“Sweden is generally made up of extremely small and boring towns. Gothenburg is the 2nd-biggest town, and it has less than 500,000 inhabitants. Most towns host about 25,000 people. There is simply not much else for youngsters to do than take up sports or start a band.”
“Apart from occasional appearances at youth centers and school dances, there was no live scene to speak of for a long time.”
“Bathory and Candlemass were living proof that extreme music of superior quality could be produced in Sweden.”
“Seven Churches. In my opinion this is without a doubt the first death metal album.”
“Mick Harris is said to have invented two crucial terms: ‘blast beat’, to describe his insanely fast kick/snare drumbeat; and ‘grindcore’, to describe the resulting ultra-fast music.”
“When the earliest Swedish hard rock bands, such as November, started out around 1969, they were in fact more like heavy blues/rock bands with some psychedelic elements, rather than actual metal groups.” “Further, Swedish heavy metal never really caused any commotion, with perhaps the exception of Heavy Load.”
“I think the D in ‘D-beat’ originally referred to Discharge, but nobody seems to remember anymore.”
“Asocial are key to any survey of extreme music, due to their 1st official release, the 1982 demo How Could Hardcore Be Any Worse?”
“The crust band Agoni transformed into the speed metal band Agony. Members from Asocial started superior thrash band Hatred.”
“Still, no Norwegian band would ever create music that came near the pure evil darkness of Bathory. In my opinion, no one has yet done that.”
“Also like the cover of Venom’s debut, the picture was planned to be printed in gold. That was too expensive a color to use, though, so Quorthon asked the printer to do it as close to gold as possible. It turned out canary yellow. Quorthon thought it looked just awful—and truthfully, it does. The color was changed to white after the initial pressing of 1,000 copies. The first pressing of Bathory has become notorious as Gula Geten—The Yellow Goat—and has become one of the most valuable collectibles of extreme metal.”
“There are no band photos on the sleeve simply because Quorthon didn’t have any. Later, the refusal to include photos on Bathory’s first three albums was one of the aspects that made the band so mystical and scary”
“On the morning of September 27, Burton was crushed to death under Metallica’s tour bus in a tragic accident on the E4 highway outside Ljungby in southern Sweden.” “Metallica was already one of the most popular metal bands in Sweden—they were the favorite band of virtually everyone I knew. (…) In fact, a guy I knew tried to commit suicide after hearing the news that Cliff was gone. Extreme metal was that important for so many of us.”
“There isn’t a record that I hate as much as Under the Sign… There isn’t a second in the songs that I like. The sound is terrible, I sing like a crow, make solos like a pig, the feeling is dreadful, and there’s nothing good about this album.”
Quorthon
“how many bands don’t you think got worse after their 1st record, or even demo?”
“The brilliant Hatred from Hedemora were in my eyes the very best of the Swedish thrash metal bands.” [DV] “it’s a shame they never made an album.”
O BRASIL SEMPRE DESPONTA EM QUALQUER USO CRIATIVO DE TECNOLOGIAS: “It was amazing how young kids like me were actually corresponding with people from all over the world. You know, we actually sat down for hours and wrote long letters in English. We used to send compilation tapes to each other, and there was such dedication and energy to it all. I remember that Tompa Lindberg got a tape from Brazil or something where the guy had actually recorded himself presenting each song with an ‘evil’ voice—you know: ‘Sadus Death to Posers!’ Those were great times.”
“I had no friends in school, because nobody liked you if you were into extreme metal.”
“When it came to T-shirts, it was cool to have the newest one possible, quite the opposite of the metal scene of today. To find T-shirts with death metal bands was very hard, though, as the few produced were only made in very limited editions. F.ex., only 5 copies of the first Nihilist logo T-shirt (the white one) were printed. For the 2nd one, with the white ‘ghost’ motif, the run was increased to 20 copies.”
“The first to break the ice were the soon-to-be-classic Merciless, from the small and idyllic town of Strängnäs, 65 miles west of Stockholm.”
