The cavernous one-time garage begins to smell of fresh sweat. My hair hangs in front of my eyes. The fluffy brown locks of the dude next to me get in my eyes. I inhale Pantene and beer. We grin at teach other. He makes invoke hands and I yell in his face. Not that he can hear me. Another wave of discordant, spiraling riffs pour off the stage, knocking us back into the privacy of our uncontrolled dancing. Well, don't tell the crowd I called it that. Metalheads tend to harbor an unjust suspicion of the word. Whatever. Nothing makes me move like death metal. I fucking love old Finnish death metal. In the vast, adjective-laden world of extreme metal, it simultaneously manages to be the filthiest, most crushing, and weirdest. It's pitch black, evil, and it takes its time. Norwegians do it colder, Swedes do it brutal as a buzzsaw, Russians and Poles have the lockdown on blasphemy, but no one does it as unremittingly dark as the Finns. It just makes me so damn happy I want to dance like a five year old. Where else in the world do you get to shake out your sillies in a dim room full of grizzled, inked, foul-looking men and women doing the same? Every scene has its asshole quotient, but you could go worse places than a death metal gig to find some charmingly straightforward company.
Back in 2010, old Finnish death metal was experiencing a revival on the metal file sharing blogs. I stumbled across Demilich's 1993 classic, Nespithe, on IllCon, and my perception of music changed. The band's angular, jagged riffs were almost jazz-like, if jazz inexorably vortexed into a yawning chasm. Like other death metal I had heard, Demilich was brutal, unlike, it wasn't stupid. And Antti Boman's voice? One of the weirdest spectral croaks of all time. As a bonus, the band was a strong contender for best song titles, The Putrefying Road in the Nineteenth Extremity (...Somewhere Inside the Bowels of Endlessness...) being a clear winner, in my opinion.
But Demilich hadn't been active for decades, and the closest you could get in SF was Fabricant, a band from dusty Lafayette doing heavy Demilich worship sans Boman's vocals and the freaky song titles. Went to their shows at the SubMission religiously. I collected just about every extant death metal album that came out of Finland in the early 90's from Adramelech to Xysma and relied on Cascadian/occult black metal to get my live jollies.
Then, somehow, in 2012, I found myself in Helsinki. Thrash was the thing if you didn't know where to look, and I didn't. I may love to listen to metal, but I like to hang out with hippies… so much for scene pointers.
Finally, I stumbled across a familiar name in the gig listings — Disgrace! A band with really peppy, danceable albums like the classic Grey Misery. Sure, I'd read something about them switching to rockabilly, but every band plays an old favorite or two per show, right?
Weirdest show I've ever been to. In the front row, a cheerful rent boy tried to spread good vibes to everyone and his John. The man in the wheelchair wasn't having it. He worked himself to a viciously drunk counterpoint and began smacking anything not bolted down with his crutches. The sad, sparkly cowboy in the corner looked on while Disgrace's singer yodeled and wailed his way between Koffs. Once drunk enough, he descended from the stage and then began, and I do not exaggerate, a solid fifteen minutes of public shoe worship with a plumply sexy librarian. She did have great shoes to be fair. It is the only time I've seen a man croon lovingly to a cradled pair of kitten heeled Mary Janes. Private show for shoes, no classic death metal included! Chalked it up to life experience and bee lined it out on the last chord.
And then, miraculously, Convulse revived. Convulse is the perfect expression of… something. All the usual descriptors apply - brutal, filthy, ear rape (Never did get that one, if you're listening, you're willing, right? More like inventive yet consensual S+M for your earholes.), dragging, necrotic, putrescent… cheesy keyboard intro. Oh yeah. They played at the bar down the street, and I went out to get my life. Which involved being crushed by an over-stimulated crowd of 15 year old boys (this is somebody's fetish, but not mine) and having a pig liver thrown at my head by the satanic opening act (they missed, amateurs). Worth it.
And old school death metal bands began clawing their way out of the grave, a horde of newly risen ghouls converging on high profile festivals I can't afford. So frustrating to relocate to the country that spawned Demilich only to watch them go play Maryland Deathfest, not exactly my backyard, but at least a state with a friendly couch or two for me.
Then, finally, this Halloween, Turun Kuolema, a festival designed for an Elizabeth. Demilich, Rippikoulu, Convulse, Purtenance, OMFG. I may have squeed in Alexandria like the excitable girl I never was. Kindly lock that in your unconscious if you witnessed. I am totally grim and trve kvlt, yes.
So I cancelled my work for the evening, donned my most gorily tasteless band shirt, and hopped on a bus to Turku to have my face melted and my ears (consensually) made violent love to.
Now, a show is one thing and a festival another. Was I going to be ok? Or was I going to have a crowd panic and lock myself in a stinking club bathroom until everyone left?
I can say the bathrooms at Logomo are very nice. They don't smell, even after a ten minute break in a stall. And that's all I needed. Turned out to be more a gig than a festival despite drawing an audience from across Europe.
Why is this? Don't get me wrong, totally better for me this way, but you guys are missing out. I do see that a genre like death metal has limited appeal, but I wonder how many old stereotypes still linger in this relatively open age of accessible music and fluid subcultures.
To my mind, death metal is simultaneously a joke and a dead serious sort of release. What can you do but laugh when a full grown man growls out a graphic description of fucking a corpse for a solid two and a half minutes? The world is full of awful shit, and there's comfort to making parody of it. From another angle, we're all going to die and lose everyone we love in more or less traumatic ways. Shouting about, or listening to someone shout about, the worst version of these circumstances is one way to vomit the fear out, accept it as a condition of life, and get on. As well as humor, there's a certain comfort in just straight saying really terrible things.
One does get beyond these things, and that's probably why death metal tends to be a young person's genre, but in it's unabashed directness and energy, death metal has a lasting appeal.