German legacy is death metal and black metal. The rasped vocal, the tremolo picked figure and the refusal of melody are all sitting in the 1986 German records, and the Florida and Scandinavian musicians have said so in print repeatedly.
That is the most consequential difference between the two scenes and it is rarely stated plainly: American thrash produced better thrash, and German thrash produced two entire genres.
The overlap
Real, and worth acknowledging so the comparison does not become a caricature. Slayer sit closer to the German position than to their Bay Area contemporaries: no resolution, no relief, atonal leads. Destruction are the most musical of the German bands and would not be out of place in California.
And by 1988 the scenes were listening to each other. Kreator went to Hollywood to record with Randy Burns; American bands were covering German songs. The distinctions described above are strongest between 1985 and 1987 and blur steadily afterwards.
How to hear it
Play thirty seconds of Bonded by Blood and then thirty seconds of Pleasure to Kill, at the same volume, on speakers. Same year within eighteen months, same nominal genre, and two completely different ideas about what a guitar sound is for.
Then play Reign in Blood in between and notice that it belongs to neither camp cleanly, which is a large part of why it is the record everybody agrees on.
The specific inheritance the German scene passed on is traced in How German Thrash Fed Black Metal.
The economics behind the difference
Worth stating, because the aesthetic account is incomplete without it.
The Bay Area had a venue circuit, a radio show, a record shop culture and, within two years, the attention of American major labels. A band there could reasonably expect that being good would be noticed.
The Ruhr had two independent labels operating on almost nothing, no venue circuit worth the name, and no prospect of a major label ever calling. A band there had no reason to make a record anybody could sell, and every one of the choices described above follows from that.
It is the same mechanism that produced Brazil, Poland and Australia. Access produces competence; isolation produces mutation.
Which one aged better
The German records, on the evidence, and it is not the answer most listeners expect.
The Bay Area albums are better made and are frequently more enjoyable, and their descendants are a genre that ended. The German albums are cruder and their descendants are two genres that are still producing new music forty years later, which means a listener coming to this music now hears the German records as familiar and the American ones as period.
That is a strange reversal and it is worth noticing before anybody assumes the polished version won. The whole German story is in Teutonic Thrash.
Where to start with each
For the Bay Area: Bonded by Blood, then The New Order, then The Ultra-Violence. Three records that cover the first wave, the melodic second wave and the teenage extreme.
For Germany: Pleasure to Kill, then Agent Orange, then Eternal Devastation. The wall, the war record and the musical one.
Six albums, about four hours, and a complete picture of the two traditions that between them account for most of what this genre produced.
The third scene nobody compares them to
Switzerland, which sat geographically between the two and belonged to neither. Celtic Frost and Coroner were working within a few hours of the German bands and made music that has almost nothing in common with them: Frost went orchestral and avant garde within three albums, Coroner went compositional and technical.
That is a useful check on the whole comparison. Two scenes with similar access to the same records produced opposite results, and a third scene next door to one of them produced something else again. Geography sets the conditions; it does not determine the outcome.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Descriptions refer to the studio recordings named and describe tendencies rather than rules.
