Obituary - Cause of Death

As far as I can remember, Obituary's Cause of Death is the only album in my collection that I intentionally got rid of, and then bought again.  Their World Demise album was one of my very first death metal albums and it was something of a revelation at the time.  The fuzzy guitars, the vocals that sounded like a cross between growling and vomiting.  I remember getting into it in middle school and coming in to tell my friend excitedly.  His response was simple: "I didn't see that one coming".  I think it was obvious that I was heading down the path of brutality.

I eventually picked up this album, since it was without question the most revered Obituary release, and supposedly a death metal classic.  It didn't do much for me though.  In the time between my purchase of World Demise and Cause of Death, I had become a more educated metal fan.  I had discovered Opeth, late period Death, and Meshuggah.  Obituary just seemed totally boring and simplistic.  I think my general sentiment was this: Obituary has one of the greatest vocalists in death metal.  Too bad it's wasted on such boring music.

Flash forward 9 years and I now consider this album one of the essential death metal releases, at least to the point of buying another copy.  In some ways my perception of Cause of Death hasn't really changed that much.  I still think the vocals are the most noteworthy thing about the sound, and I still think the music is fairly standard.  It's just that my values have completely changed.  

For a good six years, the crux of my musical taste evolved according to the notion that metal was a genre that could be just as respectable, artistic, and proficient as any other style of music.  I made forays into other "adventurous" genres of music; I made parallels to other visceral styles.  And somewhere in there I think that the pure feeling of glee at hearing a grown man puke into a microphone was beaten down.

In the last couple years I have apparently come full circle.  In my current estimation, the immediacy of the drumming, the jagged distortion of the guitar, the primal screaming - these things define value in death metal far more than the intricate and analytical progressions of an album like Individual Thought Patterns.  And in that regard Cause of Death has gained considerable ground.  In a phase of life where I wanted metal to withstand the scrutiny of (popular) critical opinion, the vocals could hold no greater status than a superfluous, if amusing, ornament.  But in the sense that death metal's value is derived from its raw intensity, what could be more crucial than throat ripping vocals?  

It's not that I no longer believe in the capability of death metal to be ambitious in scope and musicality.  But to downplay the aesthetic aspect of the music is to ignore the most blatant point of all: nobody listens to this stuff if they don't enjoy, on some level, the sound of musical chaos and aggression.

It’s a natural tendency to want others to respect your musical taste, and I wonder to what extent that drives many people to “grow out” of metal when the capacity to enjoy it never really left.  But maybe what I’m talking about is really just the self-imposed repression of being an adult.  My friend Vinay used to talk about this a lot.   Most people never stop liking many of the things that kids enjoy, like running around outside.  Adults only run around after assigning the behavior a constructive purpose and putting on clothes which signify that the behavior is non-threatening.  How very un-metal.

That was off-topic, but the point is that I think I had to come to terms with the fact that my musical taste is completely unjustifiable to the majority of reasonable adults before I could fully re-immerse myself in the world of unapologetic, zero-crossover appeal death and black metal.  And it’s significant because I truly believe that that’s the form of metal which has the most artistic significance (despite most critics thinking the opposite).  As I’ve alluded to before in this blog, if the value of a work of metal is derived from its crossover elements, then the entire genre becomes the musical equivalent of the WWF – a soap opera with just enough gleaming muscle to achieve male legitimacy.

In retrospect, I think the point when I stopped caring about justifying my musical taste to others coincided pretty closely with the point when I began identifying myself much more with my work.  In the first couple years of college, I know of at least one instance when I verbally referred to myself as a “metalhead who did engineering”.  Needless to say I would never think that way now.

To summarize, Cause of Death is pretty good.

Megadeth - Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?

It's safe to say that I was a pretty big Megadeth fan back in high school.  I owned every album they had released, except for Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?, which I only had a burned copy of.  The first album had been remastered in 2001, and somewhere in there I had obtained a copy of both the original and the reissue.  They were easily my favorite band, so in 2004 when Dave Mustaine decided to release remixed and remastered versions of albums #2-#8 (along with MD.45's The Craving), I did what any reasonable fan would do.  I went out and bought all 8 albums the day they came out.  I even saved the receipt for a while as a token of my fanboyism - I think I spent something like $90.  On albums I already had.  (Except for The Craving).  Only the first few really warranted a remaster at all, but the spines of the eight made the face of Vic Rattlehead when you put them together, and it just looks stupid if you only have half of his face sitting there on your bookshelf (exactly the reason why I can never buy Iron Maiden's Powerslave unless it has catalogue number RAW CD 131 - those dudes have released about 10 versions of everything and two of the reissue series have made the face of Eddie, but not compatibly - a fact I wish I knew before I bought Somewhere in Time and totally screwed up the middle of his face).

