Does truly great heavy metal require some sort of melody? I’m sure the knee jerk response from many metalheads will be a hearty “Hell no!” But melody doesn’t have to mean playing a grand piano over guitar riffs. In this Debate Team post, Joseph Ohegyi of the great Geek Down blog and I debate the necessity of melody in metal. For me, metal requires some sort of melody, whether major or minor key, to harness its full power, while for Joseph, it’s the very lack of melody that excites him, creating a thrilling sense of detachment from all previous musical forms. At the end of the debate, I’ve included mp3s of many of the bands mentioned.
Daniel: When I was fifteen, I was obsessed with listening to the hardest and craziest music out there, whether punk or metal. Having a spent two years listening to various strains of punk, from anarcho punk to Oi! to hardcore, I was bored and looking for something new, something that was more than just minor variations on three chord punk.
On a whim, I bought an LP copy of Necropolis, by the Minneapolis crust punk band Destroy!, and my mind was blown, and not entirely in a good way. The band played impossibly fast, heavily tuned down hardcore punk that borrowed far more from death metal than it did from, say, 7 Seconds or Minor Threat. The vocals were unintelligible without a lyric sheet and the singers alternated screaming their lyrics in high pitched squeals and barking them in exaggerated, Cookie Monster sounding baritones.
Listening to the album with my friend Brian, who at the time played in a hardcore punk band with me, I felt confused as to how to react to such harsh and abrasive music. It was clear that this was a new extreme and I could either reject it as too noisy and ugly, which my ears were telling me to do, or I could seize onto it as the hardest, most fucked up music I’d ever heard, a new standard for all music to be judged by, as in “Ah, dude, this is nothing compared to Destroy!”
Of course, I did the latter. High on the exhilaration of listening to music too corrosive for most ears, I declared myself a fan of only the most extreme of genres, like power violence and grindcore. The former, owner of perhaps one the most self-explanatory genre names this side of sadcore, was represented by bands like Capitalist Casualties, Spazz, Man Is the Bastard, and Crossed Out, and was characterized by constant, violent shifts in tempo, with two minute songs featuring two or three cycles of ungodly slow dirges hurtling forward into blast-beat explosions of noise. Grindcore, represented by bands like Napalm Death (who pretty much invented the genre), Brutal Truth, Carcass, and Agoraphobic Nosebleed, was more influenced by death and thrash metal and sounded like the blast beat mayhem of power violence, only with more technically skilled musicians and higher production values.
I remember buying Carcass’ Reek of Putrefaction at Wherehouse Music and listening to it twice in one sitting, pushing myself towards the second listen just so I could condition my body not to tense up in reaction to the music. It’s a painful record to listen to, and I mean that partly as a compliment. Full of song after song of short, merciless grindcore and with lyrics cribbed right out of the grossest sections of medical textbooks, the album is an undisputed classic, and in my opinion, the closest thing ever to pure grindcore. But it was never something I enjoyed, only something I endured for the thrill of having endured it, like a gang initiation or a dangerous stunt.
Now that I’m older and slowly getting back into metal, I realize that I can’t listen to bands like Carcass because their music eschews the one thing I require of almost everything I listen to: melody. Not melody in the sense of pretty notes and chords, but melody in the pure sense of notes that can be registered by the human ear. This requirement can’t be met by shrieking, blast beat-addict grindcore bands nor death metal bands whose guitars are tuned so low you can’t hear chord progressions.
Joseph: I’m glad you highlighted the boundary-pushing sensory experience that the harshest styles of metal create. That’s a huge part of its appeal for me, but there’s another related aspect that plays a part in my favorite grindcore and death metal: rhythm. Metal’s rhythm is what inspires the headbang.
The “chug” guitar sound is what comes to mind when I try to think of a rhythmic example that’s unique to metal. It’s almost definitive. A chugging riff can contain melody, like in classic and thrash metal, but it doesn’t have to. When death and grind dropped the recognizable melody in the mid-’80s, the bands relied on an a-melodic chug for their main structural basis. With the downtuned guitars you mentioned and dissonant, chromatic riffs, chugged guitar lines transform into just another rhythmic element of the music alongside the drums. For me, this transformation just brings the music closer to metal’s primal, headbanging essence. It’s less about creating relatable, recognizable melody than disorienting your logical brain enough to hit those hedonistic caveman pleasure zones with sheer rhythm.
The harsh vocal style that started in metal around the same time as the tuneless guitar riffs is less rhythmic so its appeal is harder for me to pinpoint. I think maybe I’m still at the point you describe as being “high on the exhilaration” of all this corrosive music. It’s still absurd and amazing whenever I hear someone shredding their throat to pieces. My favorite example to point to is this live video of Pig Destroyer’s vocalist JR Hayes continuing to perform even after the microphone breaks. It’s approaching the same primal headspace that the instruments are, but by assaulting your instincts rather than your sense of rhythm. Hearing a person scream is inherently unsettling. To follow this line of thinking, I’m now ready to say that this kind of a-melodic music provides me with a more thrilling, visceral experience than any melodic music can provide.
