Warning: this article contains discussion of some disturbing and graphic subject matter.
Waking The Cadaver’s first album is certainly heavy, but not exactly… good
Truth be told, I’m not a big metal guy. I’m probably more into punk than anything else. That said, I do like a fair bit of it. I’m a huge fan of nu-metal bands like Slipknot and Korn, but also a lot of the more classic, brutal bands like Death, or Fear Factory, or even Napalm Death. I remember when I first came across Napalm Death with ‘Scum’, it was the biggest culture shock I’d ever experienced. There were these four Brummy guys, the guitar sounded like mud, the drums were pounding away at a million miles an hour, and the vocals were absolutely guttural and completely manic. It was amazing. For a white there I went down a bit of a grindcore/powerviolence rabbit hole, listening to bands like early Carcass, Siege, Infest, a lot of the ‘Bllleeeeaaauuurrrrgghhh!’ comps and Slap-A-Ham stuff, things like that. Dead Infection as well. So I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for not only metal, but particularly bits and pieces of the harder edged stuff.
The other day though, I came across something that made me seriously scratch my head. I was watching a YouTube video talking about the worst ranked brutal death metal albums, and a song that came up as an example from one of these albums was a song by a band called Waking the Cadaver. The song was called ‘Type A Secretor.’ Only after listening to that did I really think for the first time, “wow this is shit.” The guitars sounded horrific, the drums couldn’t keep time, the bass wasn’t even audible, and the vocals quite literally sounded like what happens when you flush a massive shit down your toilet with a rickety plumbing pipe. I thought to myself, “who the fuck even likes this stuff? what’s the appeal beyond ‘woahhh so brutal man’? Then it got me thinking, just where is that line? When does a song go from being enjoyably brutal, pummeling, and punishing, to just being an auditory nightmare? It’s obviously a very complex question, so, with help from one of my friends and huge metal fan, Jack, I thought I’d consider a few different perspectives and parameters to see if we can actually come to any definitive conclusion.
One of the things I find might actually have the most sway in arguments like this, weirdly, is the idea of novelty. When you’re dealing with music of such extremes, it’s naturally a question of, as i said earlier, what else it has going for it. In my head, comedy is a pretty valid one. There’s great examples of this throughout extreme music working very well. It’s clear with songs like ‘You Suffer’ that Napalm Death don’t take themselves too seriously, the SpongeBob inspired ‘Patrickviolence Demo’ from Goolagoon is frankly incredible, and the children’s TV intro on Doom’s ‘Terminal Filth Wimpcore Killer’ is a great example too. Not to mention the numerous practical jokes made throughout the career of A*** C***, like their album of saccharin love ballads. Those are all great, but I think I’ve found a better one.
In 1989, Huddersfield band Sore Throat released the album ‘Disgrace to the Corpse of Sid.’ If this was presented as a more regular grindcore album, I’d give you the argument you could make of it being brainless noise. That said, it’s precisely the presentation that gives it that separation. Aside from the 11 tracks on the b-side that are more standard crust punk songs, side A, by the band’s own admission is made up of 90 blasts of utter noise, where an unrelenting blast beat and essentially unintelligible muddy guitars bash away for almost 23 straight minutes. Where the comedy comes in is the vocals. The band seem very aware that what they’re doing is just tantamount to noise music, and so the decision to cake their voices in a series of harsh industrial robot effects really brings that home. You can almost hear them in the studio going “hey guys, heh heh, how about this? Aaaaaarrrgggh”, “huh huh, yeah man.” How do I know that their intentions are comedic? Well if the abstract ridiculousness of the concept in itself wasn’t enough, maybe them singing the Pearl and Dean advertising jingle, or despite clear and quite serious political overtones, track titles like ‘Let’s Go Brighton Bomb Torys’, ‘Let’s Go Stock Market Disembowel Yuppie’ and ‘P.M.R.C. All Perverts’ will be.
Jack made some great suggestions in this area as well, as he was able to point out many bands that wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable, or even that he avoided, because of the palpable silliness at hand. Black metal bands with names like ‘Destroyer 666’ and ‘Darkened Nocturnal Slaughtercult’ are so cartoonish it almost verges on total parody (despite making great music in Jack’s opinion), and the amusing sense of “get a load of this” he had when showing me Gutalax, a band that can only be described as “shitcore”, gave me a hearty belly laugh. I mean for God sake, as disgusting as it is, how is their logo being a cartoon of a spread bumhole, as well as titles like ‘Fart and Furious’ and ‘Vaginapocalypse’ not funny?
