Symbolic

I feel like such a sellout for devoting a post, on what is meant to be a death metal column for lesser-known gems, to fucking Death. Oh well, fuck it. I’ve been binging on this album quite a bit as of late, so here’s a write-up for you. I tend to have mixed views on Death. On one hand, Death/Chuck (obviously the nouns are interchangeable) was one of the pioneers of what was to become the wonderful genre of death metal. Mantas (Chuck’s pre-Death band) was rehearsing and releasing demos like crazy back in the mid 80s. But, with the exception of The Sound of Perseverance, Chuck is also one of the most boring and predictable songwriters in death metal. Even way back then, bands like Possessed, Morbid Angel, and Necrovore (an awesome death metal band that only recorded one famous demo) were just a bit more dynamic in their songwriting. If you ask me, pretty much every death album until Human is good, but not spectacular in any way. Luckily, later-era Death happens to sound pretty damn good, even if Chuck still never changed his song structures with the exception of having longer solo sections. Although The Sound of Perseverance is Death’s most musically ambitious effort, I think their crowning achievement is Symbolic.

Simply put, Symbolic has Death at its peak in every conceivable way. It has the technicality and intensity that early-Death desperately lacked, and mixed it with somewhat longer songs that later-Death is known for, without being as overtly wanky like The Sound of Perseverance. The lineup here is my favorite Death lineup, if not for Gene Hoglan alone. His fills and hits on this album are just plain fun to listen to. Hell, just listen to the chorus of the title track. Those cymbal hits are just fucking addictive to listen to over and over again! Gene throws in awesome cymbal fills all over this track, especially when the main riff is played. How does this man manage to make any music he’s involved in sound more interesting? Even the new Fear Factory album/"that thing that might as well be his solo album" has some decent grooves in it despite the obvious limitations of every other member of the band.

While on the topic of the title track, it’s an excellent way to start this album. The tempo changes really do wonders for Death’s music, and the solo section shows an incredibly improvement over early-Death. While maintaining the “fast” edge that many death metal solos require, the solos seem to have an extra bit of epic feeling to them. Maybe this is just the awesome Florida sound shining through, but whatever it is, this is the best it ever sounded for Death.

This epic feeling is not just relegated to solos though. The lead guitar melodies in general sound epic throughout the entire album. Just check out the slow break towards the middle of ‘Zero Tolerance’ for a good example of this. Whatever the fuck is going on in the album cover, that feeling just seems to be conveyed through the lead guitar playing on this album. The riffs here lend themselves really well to this. They are by no means complicated or heavy relative to what was going on in Finland or Sweden, but they are incredibly fitting to the atmosphere created by the lead guitar playing. The thrashy influence is still there, but none of the riffs here feel chaotic like a lot of thrash-inspired death metal. Instead, these all feel meticulously planned out. The groovier riffs here work exceptionally well and do a wonderful job of complimenting the lead guitar and the drums.

Vocally, this is easily Chuck’s best performance. It may not be as perplexing as his vocals on Death’s cover of ‘Painkiller’ (he sounds like he’s a chipmunk being castrated on that track), but he has that perfect mix of higher pitcher rasp mixed with enough deepness to still sound like a death metal vocalist. On tracks such as ‘Empty Words,’ his vocals just shine! For the most part, they do an excellent job of accentuating particular moments in songs while also being pretty articulate.

‘Perennial Quest’ shows hints of what Death’s future would hold, as it’s one of the very few tracks that deviate from the standard verse-chorus formula that Chuck used for a sizable chunk of his career. The outro to this song, and this album, is really quite emotive, which is an odd way to end a death metal album.

With the slowly progressing musical direction that Chuck was taking, which ended up with Death basically turning into a progressive metal band and him playing in the vastly underrated power/prog band Control Denied, we don’t know what direction death metal might have taken if he was still alive. By the time this album was released, death metal was headed towards its low point (the late 90s weren’t kind to death metal, although there are some exceptions). Was death metal as a whole supposed to go in a more progressive direction? It might have been interesting to find out, but although we can’t do that, the least we can do is sit back and crank this album up to the maximum volume.

Written for http://thenumberoftheblog.com/