Death metal album art is graphic because it had one surface and one job. No radio would play the music. No television would show it. No chain store put it in a window. What the genre had was twelve inches of cardboard in a rack, four centimetres of the same picture reproduced in a mail order list, and a stranger with three pounds in his pocket who had never heard a note. The sleeve was the entire marketing department, and it was paid to stop that man walking past.
Almost everything people find unbearable about death metal album art follows from that one fact, and almost none of it follows from a competition to be vile. A picture was doing the work that a radio single does for everybody else.
The sleeve was the whole advertising budget
Look at how these pictures were actually seen and the style stops being a mystery. Almost nobody met a cover at full size first. You met it shrunk to a postage stamp in a distro list, on a flyer stapled to a rehearsal room noticeboard, on a J card folded into a cassette shell, on the back page of a fanzine run off on a machine that turned every grey into either black or white. Subtlety died at that size. One figure, one act and a hard black outline came through five generations of copying with everything still legible.
So the compositions went blunt on purpose. Centred, high contrast, no ambiguity anywhere in the frame, built the way a warning is painted on the door of a slaughterhouse rather than the way a picture is hung in a room.
Drawn entirely in ink stipple by a man who would shortly join another band on the same label, the sleeve of Napalm Death's Scum is the cleanest proof of the point, because Jeff Walker set businessmen towering over an African family on a carpet of skulls, worked the logos of Nestle, McDonald's and BP into the bones, and made every tone in the drawing out of dots, which is the one technique a photocopier cannot smear into mud. Earache released it on 1 July 1987. It had been cut in two halves at Rich Bitch in Birmingham, side A in August 1986 and side B in May 1987, with a different line-up on each side.
A cover is a contract
Here is the part outsiders never get. The graphic sleeve is not a dare. It is a promise, and the genre kept it.
A butcher's window is the most honest advertising there is, because what hangs in it is exactly what you are buying.
A butcher's window is the most honest advertising there is, because what hangs in it is exactly what you are buying. That is the whole logic. A record built on a guttural voice dredged out from under a floor and guitars that saw through a riff instead of playing it cannot go out wearing a photograph of five men leaning on a bar without lying to the person holding it. Once the audience worked that out, escalation stopped being a conspiracy and became the market functioning. Every sleeve had to promise at least as much as the last one delivered.
Cannibal Corpse pushed that promise as far as it has ever gone. Butchered at Birth was recorded at Morrisound in Tampa with Scott Burns and released by Metal Blade on 1 July 1991, and Vince Locke painted the front in watercolour: two dead surgeons at work in a delivery room where the surgery has already gone as wrong as surgery can go. It is exactly as bad as it sounds and there is nothing more worth saying about the image itself. Chris Barnes said his jaw dropped to the floor when he first saw it and called it the ultimate death metal album cover. Brian Slagel, the man paying for it, called it one of the greatest covers he had ever seen. Shops across the United States answered by refusing to sell the record to anybody under eighteen, which is a review as much as a restriction.
Where the pictures actually came from
None of this was invented in a bedroom in 1989. Every image in the genre has a parent, and the parents are more respectable than the children.
Four bloodlines feed the whole tradition. The EC horror comics of the early fifties, Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, hauled in front of a United States Senate subcommittee in 1954 for doing precisely what death metal was accused of doing forty years later. The poster art of the drive in and then of the video shelf. Plates lifted out of pathology and forensic publishing, pictures never meant to be looked at by anybody except a coroner. And fine art, which is the bloodline nobody expects.
Recorded at Morrisound across January and February 1991 and released by Earache on 22 May of that year, Morbid Angel's Blessed Are the Sick carries on its front a painting called Les Tresors de Satan, oil on canvas, 258 by 268 centimetres, finished in 1895 by the Belgian Symbolist Jean Delville and held by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. Delville lived from 1867 to 1953 and meant the picture as a warning against sensual greed: a sepulchral underwater scene of sleepers drowning in their own jewellery. The band took a museum piece and put their logo across the top of it.
Nobody objected. Not a distributor, not a review board, not a shop. That tells you what the objection was ever actually about, and it was not the picture.
The airbrush, then the mouse
Technique decided as much as taste did. Ed Repka, born on 22 October 1960, gave Death its first three faces with Scream Bloody Gore in 1987, Leprosy in 1988 and Spiritual Healing in 1990, painted Possessed's Beyond the Gates and Massacre's From Beyond, built the skull mascot that has fronted Megadeth for four decades, and became the house painter of a style whose records he does not particularly listen to. His own taste, he has said, runs to punk and to the Misfits.
The airbrush is why those covers look the way they do. It will not do accident. It gives flat gradients, saturated colour and lighting borrowed wholesale from a cinema poster, and one sleeve took weeks of masking and spraying to finish. Then the tools got cheap. From the middle of the nineties a cover could be assembled in an afternoon out of stock renders, digital chrome and a filter dragged across a photograph, and the flood that followed is the weakest period of sleeve art the genre has had. Easier tools, worse pictures. That correlation is not an accident either.
Sorting out who did what, which of them were trained painters, which were comics artists working outside music altogether and which one was still seventeen when the first commission arrived, is the business of the Death Metal Album Cover Artists, because a surprisingly small number of hands carried the whole tradition.
The bands who proved it was a choice
If the imagery were a law of the genre, nobody could have broken it and stayed inside. Plenty did.
Death walked away from the monster and lost nothing by it. Human came out on Relativity on 22 October 1991, cut at Morrisound with Scott Burns and Chuck Schuldiner producing, carrying a Rene Miville image and not a severed thing anywhere on it. Carcass made the same move harder. Five years after a sleeve built out of medical photographs, Heartwork went out on Earache on 18 October 1993 in Britain and on Columbia on 11 January 1994 in the United States, recorded at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool with Colin Richardson, wearing a sculpture by H. R. Giger called Life Support.
Immolation put Andreas Marschall's inverted religious imagery on Dawn of Possession, released by Roadrunner on 16 July 1991 and recorded at Musiclab in Berlin with Harris Johns. Bolt Thrower painted war and nothing else for a quarter of a century. Nile went to Egypt and never came back. Not one of them was accused of going soft, because all of them kept the contract. They simply promised something other than an operating table.
I have bought records off the front alone, standing in a shop with no information beyond a painting and a logo, and been right more often than that method deserves. It is the trick this genre worked out before anybody else did. A picture that tells the truth about the noise inside it is worth more than any advertisement that could have been bought for it. The full account of how the noise itself got made, the roots, the boom and the revival, is a longer story than the pictures are. But the pictures arrived first, and for most people they are still the door.