Another obvious element that plays a big part is the sonics of some of these albums. As I’ve said previously about Napalm Death’s ‘Scum’, with them not even having £250 to record the album, you’re not exactly going to get a George Martin production, but simultaneously, there’s an undeniable charm to the dirt and scuzz of the sound of both of those first two ND albums. In fact in general, I think a raw production style has added a great deal of charm to many similar records, where the dirtiness of it makes it oddly compelling, whether it is the Slap-A-Ham comps, Doom’s demo collection, or a lot of the great stuff Spazz or Discharge did over the years.
It is a strange one though, because if an album is more “normal sounding”, or at the very least slightly more competently recorded, it puts more emphasis on the musicality, which is often piss-poor, an so enjoyability plummets (Waking The Cadaver, i’ll get to you later). On the other hand though, for as enjoyably raw and grimy as a lot of these albums are, push it too far and you may as well just be listening to TV static. Others might sound bad, but at least you can discern a riff, or a beat, or something. The worst culprit for this is probably Black Metal. Firstly, I will admit that some of the rawer classic albums like Darkthrone’s ‘Transylvanian Hunger’ or (nazi bollocks aside) Burzum’s debut, while sounding less than stellar, do have a generally eerie, spine chilling vibe, for which I can certainly give credit. Put that in the hands of less capable musicians however, and the degree of credit I can give plummets through the floor.
Jack himself cited a few projects, Black Metal and otherwise, whose almost stubborn adherence to a deliberately crap sound made their music damn near unlistenable, including ‘Csarzi Swit’, ‘The Slamburglars’ and ‘Tougher Than Nails’, and he really wasn’t wrong. He also took time to lambast the deluge of crappy gorenoise bands where, not only do the lyrics and album covers genuinely make me feel a bit sick in some cases just because, well, what the fuck am I looking at?, but also because, as Jack put it, the fact that a lot of it is made by edgy 14 year olds in their bedrooms makes it so you’re very much laughing at them, not with them. Take one listen to bands like Phosgene and Lymphocytic (which I don’t recommend you do for the sake of your sanity), you may well agree.
Tougher Than Nails is hilariously bad, once described as “Westboro Baptist Church goes metal”
My next point is a bit of a shorter, abstract one, but I’ll try to explain it the best I can. For me, a lot of what makes punk or metal “brutal” is the sense of catharsis that comes along with it. We’ve all had it, where you hear a particularly gnarly riff or groove, and an especially manic vocal performance, and it makes you pull *that face*, like say ‘Soul Hacker’ from Fear Factory’ or ‘Grimm Frost’ from Witch Cult. It’s not just limited to slow, groovy tracks either. There’s been many times where a super fast blast beat or a noisy, wailing, tuneless guitar lead has got that exact same reaction, whether you’re talking about Siege on tracks like ‘Sad But True’, the intro to Conflict’s ‘Mental Mania’, Crass’ ‘Big Hands’, or any number of early tracks by Nails for instance.
A key factor in all of the above examples is the expression in the vocals. You can tell that Conflict and Nails are angry, and you can tell that Napalm Death and Crass are sick of people’s shit. Thus, the music they create seems like the end result of a gut emotional reaction, making the force behind the tracks hit all the harder, and this is where I think some modern bands fail. They’re engaging in an arms race to be the most brutal, most extreme, and most underground band with the muddiest guitars, most disgusting lyrics, and dirtiest vocals, and so in the process have become almost inhuman. It’s almost as if all the emotion or genuine weight is substituted for volume and noise, making it appear infinitely more cold and detached, which at least for me, greatly hinders its attempted brutality. It seems calculated and performative. It seems fake. It’s less “hey dude, check out that riff”, and more “hey dude, check out that disemboweled pig on the cover.”
I suppose as a brief add on to that as well, musicality obviously plays a part. Now I know that punk or metal musicians don’t exactly need to be classically trained, but they at least need to keep a steady beat going or a riff or something. Even with some of the more brutal stuff, there’s a blast beat you can tap along to, a refrain you can shout, or the odd guitar phrase you can hum along with, but once again, some bands, in trying to be as skull crushing as possible, forgo any musicality, to the point where the only enjoyment I can get out of it is laughing that the drummer for instance can’t keep a steady beat for more than five seconds before needing to “recharge.” Yet again, I’ll take the opportunity to single out Waking the Cadaver as the impetus for all this. Some of it is actually so unmusical that it may as well be noise music. I like some noise music, but it’s not what I would call brutal, more just generally abrasive. Then again, it’s barely music either, so take from that what you will.
