REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — Local grindcore fan Nick Heineke recently criticized all death metal for sounding exactly the same, confirmed sources who didn’t necessarily disagree.
“Yeah, I’ve never fully been able to get into death metal because I cannot tell you the difference between Obituary and Morbid Angel,” Heineke explained without realizing he’d been listening to the same Circle of Dead Children song five times in a row. “Like it’s a good vibe if you’re mutilating a frog or throwing rocks at a dilapidated house, but for everyday stuff like folding laundry or punching your dad in the face, I’m probably going to be blasting something a little bit more nuanced like Assück. The blast beats in grindcore tell a story with each snare hit. Death metal blast beats are nothing but noise.”
Greg Appel, longtime friend and assistant supervisor at the local Guitar Center, strongly disagrees.
“Oh my god, ‘Butchered At Birth’ could not sound any more different than ‘Tomb Of the Mutilated’ and that’s literally just Cannibal Corpse,” Appel roared. “Grindcore on the other hand? That shit all sounds the same. Just dumbed down death metal riffs with some dude squealing like a pig or shouting about diarrhea. In actuality, no grindcore songs are long enough to fully understand whether they sound alike. You’re telling me you can spot the difference between all 20 seconds of Napalm Death’s ‘The Kill’ and the 20 seconds of Napalm Death’s ‘Parasites’? You can’t.”
Swedish metal historian and professor Lars Harver-Magnussen shed some light on the genres.
“The myriad variations and permutations of the aggressive, heavy metal style of play are dazzling in their fecundity. There are so many ways a man can squeal and growl,” said Harver-Magnussen. “Just within the death metal and grindcore subgenres, you have melodic death metal, brutal death metal, deathcore, deathrash, goregrind, cybergrind, pornogrind, stinkgrind, everythingbagelgrind, MTV’sthegrind, grindcoregrind. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it all sounds the same. Literally no difference whatsoever. Most of us are just pretending to tell them apart. It’s just easier than admitting failure.”
At press time, Heineke also revealed that he thought all doom metal chords sounded the same.