“Now let’s turn to one of the most revoltingly named bands of all time, Treblinka. Operating under the name of a German WWII concentration camp caused some problems. Before one of their first gigs they were asked to explain that they were not Nazis before they would be allowed to play.” “Treblinka’s demos were important, and they remain respected to this day. In fact, I think they are as powerful as anything the band made after the name change to Tiamat.”
“Nicke Andersson’s original idea was to call the band Dismemberizer, but he ran out of space while drawing the logo and so cut the name to Dismember.”
Não vou muito com as opiniões do autor, nossos gostos são conflitantes!
“In 1988 Corpse changed their name to Grave, under circumstances typical of the early Swedish death metal movement.
‘The reason for the name change was that we wanted to get rid of our bass player, since he sucked, but we were too cowardly to sack him. So we just changed our name to Grave when we got one of our first gigs—and never told him about it! Well, naturally he turned up at the gig to find out what this evil-sounding band was all about, and could see that the mysterious Grave was in fact his own band. Fuck, I got embarrassed when I think about it…’—OLA LINDGREN, GRAVE”
A Suécia e a ubiqüidade de quem fala inglês no território!
“We did our 1st gig with Nihilist at Kista youth center late in 87. Not a single person in the audience liked metal; the kids just stared and laughed. We were so young and so extreme. People thought we were a joke.”—NICKE ANDERSSON, NIHILIST/ENTOMBED
“Nobody liked you, specially not girls.”
“…and everybody hated technical thrash metal. ‘Fucking wimpy techno-thrash; it’s better to tune down to Z and just destroy!’”
“Bill Steer influenced a lot of people and bands. He was the 1st guitarist to tune to low-B, and that is now a standard tuning in extreme metal. Someone should write the guy a check!”
“It’s highly advanced in many aspects—the speed, the unorthodox tuning and riffs, the many tempo changes and breaks—and yet it was all done by teenagers.”
“The guitar sound on Entombed’s debut remains the best example of the ‘Sunlight sound’”
“Entombed were on a roll. They soon recorded a video clip for the song ‘Left Hand Path’—the first ever for a Swedish death metal band.”
AUTOCONTRADITÓRIO: “But to my ears any atmosphere that might have been created is ruined by the blues part and the ridiculous cartoon-sampling at the end of the record. In those days, metal was still all about fun.” Abre a cabeça, quadradão!!
“The slow, melancholic riffs of Katatonia really were something else back then, influenced by bands like Paradise Lost. The tormented voice and depressed lyrics of Jonas Renske add to the atmosphere and mood, as do the keyboards and acoustic guitars. Katatonia nodded to the rising black metal movement with a pentagram logo, and they even used corpse paint for a brief period. It seems laughable today, but back then it made all the difference. Though their debut was sloppy and crude, Katatonia definitely had a special feeling.”
“Other bands in Finspang during the early 90’s were the strange black metal act Abruptum, Ophthalamia, Darkified, and Grimorium. All of them recorded memorable demos”
“This became problematic, leading to loads of similar-sounding demos. Since the songs on many of the tapes were of inferior quality, interest in the Sunlight sound waned. Instead of being a guarantee of quality, the Sunlight name soon indicated a lack of imagination.”
“That night [o show do Deicide em que explodiram uma bomba] was the end of the original death metal scene in Sweden. After that there were hardly any shows for a long time, and it all just faded. The great feeling that had been present at that Candlemass gig in 1987 was long gone. I got out of the scene shortly after. It was over.”
“Brilliant bands like Crematory, Interment and Evocation just vanished in the massive blur of death metal.”
“Dissection didn’t sound like any contemporary metal band. If you have to compare them, it should be to At the Gates.”
“In fact, Marduk sounded a lot like Edge of Sanity, hardly a surprise when you consider Dan Swanö recorded them.”
“Marduk’s masterpiece of sheer brutality must be Panzer Division Marduk from 1999, an album that basically consisted of blast beats (after that they had obviously made their point, and have mellowed out a bit).”
“In truth, their [Abruptum] music actually resembles a band like Butthole Surfers more than any metal band.”
