Suburbia, Summer and Death Metal

I never really like death metal, despite the fact that I always felt I should. I had spent my teenage years listening to thrash metal and hardcore - the faster, heavier and mroe intense the better. I was aghast when the bands I loved - thanks to the commercial success of bands such as Metallica and Megadeth - began to aim for such mainstream success themselves with albums that were lighter, slower, and often contained dreadful, dreadful 'ballads'. Death metal seemed a reaction to this, even more concerned with a single-minded intensity than thrash ahd been. It was faster for one - with metal's first excursions into the realm of the 'blast beat'. The lyrics were all concerned with horror, death, zombies and decay (One commentator later wrote about death metal that the two main lyrical themes were 'apathy and disease'). Death metal appeared to have everything I wanted in metal. From 1989 - 1992 I would buy the occasional death metal album when they turned up. Some I liked (Obituary, Morbid Angel) while others I found interesting, but always felt like I should like them better than I did (Benediction, Dismember, Entombed, Cannibal Corpse etc etc).
I never loved any death metal band as I had done with thrash, and no band equalled my love of teenage heroes such as Voivod, Kreator, Sodom, Whiplash, Razor or Bulldozer.
Over the summer of 1992 this vague interest exploded into an odd fascination with the genre, all thanks to a cheap compilation of death metal bands I had bought from Our Price in Uxbridge. Over that summer I remember listening to bands such as Immolation, Unleashed, Baphomet, Deceased, Cancer, Monstrosity, Sentenced, Impaled, Gorguts, Therion and Vader. I invested a lot of time (and money) in death metal, and spent many a happy hour listening to the records in my bedroom while playing the computer game 'Elite' on my Amstrad CPC 464... unfortunately I never really loved them, like I had done with bands from the preceding thrash genres... It became a kind of game to me - could I learn to love death metal? Death metal seemed to require a more intellectual than emotional response, a conscious studying - almost an aural observation - of the riffs and the lyrics. listening to the sounds and not feeling for the emotion. Listening to death metal became a discipline in strange abstraction.
Summer moved to autumn and winter, and I lost interest in death metal, because there were other new metal genres which actually were emotionally and imaginatively exciting. There was the second generation of black metal including Darkthrone, Emperor, Mayhem, Immortal and the burgeoning doom scene involving such groups as Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, Anathema and The Gathering. There was a certain wild experimentation wehich infected the various extreme metal sub-genres. Death metal, in its single minded obsessiveness began to seem more and more conservative and disappointingly one-dimensional.

I still return to death metal every now and again, go through these phases of trying to find some emotional or imaginative response to the genre. It never quite works, but my fascination with it, and my fascination with my own fascination continues. I'm going through one such period now, and my most played bands on my i-pod over the last few months include Bloodbath, Autopsy, Living Sacrifice and Vallenfyre.

One thing which has become apparent - and what I have actually noticed before - is that I associate death metal with summer, and more specifically, a certain type of summer. I don't think we really get summers like this in Brighton - too close to the sea perhaps, as the summery landscapes that death metal describes is a very inland one. Death metal is the sound of suburbia, but not just the suburbia of neat and tidy gardens where the air tastes of sun-sticky tarmac and car-metal, but another kind of summer. A summer where weeds grow in wild tangles of fecund obscenity, and deep roadside ditches are choked full of poisoned flowers and head high grasses, summers full of the dark green of shadows of clustered ferns and rhododendron conspiracies, of the languorous winding of canals full of sky and emptiness and Sunday walks with the dog. There is an odd frenzied element to this deep in summer where the landscape becomes feral and feverish and feels oddly infected with too much life. Often in these dripping summer topographies there will be signs of human intervention, but an intervention that is decaying in a strangely elegant and mysterious fashion; brick walls once belonging to a factory that no longer exists, overflow pipes that have been dry for years sticking out of the stained stone walls of footbridges over August-shallow rivers. I remember back in Worcester, two years ago, seeing what looked like to be a chimney rising up out of a chaos of rhododendrum leaves by the side of the Severn.

Deep summrs are strange places - contain strange places, but even the most mundane of places sometimes achieve an oddly portentious anxiety. I remember over the summer of 1992 leaving the doctors in Ickenham. I had had to get jabs for a holiday in Tunisia, and I remember listening a Gorguts song ('Drifting Remains' about a group of people lost at sea on a raft; 'It was a sunny day, our nice trip turned to gore'). I was crossing Swakeleys Road listening to this song, preoccupied with all manner of morbid thoughts. 'People like me' I thought 'walk with out own mortality'. By the time I had got to the other side of Swakeleys Road, I had (correctly) thought that this was quite a pretentious thing to think, but looking back on it, at a distance of twenty years, I did have some kind of point. The upcoming flight made me nervous (I hadn't flown since returning from Malta back in 1976 or 1977) and Tunisia, in my imagination, had become a country of deserts and serial killers and secret police and miscarriages of justice. I began to become convinced that we would all be arrested and sentenced to death, framed for drug smuggling or something equally ridiculous. I remember Philip having a dream I took to be some kind of premonition. In the dream he had entered a room where there were four coffins on a table, a coffin for each of us who were going to Tunisia. When we were in Tunisia Philip had another dream. In this one he died. He was quite shook up by the dream - in the dream he saw his own coffin carried onto the plane, and then his own funeral. In this dream he was some kind of disembodied, disinterested observer. We all became quite shaken too, and discussed catching an earlier flight back, convinced that Philip's dream meant the plane was going to crash. Nothing even remotely sinister happened. I'm just glad that we weren't in Tunisia when 9/11 happened. (I was in Malta instead - well a few days afterwards - thats another story). I do remember playing Philip an Unleashed track on the plane trip back though. He looked offended and said 'it sounds like a bunch of grunting pigs!'. I was quite pleased with this reaction.

Even now death metal captures that slight paranoid anxiety I associate with August heat and the outer London suburbs of my late teens and early twenties. I remember the river that ran through Ickenham, staring down reedy embankments into the shallow brown water that stank of overgrowing weeds and brackish liquid. This is the smell of death metal and deep summers, of late adolescence and days in a hot dusty room listening to records that I never really liked, no matter how hard I tried.