With that said, of course, I’m ignoring the potential emotional aspects of music in my argument. I don’t think I could sustain listening to only extreme metal, because that type of visceral experience starts to wear me down and I eventually need respite. That’s when I break out the melodies. However, it usually isn’t melodic metal, but some other style of music that I turn to. I’d like to know, when you were most entrenched in extreme metal did you listen to it exclusively?
To answer your question “When you were most entrenched in extreme metal, did you listen to it exclusively” the answer, of course, is no. But I’m curious why you choose to skip over “melodic metal” and go straight to non-metal when searching for melodic music. Do you find metal with melody lacking in some way?
I’m interested that you bring up rhythm as one of the appeals of extreme metal. If the purpose is to, in your words, “hit those hedonistic caveman pleasure zones with sheer rhythm,” why use the blast beat? For me, blast beat can barely be considered rhythm. A 4/4 beat played insanely fast creates almost zero rhythmic tension. Also, playing such a simplistic rhythm that fast creates the opposite effect of what’s intended; it actually slows the music down as opposed to speeding it up. Since the ear can’t possibly hear every single separate beat, what it does hear sounds more like a dirge than a burst of speed.
And while that clip of the dude from Pig Destroyer is interesting and an amazing example of the dedication and intensity of so many extreme metal vocalists, it also reveals the limitations of that kind of vocal style. Sure, many metal fans will argue that there are countless different variations of screaming and yelling vocals, but in my opinion, it’s inherently limiting. For me, those kind of vocals discard so much of what I appreciate about a singer’s voice. It’s things like timbre, accent, diction, and range that define singers and their personalities, and when those are dropped in favor of what sounds like primal scream therapy, it frustrates me as a listener.
I’ll give you props for making a bold statement like “a-melodic music provides me with a more thrilling, visceral experience than any melodic music can provide,” but I definitely have to disagree. For me, it’s the mixture of melody and heaviness that makes great metal, whether it be Black Sabbath’s “Children of the Grave,” Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” At the Gates’ “Blinded By Fear,” or Sleep’s “Dragonaut,” just to cite a few examples. In these songs, the melody acts as an anchor for the huge riffs, giving them the perfect form to release their power. Too often I hear metal bands whose riffs sound unfinished, because they’re content with almost any combination of chords as long as they’re played fast and loud.
I find melodic metal lacking in terms of what I go to extreme metal for, which is that animalistic thrill I mentioned, where I can barely hold myself back from punching the sky when a sick part hits. I mean, that’s not to say melodic metal doesn’t have sick parts (all the songs you mentioned do), but I’ve never heard a melodic metal song that makes me lose my shit like, say, Suicide Silence’s “Wake Up”. Funny though, listening to the song right now, the part that wrecks is the chorus, which is the second-most melodic part of the song. Maybe a healthy juxtaposition/contrast can do it for me.
I agree with you about both blastbeats and vocals. I usually don’t prefer blastbeat-exclusive death or grind. You’re right to say there’s no tension there. To bring up juxtaposition/contrast again, my favorite metal bands balance the blastbeats with groovier parts or breakdowns, either throughout the album or within the song. Some albums that do this well are Pig Destroyer’s Phantom Limb, Assück’s Misery Index and Ion Dissonance’s Solace. There’s a distinct tension resolving when those bands hit the more rhythmic parts after a minute of blasts. I should say the amount of extreme metal bands I enjoy is a small minority; I can’t defend the genre as a whole because like with every genre of music, there’s a ton of crap.
With harsh vocals, you’re right again to say that there is little room for expression that more traditional vocal styles can provide, but I’m not really looking for expression or nuance in metal. The easier it is for me to appreciate the sound as-is on the surface without applying too much intellect or interpretation, the harder it hits me. I prefer to detach, which music so alien-sounding allows for. When I can hear the blues or classical influence behind a more melodic metal song, there’s an attachment to the past and real-world shit that brings me down to earth and kills the primal escapism that I’m looking for. Two recent black metal bands have approached similar ideas in interviews. I’ll end with a quote from each.
Liturgy’s Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: “The album art is supposed to represent transcendence, which for us means an ecstatic encounter with the present; a violent, apocalyptic, cosmic joy. And a shattering of ego. But then there’s also a certain impossibility of that encounter, like a withdrawing horizon.”
Wolves in the Throne Room’s Aaron Weaver: “For us the physical act of playing the music, the wrenching physicality of it is the method that allows the transformation of consciousness. I think it’s not just me. I think that both the guitar players are just as physically involved as I am on the drums just through the intense movement and the intensity of the vocals and that sort of thing.”
Carcass – Carbonized Eye Sockets
Buy Carcass’ Reek of Putrefaction
Pig Destroyer – Deathtripper
Buy Pig Destroyer’s Phantom Limb
Black Sabbath – Children of the Grave
Buy Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality
