I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Every other revival in metal has been a matter of attitude. Play it harder, play it faster, put the denim back on. This one is a matter of specification, and that is what makes it strange enough to be worth a whole article. A band working in this style is not reaching for a feeling. It is reaching for a parts list, and the list is precise enough that two strangers on opposite sides of the world can build the same machine from it without ever speaking.
The scene that grew out of that list, its labels, its cassettes and its two genuinely new offshoots, is the subject of the chapter on the old school death metal revival. This piece takes the narrower question. What exactly is being copied, who does the copying well, and at what point does a good copy become an outright forgery? If you want the ground all of it stands on, the genre in full runs from 1983 forward.
The specification
Write the list out and the movement stops sounding mystical. A guitar tuned low and driven through a discontinued Boss HM-2 with the controls at the stop, or a pedal built to imitate one. A drum kit recorded as a drum kit, with the room audible and no samples replacing the kick. No click track governing the arrangement, so the tempo breathes by a beat or two and the band sounds like four people rather than a grid. Riffs built out of four or five parts, not fourteen. Blast beats used as punctuation. A vocal dragged out from somewhere under the floor and left there.
Then the objects around the music, which matter just as much. A painted sleeve rather than a rendered one, preferably by a hand that was working in 1991. A logo that is illegible on purpose. A demo before the album, on cassette, in an edition of a hundred or two. A seven inch that costs more to press than it will ever recover.
None of that is nostalgia in the soft sense. It is a set of technical constraints, chosen deliberately, in the way a photographer chooses to shoot film. Constraint is the point: every item on the list removes an option that modern equipment would otherwise hand the band for free, and what comes back in exchange is weight.
Every item on the list removes an option that modern equipment would otherwise hand the band for free. What comes back in exchange is weight.
Sweden reopened its own case
Sweden went first because Sweden had the most to reopen. Repugnant made a deliberate reproduction of 1990 before anyone had a word for the exercise, Bloodbath made it respectable, and after that the country produced a decade of bands who treated the Stockholm sound as a living form rather than a period costume.
Entrails are the emblem of the whole business, because their story is a loop rather than a line. Jimmy Lundqvist formed the band in 1990, half the line-up left in 1994, and by 1998 he had stopped writing for it altogether. Ten years later he found the old recordings in a box of tapes, decided they should have been released properly the first time, and rebuilt the band around them. FDA Rekotz signed the reactivated version in 2010 and Tales from the Morgue came out that year. A record from 1990 finally reaching shops in 2010, made by the same man, on a label that did not exist when it was written.
Morbus Chron took the opposite road. Formed in Stockholm in 2007, they made Sleepers in the Rift for Pulverised in 2011, which is a fine example of the specification worked properly, and then made Sweven for Century Media in 2014, which throws most of the specification away in favour of something twisting and half lit that has almost no antecedent in the genre at all. Daniel Ekeroth, who wrote the book on Swedish death metal, has called them one of the few genuinely breaking new ground. They split in 2015, two albums in, having done the thing and then refused to repeat it.
Tribulation did the same manoeuvre over a longer distance. The Horror in 2009 sits squarely inside the parts list and means every word of it. Four albums later the band was playing something closer to gothic rock with corpse paint on, and the two ends of that catalogue barely acknowledge each other.
America, and the limit case
The American wing arrived later and split in two. One half simply plays the style: Skeletal Remains, formed in California in 2011 and originally called Anthropophagy, put out Beyond the Flesh in 2012, a record that aims squarely at the sound Tampa was making in 1991 and hits it. Bands like that are working inside a form, exactly as a band in 1991 worked inside a form.
The other half went further, and Gruesome is where the argument gets sharp. Matt Harvey of Exhumed and Gus Rios of Malevolent Creation had been playing in the Death to All tribute project, decided they would rather write new material in that idiom than keep performing somebody else's, and brought in Daniel Gonzalez of Possessed and Robin Mazen. Savage Land came out on Relapse on 21 April 2015, recorded at Riversound Studios in Fort Lauderdale, twelve songs written to sound like Death in 1987 and 1988. They then hired Ed Repka, the artist who had painted Death's early sleeves, to do the cover, and James Murphy played a guest solo on one track.
That is the limit case and it is worth being honest about it. Gruesome are excellent and they are also, by their own account, a reconstruction. Everybody involved knows it, nobody pretends otherwise, and the record is better for the absence of pretence. The problem only arrives with the bands who do the same thing without saying so.
The far end, where nobody is copying anything
Then there is the wing that took the specification and used it to make something the eighties never attempted. Undergang formed in Copenhagen in the summer of 2008 and have released everything through Dark Descent and Me Saco Un Ojo, singing in Danish over a sound that is less old school than simply old: sluggish, wet, closer to early Finnish records and to goregrind than to anything from Tampa or Stockholm. Nothing in 1991 sounded like that, because nobody in 1991 wanted to.
Horrendous, formed in 2009, started inside the specification and quietly turned into the best songwriters of their generation, at which point the question of what they are reviving stopped being interesting. Molder and Outer Heaven came up the same way. The pattern repeats often enough to be a rule: the bands who take the parts list most seriously at the start are the ones most likely to abandon it, and the ones who treat it as a costume tend to still be wearing it a decade later.
Where homage stops
So here is the line, and it is not drawn where the purists put it. A band is not a forgery because it uses the pedal, the painter and the cassette. It is a forgery when the parts list is the only thing holding the record together, when you can hear the checklist being worked through and there is no song underneath it. That failure is audible within about ninety seconds and it has nothing to do with which decade the band thinks it is living in. Bad records were made to this specification in 1991 too, in far greater numbers than anybody now remembers.
The good ones share one property. Whatever the sleeve and the tone are doing, the writing is not looking over its shoulder. Incantation have made records to roughly the same specification without interruption since 1992 and nobody calls them a revival band, which tells you the word is doing something other than describing music. What it is actually doing, and where the acronym came from, is what does osdm mean.