I guess I don't regret buying the whole set, because it was the ultimate display of my badass metal fandom, but I've since come to the conclusion that the reissues pretty much suck.  From Countdown to Extinction onwards, it doesn't really matter.  The drums are punchier, the tone is thicker, whatever.  But Peace Sells and So Far, So Good...So What! were the pinnacle of 80's thrash.  They were written by a heroine addict who was so drugged out that he got kicked out of Metallica and made his band with the sole intent of being heavier and faster than them.  And I think that general vibe shines through the original albums.  

More generally though, the sound of thrash is intimately tied to late 80's production values.  I hated Testament's First Strike Still Deadly, I hate all 21st century retro thrash, and I hate these remasters.  When you listen to classic thrash albums, I think the hardcore/punk roots are clearly there, and along with it comes a visceral immediacy that made the music so great.  Remaster them 15 years later, and you are layering on aesthetic sensibilities that don't reflect the original era - loud bass, punchy drums - things that accent the thickness and crunch which is characteristic of modern metal and not the blurred out speed of the original sound.  I'm sure it seems counterintuitive, but albums like Peace Sells actually sound more aggressive to me with their original thin production.

But beyond the general points, I think it's problematic to have an artist remixing his own work 15+ years after the fact.  You've got Mustaine sitting their at the knobs, in a phase of his career where he's making crap music which he probably thinks is good, and making "improvements" to his classic work.  I am definitely not one to say that the artist knows best - some of my favorite albums (like None so Vile or Transilvanian Hunger) were almost certainly brilliant despite their creators lack of artistic vision.  Lord Worm said they were drunk the entire recording of NSV, and Fenriz thinks their early material was easy to write and that their current stuff is better music.  Most of the time, metal needs that youthful abandon to be truly definitive, and maturity obviously doesn't do people like Mustaine any favors.  

So the point is, I may not like remasters to start with, but a remix is just blasphemous to me.  Listen to the riff of "The Conjuring" for example, after that shout of "Obey!".  That riff was not all stacatto like that, all the reverb was taken off.  It sounds way crappier to me.  And it's changing history.

It probably sounds like I'm latching on to trivial things out of some irrational commitment to the originals, but that really isn't it, and here's my evidence:  perhaps my favorite metal album of all time, Sepultura's Beneath the Remains.  I left it in my friend's car in high school, and after several weeks I got back the disc, but the case and artwork were gone for good.  I just couldn't have that, so I bought the remaster.  This was a point in my life when I assumed that remasters were always better (exactly the reason that I bought the whole Megadeth set).  For a year or two, I just listened to the remastered BTR, but it never really grabbed me anymore.  It was nothing conscious, I just assumed that I didn't like it as much as I used to.  But after gradually realizing that the Megadeth remasters sucked through side by side comparison, it dawned on me that this was the problem.  I went back to the original BTR, and it returned to its rightful place as one of my favorite albums, and has remained there.

I guess this shows how large a role aesthetics plays for me in thrash metal (and that goes for death and black metal as well).  This wouldn't really help my case if I were trying to convince an outsider of the genre's merit, but it really is true.

Long story short, after 7 years I've filled in the hole in my collection of two-copies-each of the first 8 Megadeth albums.  All because the other day I was listening to the album for the first time in a year or two, for the first time ever on a decent pair of headphones.  It was like hearing it for the first time, and it was amazing.  So I thought what the hell, I'll shell out the $8 for a non-remastered version of one of the best metal CD's ever recorded.  Why not.  It's just a shame that future metal fans will grow up on an inferior version of these classics (and don't even get me started on Rust in Peace - rerecorded vocals, it's too painful for words).  I guess they won't know the difference, but that doesn't make it easier to live with.

P.S.  The new version also deleted the words "Vic Realtors" from the For Sale sign on the cover.  Sure it was cheesy, but it's history!  You can't rewrite it!