Death Metal on vo.rs

Growled Vocals: How to Scream for Twenty Years

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Opeth: Mikael Åkerfeldt's Long Goodbye to Growling

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

In 2011 one of the best death metal bands in the world put out an album with no death metal on it, and split its own audience clean down the middle. That album was Heritage, the band was Opeth, and the man who did it on purpose was Mikael Åkerfeldt, following his own taste off a cliff he had been walking towards for years.

Opeth formed in Stockholm in 1989, and Åkerfeldt took the wheel early, becoming the songwriter, guitarist, lead vocalist and guiding intelligence of the whole project. For roughly two decades they were the most sophisticated death metal band going — a group that treated brutality and beauty as equal partners, and swung between them inside a single ten-minute song. That combination is the thing to understand about Opeth, because it explains both the greatness and the eventual divorce with half their fans.

The Blast Beat: How the Double-Kick Conquered Metal

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

There is a sound at the far end of loud music that stops feeling like drumming and starts feeling like weather. Kick, snare and cymbal fire together at a speed the human ear cannot separate into individual hits, and the whole thing becomes a wall of grey static with a pulse buried in it. That is the blast beat, and once you know how it is built you cannot un-hear it — in the pit it is the difference between a fast song and a genuinely overwhelming one.

Baest: Aarhus Death Metal With a Butcher's Confidence

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Hatesphere and Illdisposed: Danish Death Metal's Workhorses

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 +0000