“[Abruptum] Reportedly, they recorded some ‘vocals’ by putting Tony Särkkä under a sofa—with the others sitting on it as he moaned in pain into the microphone!”
“[Segundo álbum] There are no structures to guide you through the noise, and even Abruptum’s demos sound like traditional rock in comparison.”
“Black metal is generally much more accessible music than death metal, since it mainly uses regular song structures veiled in satanic imagery and distorted guitars. The songs are simpler and thus easier to follow, the screamed vocals aren’t as demanding to listen to as deep growls, and the image made it easier to market.”
“A recent movement, suicide black metal, with bands like Shining and Silencer, has probably taken the original concept a bit too far. Few people seem to care anymore.”
“In fact, the latest album by crust punk band Skitsystem sounds very black metal—while the latest black metal opus by Darkthrone sounds very punk! This would have been unimaginable in the early 90’s.”
“In late 2004, Nasum were one of the biggest grindcore bands in the world, but that ended when Mieszko was tragically killed in the tsunami disaster in Thailand just before the New Year. Nasum will most certainly continue to be an influence, but the title of Sweden’s grind kings probably now belongs to Gadget from Gävle.”
“To me, their masterpiece is the ultra-brutal High on Blood from 1999, one of the most destructive Swedish albums of all time. Deranged have labored practically alone in their single-minded pursuit of pure death/grind, and their dedication has taken them on to far-off places like Japan.”
Wolverine Blues como nascimento do death ‘n’ roll.
“A few bands did attempt the death ‘n’ roll formula. The most successful was surely Nine from Linköping, who started in 1994.”
“They began to appear in the U.S. Billboard album charts. Then in 2006 their economic contributions made In Flames the 1st metal band to win the Swedish Export Award from the national government—a strange honor for a band with a death metal past.”
“Though we didn’t realize it back then, At the Gates had again initiated an extreme metal subgenre, something I’ll call retro thrash.”
“Over the years, The Haunted have continued to produce superior-quality retro thrash, and they have eventually and rightly been so successful that they can earn a living from their music, something very few Swedish bands ever achieved. Apart from the guys in In Flames, I guess only Nicke Andersson of Entombed and Johan Edlund of Tiamat ever made a good living out of death metal.”
“Finally—what do you think happened in the late 90’s when modern death metal became mainly about melody and technical prowess, while black metal had become a million times trendier, weaker, and more watered-down than death metal could ever be? Naturally, some guys started to look in the rearview mirror for inspiration. A project such as Bloodbath (…) was all about old school Swedish death metal.” O tempo da estética metal é cruelmente curto.
“I’m pleased to report that the earlier, Swedish edition of this book even helped bring back the bands Grotesque, Nirvana 2002, Interment, Treblinka, Obscurity and Uncanny. The book release party has now become an annual event each January in Stockholm, celebrating the death metal era with gigs at Kafe 44—the only club left from the old days. After reuniting, Obscurity has even remained active, and they never played live at all during the pioneer era.”
Bandas que desconheço:
Afflicted
Krabathor
November
Heavy Load
Anti Cimex
Mob 47
Asocial—Hatred
Agoni—Agony
Damien
Hexenhaus
Merciless (só 4 scrobbles)
Morbid
Afflicted Convulsion—Afflicted
Carbonized
Grotesque
General Surgery
Desultory
Edge of Sanity (3 scrobbles)
Liers in Wait
Cemetary
Ophthalamia
Darkified
Grimorium
Traumatic
Dawn
Crypt of Kerberos
Defleshed
Unanimated
Throne of Ahaz
Skitsystem
Gadget (grindcore) (9 scrobbles)
Necrony (1 scrobble)
Deranged
Furbowl
Dellamorte (banda do autor)
Driller Killer
Uncurbed
Eucharist
At the Gates (calma!!)—The Haunted (não é incrível que um fã de thrash como eu tenha passado isso por alto?!?)
Carnal Forge
Seance
Throneaeon—Godhate
Insision (outra do autor)
Repugnant
Kaamos
Katalysator
Evocation (1 scrobble)
rafazardly 