And while fans certainly had feelings about which bands were good or bad, there was a broader mixing pot of stylistic reference than is sometimes reflected in journalism. Warrior in his youth without hearing Hanoi Rocks. There was no viable way to indulge in the rising South American bands that were bending thrash toward death and black metal ends without also hearing about Quiet Riot, no way to follow the demo tapes of Tom G. While we can look back and pluck out the bands, both underground and popular, that we find particular affinity to, issues like general lack of radio play aside from very specific time slots and almost no representation on channels like MTV meant that those who wanted metal were more or less exposed to a very wide swath of it all of the time. This is partly because of a historical factoid that gets omitted sometimes, especially in contemporary discussion of these genres within the 1980s, as metal as we know it (as opposed to, say, the heavier, headier hard rock of groups like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple) was on the rise, there was only mild separation by crowd.
They were formed in 1984 and, like a lot of bands of the genre formed that early, drew from a lot of wells beyond death metal as we know it. I needed death metal.Ītheist is a death metal band out of Florida, the most benevolent home of the genre in the United States. I needed something that would beat the shit out of me the way the shit was beaten out of me at home, long-sleeve black t-shirts worn to school to cover blacker bruises and then, eventually, short-sleeve black t-shirts to flaunt them. I hated pop-punk when I was younger it never touched that place in me that it seemed to in others, something I’ve learned as an adult to be more of an epigenetic fluke in development of taste that any broader or more objectively grounded fact of the quality of the work. It felt like donning an old coat the scouring, the bestiality, the willingness to consensual cruelty and hyperbolic violence fit some vile thing that lurched and writhed and crawled within me, something I hated but had to get out and knew no other escape. I followed from Mastodon to sludge metal more broadly, and from sludge it was not a great leap to finally fully return to Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel and the like. My father, miraculously, would live, but that throttling to darker and more feral music had begun in earnest. Ahab’s mad death-struggle against the perfect evil of God-via-white whale was replicated in my fledgling atheism in the face of seemingly insurmountable and deeply chaotic punishment me and my family had passed through.
The progressive/psychedelic thrash of Leviathan, which was released as my father was dying for the first time in a hospital, bleeding from a wound in his gut gained after an attempt to drain the abdominal fluid from his cirrhosis was botched, was a pitch black bullet to my brain. “March of the Fire Ants” still functions as a brutal, technical death metal pummeler, one of a level of heaviness they’d never again even shoot for. No description of metal fandom in that era, especially young metal fandom, can be complete without at least briefly mentioning the seismic shift when Mastodon arrived on the scene. Like many who were young teenagers in the 2000s, I had my nu-metal phase, but the parallel worlds of progressive music and extreme music drew me out. Opeth was that first taste, or at least first real taste, and from there it accelerated. I’d been bitten by the death metal bug already.
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