Rotten pocket

For someone who's nominally a death metal musician, I don't attend many purebred death metal shows. In this day and age, most metal bills are heterogeneous. This state of affairs is probably for the best. It's hard to absorb four straight hours of any style of metal, and death metal tends to batter the ears into numbness more quickly than most others.

So last night's lineup at Gramercy Ballroom was an oddity. Grave, one of Sweden's most stalwart DM acts, headlined a package that also included Norway's Blood Red Throne, California's Pathology, and Florida's Gigan. Gramercy is a large venue for bands of this sort, and its excellent sight lines and mercifully restrained volume levels exposed the dramatic differences between four bands who nominally play the same style of music.

The above song demonstrates how heavily Gigan relies on texture. Their compositions are zany--guitars squiggle and chirp over jittery blastbeats and baroque fills. Gigan codify their sound with their liberal use of effects processors and noise washes. Those digital squawks and drones transform them from "technical death metal" into "alien death metal."


If you've ever seen an 'extreme' metal band of any sort live, you've experienced the poor aural fidelity that accompanies most such performances. Bands that play extremely fast and rely heavily on fine details often suffer the most from this problem, and Gigan were no exception. The band's new one-guitar lineup did nothing to help matters. All that ambiance from the record? Basically gone, as sole guitarist Eric Hersemann has no choice but to focus on his tortured riffing. Gigan are my favorite band of the bunch, but turned in the worst performance (aside from Pathology, who I don't care enough about to discuss).

Blood Red Throne didn't suffer from the same issues. This band does not share Gigan's messy technological fixation. Their thrashy DM is pure plug'n'play. BRT are also hardened veterans. Between them, guitarist Død and bassist Erlend Caspersen have recorded with seventeen metal bands. They know what they're doing.

Blood Red Throne take a few theatrical cues from black metal. They took the stage to a nominally menacing ambient track, and vocalist Vald rocks a bloodstained beater and Kerry-sized gauntlets. These aesthetic tics fade before the band's wall of riffs. Their machine-like rhythms often sound dry on record. Not so in person. You can't really dance to death metal, but Blood Red Throne's march-tempo breakdowns make the idea strangely appealing.

Like American thrash, Swedish death metal has a Big Four. Of these, Entombed are the most ambitious, Dismember the catchiest, and Unleashed the most consistent. Grave are the heaviest--the "deathiest," in a way.

When a band focuses on vocals and guitars as overtly as Grave does, it's easy to overlook their rhythm section.  Ronnie Bergerståhl and Tobias Christiansson don't call attention to themselves. Neither of them is terribly precise. They play fast when the guitars play fast and play slow when the guitars do likewise.

But they have that most ephemeral and most necessary of rhythm-section attributes: feel. When the band drops into the monster grooves that define their sound, Ronnie and Tobias lay back. Not too much; just enough to open up space for Ola Lindgren's rotting power chords and all-too-human bellow. Every half-decent arena rock band from Led Zeppelin onward has mastered this trick. Grave use it better than just about anyone in the death metal world. And when they do it live, you hope the procession of slow-downs will never end.