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February 3, 2023
T Coles' Playlist for Their Book "Death Metal"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
T Coles' Death Metal is a fascinating and compelling history of the genre.
In their own words, here is T Coles' Book Notes music playlist for their book Death Metal:
Death Metal was written over the final part of the UK's lockdown, and was finished as things were starting to open up. My year of writing was spent in Zoom calls with musicians, picking over music books I bought a decade ago, and reckoning with something I loved as a teen. With fresh eyes the main challenge was how to communicate its awesome power to newcomers, and to explain why I still enjoyed it over a decade later. These are many of the songs that went into the book, tracks from the genre and those that have been inspired by it. They kept me together over a few difficult years.
Possessed - Death Metal
Lots of art concerns death – the only thing that everyone will eventually experience – so it's not surprising that heavy metal would catch up. Earlier styles solidified the bombast of heavy guitar music, the theatrics and warrior aesthetic, and by the mid-'80s death metal channelled that into darker territory. Now the voice was distorted and ugly, a far cry from Iron Maiden or Judas Priest, all the better for describing botched surgeries and zombie rituals. Possessed's Seven Churches is the genre's ground zero, and Death Metal is a rallying cry, featuring hordes of the freshly risen dead reanimated with malicious intent. Death is not only inevitable, its advance has been accelerated.
Cannibal Corpse - Hammer Smashed Face
It's difficult to describe songs like this without the help of industrial machinery. This song is like being pounded by meat hammers, or ground into a pulp. Every snare beat compels the body to move like animals trapped in a slaughterhouse. The bass solo is a tiny moment of calibration before the machines start up again. This song moves in disgusting movements – it drags its arms behind it, grinds like rusty saws dragged across the ground, and then oozes back into its hiding holes. I love every inch of it just as much as when I was 13.
Napalm Death - You Suffer
"You Suffer" is the world's shortest song, on an album which has a fascinatingly strange history. The whole band – bar the drummer – quit after the first half was recorded, leaving stalwart percussionist Mick Harris to put the project back together, in time for it to suddenly balloon in popularity thanks to John Peel's assistance. The record is dour but completely self-aware, the rapid songs eventually leading to sly self-parody. You Suffer is a mercilessly sharp shock, which surprises and delights every time I add it to a playlist and forget about it. It's ugly, stupid, and completely magic.
The Mountain Goats - The best ever death metal band out of Denton
In 2010, having just started university, a cooler older pal told me about the Mountain Goats. I was very keen to make new friends so I searched for them immediately. This was the first thing that came up and I was never quite sure if it was on death metal's side or not. It felt earnest, but at the time I assumed death metal was a joke to everyone. I later learned that John Darnielle was a bona-fide metal fan, not only writing his own 33 1/3 on Black Sabbath's Master of Reality but de-railing his podcast I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats to talk about Summoning. This song is about the elemental power of heavy music, yearning for the future, and delighting in obscurity when no-one else is around who gets it.
Carcass – Heartwork
One of the mysteries of death metal is that it works with melody. The people who made it will tell you they were simply listening to Iron Maiden and Thin Lizzy as kids, and wanted to make music like that when they were older, tinged with the malevolent power of extreme metal. On one level it works because it's still about death, which is complicated – we can imagine someone recalling fond memories as they slip away, or the sweet almond taste of cyanide. To me, this communicates a point a little better, marking the point where death metal got bored with sounding as horrible and muddy as it could. It is a contrast, and maybe one that contradicts itself, but from that tension comes vital tracks that I happen to quite like.
Venom Prison - Perpetrator Emasculation
Early death metal owed a lot to horror movies – Possessed literally covered The Exorcist theme on their debut record. There simply wasn't much material that covered these bases – you were limited to Venom records, wrestling, or horror films. This meant that a lot of the tropes in horror which have aged poorly are present throughout, which sadly includes a deeply-ingrained misogyny. 'Perpetrator Emasculation,' performed by Venom Prison, whose singer Larissa Stupar takes a prominent voice through the end of the book, reimagines this violence as a revenge taken against a rapist. There is some debate as to whether this is an ideal outcome. But as a song it is starkly ferocious, and hits deeper than a lot of the material it's reacting to, one of the darkest death metal tracks to release over the past decade.
Death – Painkiller
Death's Sound of Perseverance is an astonishing end to a fruitful career. It swings from musings on sensuality in "Flesh and the Power it Holds," the depths of isolation and mental illness in "Spirit Crusher" and steely-nerved stoicism in "Bite the Pain." The Judas Priest cover that rounds off the record is disarmingly silly, a sly nod to how daft death metal can be and a course readjustment after an album of very serious material. The last scream of “pain!” is lots of things – overwrought, anguished, mawkish, it's an almighty moment to end on. Ultimately this was the cap to their studio albums, a sly nod that they weren't taking everything seriously all the time, a little parting gift to us in case we start reading too deep into everything.
KLF vs Extreme Noise Terror – 3AM Eternal
At the 1992 Brits, the KLF appeared with "Extreme Noise Terror." Their collaborative version of the staggeringly popular dance track mangled it beyond recognition, stripping back the layers and mysticism of the KLF and reducing – or elevating – it to a sledgehammer stomp. The KLF's own history is baffling, and a collaboration with extreme metal is perhaps not surprising. What is significant is that, for 27 years, this moment signalled the end of their career as musicians. This is best experienced with the live footage of the awards crowd completely baffled. I like to think that as the KLF tanked their career, ENT picked up at least a few fans.
Job For A Cowboy - Entombment of a Machine
JFAC came up at a time when everyone thought death metal was largely dead, making use of newly-emerging social medias like MySpace. I completely glossed over this in the late 2000s when it dropped, and found myself deeply engaged in the whole thing. This is a testament to being a fool and coming back to something excellent, to live it for the first time all over again.
Full Tac and Lil Mariko - Where's my Juul??
Death metal is very old, and its influence can be found everywhere. This two minute track features rapper Full Tac berating her partner for losing her vape, an immediate death sentence. As her anger increases, so do her vocals get distorted. It got a mention in the book because it shows that death metal is everywhere – it's not popular, but it's not confined to the shadows either, no longer hidden behind apocryphal knowledge but available for anyone with access to Youtube, a spare afternoon, and a fascination with the morbid. The bubbling throb of the bass that explodes as her rage mounts did it for me, and I am morbidly fascinated how far up my Spotify list for this year it got.
T Coles is a writer and music journalist from Somerset, UK. They have worked as a contributing writer for the print magazines Terrorizer, Zero Tolerance and Discovered and websites The Quietus and Cvlt Nation. They play drums for Sail.
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