The final point I would like to make is arguably the most complex of all, as a question I’ve held in my head since I first formulated this idea, without wanting to be a diktat of societal moral upkeep, is “does the pursuit of brutality and callousness cross moral boundaries?” Obviously I would never suggest that metal musicians, or musicians in general, have any kind of moral obligation, but there are times I think where the content, and more specifically the intent of the content can cross a line for me personally. I apologise if I ramble a bit here on in but hear me out. Shock and horror tactics are nothing new in extreme music. Goregrind godfathers Carcass on their first album, 1988’s ‘Reek of Putrefaction’, featured an album cover with a collage of spare autopsy parts and general gore. The thing I would say with Carcass though, is that they use the extremity as a way to portray the horrors of things like abortion, psychopathy and animal abuse, so there was some moral component to it. Then again, there are also many bands that use violence and brutality in a kind of horror, slasher movie way, where it is graphic, but general enough in its imagery to just generally shock, rather than out and out appaul.
Is there a line though? I think so. In my head, there are many ways to breach taboo topics, some of which are genuinely very uncomfortable, but that do serve a purpose. Take the power electronics group Whitehouse. They became infamous for their graphic and deeply disturbing lyrics about things like misogyny, nazism and sex abuse, but the band have consistently maintained that, while meant to shock, they are trying to make a wider point about the matters being discussed, such as portraying the horrors of such circumstances, rather than just to stoke shock value, which you will see if you read into them, although they are absolutely not for the faint hearted. This then leads me to my next point that, in terms of the extremes in metal music, it doesn’t seem like that same want to shed a light on depravity is there, as they instead seem to choose to revel in it. You can call me a prude or whatever, but after reading through the lyrics of songs like Waking the Cadaver’s ‘Pigtails are For F*********g’ or ‘Chased Through the Woods by a R****t’, and coming across bands like W**** Torture with songs like ‘Bitch R****g Time, it doesn’t seem like they’re exactly plunging the moral depths, but rather just being blatantly misogynistic, which is obviously very bad. I wouldn’t even say they’re approaching it in a way similar to films like ‘A Serbian Film’, where deeply sick imagery is used to convey a wider point. It seems to genuinely just be gore for gore’s sake. I don’t normally censor things, but I felt disgusted just typing it, and to be honest, I don’t think I’ll include nearly any examples here.
Whitehouse are known for their incredibly controversial, brutal, dark, lyrics, but unlike many gore/pornogrind bands, it’s not just for shock
The reason for this is either a sick and twisted sense of “humour”, displaying degeneracy to try and look cool, or just that, to put simply, they need their heads checked. Sure, you could make the ironic argument, but, call me mad, I don’t think it necessarily stands up, because it’s not as though the music is being presented in a way where it says “you’re supposed to disagree”, but more just “hey, look how gross we are.” Jack actually had an incredibly level headed take on the whole thing. He perhaps wasn’t as disgusted as me, but his reasoning was that it seemed to him like outrage was almost futile. Going down a bit of a rabbit hole, we found bands like Torsofuck, with songs covering topics like rape and even bestiality, and weirdly, all me and Jack could do was laugh. The reason was that Jack had essentially seized upon the fact that it wasn’t so much a pissing match in brutality, as it was a few idiots seeing if they can out-edgy each other, which he said would also explains the needlessly graphic covers of disembowelment or decapitated children or whatever else. If clearly all their trying to do is get a rise out of you, why the fuck would you even engage with it? So Jack didn’t. Wise move, man.
So at the end of all this, while the two of us haven’t exactly come to a definitive answer as to where the brutal/shit line is, I can say that maybe trying to figure it out is a bit of a fool’s errand in itself. At least personally, I think if all you’re looking for in music is pure brutality, you’re really barking up the wrong tree. It just seems such a waste when there are other metrics to quantify what you think good music is that seem much more important. What those metrics are is up to you. In addition though, if you truly believe brutality rules all, you may end up sucked into one of the darkest, most fucked up corners of the culture world that I guarantee you’ll never unsee, so just, tread carefully!
