The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea.Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Take a death metal band and remove the speed. Everything the genre relies on to hide behind goes with it: the blast beat that fills every gap, the tremolo picking that turns a thin line into a wall, the sheer rate of events that stops a listener asking whether any single riff was worth writing. What is left standing has to be worth standing. That is death doom, and it is the least forgiving corner of the whole family.
The bands who went there did it between 1990 and 1993, in New York, California, West Yorkshire and Melbourne, mostly without knowing about each other. They kept the guttural voice and the detuned guitars and they threw out the tempo, and what came back was something the parent genre had never managed on its own, which is grief. For where this branch hangs among the rest, see the family tree.
What actually changes when the tempo goes
Slow is not a setting on an amplifier. A riff played at sixty beats a minute is exposed in a way that the same riff at two hundred never is: you hear every note begin, ring and decay, and you hear the space after it. So the writing has to change. The chord voicings get wider because a power chord held for four bars turns into a drone and a drone is not a chord. The bass stops doubling out of habit and starts holding the harmony, since it is now the only thing keeping the note alive between guitar hits. And the drummer, who in death metal is the engine, becomes a punctuation mark: a crash landing on the first beat of a bar you have been waiting eight seconds for.
The voice is what keeps it inside death metal rather than doom. Traditional doom, the Sabbath line and everything Candlemass built on it, sings. Death doom growls, at half the speed, which means the growl is exposed too. Nobody can hide a thin voice in a slow song. Several bands who tried this in 1992 found that out and went back.
The other thing that arrives with the slowness is room for instruments death metal had no use for. Keyboards, strings, a violin, a second voice singing cleanly against the growl. None of that is decoration in this music. At these tempos there are whole bars with nothing happening in them, and something has to be in the room. All of this sits at the far end of the map from where the genre started, and the starting point is the parent article.
1990 and 1991, in four cities at once
The first proper record of the style came out of New York. Winter recorded Into Darkness at S.O.S. Studios in April and May of 1990 and Future Shock released it that May: forty six minutes, Jon Altman singing and playing bass, Stephen Flam on guitar, Tony Pinnski on keyboards, Frank Casey on drums, and a tempo that at the time simply had no precedent in a band with that vocal. Decibel later put it thirteenth in its hundred greatest doom albums. Almost nobody bought it in 1990.
Six months later, in a studio in San Francisco between 20 and 26 November 1990, Autopsy made Mental Funeral. Chris Reifert singing from behind the drum kit, Danny Coralles and Eric Cutler on guitars, Steve Cutler on bass, produced by the band with Paul Halmshaw, and Peaceville put it out on 22 April 1991. Thirty seven minutes and fifty four seconds, twelve tracks, and it lurches between fast and glacial inside single songs rather than settling on either. It divided people on release and it is now treated as one of the essential death metal records of the decade.
Then England. Paradise Lost recorded Gothic at Academy Music Studios in West Yorkshire between November 1990 and January 1991 and Peaceville released it on 19 March that year, with Nick Holmes growling, Gregor Mackintosh writing leads that behave like a funeral organ, orchestral arrangements credited to The Raptured Symphony Orchestra and guest vocals from Sarah Marrion. Decibel put it into its Hall of Fame in June 2005. The record is death doom and it is also the reason an entire later genre is called gothic metal, which is a lot of work for a second album by four young men in a town with no scene.
Nobody can hide a thin voice in a slow song. Several bands found that out in 1992 and went back to playing fast.
The Peaceville three, and a violin in the band
Three bands on one label out of the north of England ended up carrying the style, and the second of them took it furthest. My Dying Bride recorded Turn Loose the Swans in June and July 1993 with Robert Magoolagan engineering, Peaceville released it on 11 October, and it runs fifty eight minutes and fifteen seconds across seven tracks. Aaron Stainthorpe alternates a growl with a spoken and sung register that most of his contemporaries would not have risked, and Martin Powell plays violin and keyboards as a member of the band rather than as a guest on two tracks. In 2011 it was certified gold by the Independent Music Companies Association, meaning at least seventy five thousand European sales, which for a record this slow is a genuinely strange number.
- Paradise Lost, Gothic (1991): orchestration and a clean female voice against the growl, and the word that named a genre.
- My Dying Bride, Turn Loose the Swans (1993): the violin promoted to a permanent seat, and the longest sustained misery on the label.
- Anathema, Serenades (1993): the third of them, and the one that left the style soonest.
Melbourne, and the record that went slower than anyone
The most extreme statement of the idea came from the far side of the world and from a band that lasted four years. diSEMBOWELMENT recorded Transcendence into the Peripheral at Toybox Studios in Melbourne in 1992, Relapse released it on 31 March 1993, and it runs fifty nine minutes and thirty three seconds across seven tracks. Renato Gallina on vocals and guitar, Jason Kells on guitar, Matthew Skarajew on bass, Paul Mazziotta on drums, with a double bass played by Tony Mazziotta on top of it.
What the record does is alternate: passages at a crawl so slow the pulse nearly disappears, then a sudden acceleration into blast beats, then back down. That switch is the whole architecture, and it is the reason the slow parts hurt. The band split up shortly afterwards and never made another album. Thirty years on it is still the record every band in this style gets measured against, which is a heavy load for one album by four men who had already stopped.
Where it went from there
Two directions, and both of them left the parent behind. One goes slower still. Thergothon formed in Finland in 1990, put out a demo in an edition of six hundred copies in 1991, decided to break up in the spring of 1993, and had Stream from the Heavens released by Obscure Plasma in 1994, a year after they had stopped existing. That record and the ones around it became funeral doom, carried since by Skepticism, Evoken, Esoteric and Mournful Congregation, where a single piece can run twenty minutes and the tempo drops below anything a body can move to.
The other direction went towards melody and towards singing, and by the middle of the nineties several of the founders had gone with it: keyboards forward, clean vocals forward, growl retired, and gothic metal standing where death doom had been. Both roads are honest. Neither of them is the one taken by the bands who kept the slowness and added the frost and the blasphemy instead, and that argument is at blackened Death Metal Explained.
