There’s something I never quite understood, or better yet, something that has been pissing me off for some time in the past until my nihilistic point of view justly settled in and told me not to care. I am talking about people vigorously debating about so called “Death Metal ” vocals techniques. Endless argling-bargling on whether to exhale or inhale when making growls or how to keep your throat when screaming. All of this is, in my humble opinion (and as a short-time singer myself 20-something years ago already) utter bullshit. There is no proper singing technique in Death Metal, at least not in Death Metal as it was in the beginning, at least not any technique specific for Death Metal. I guess general singing techniques on how to use your diaphragm and stuff like that possibly works on DM as well, but Death Metal, per se, is not something you should easily describe or catalogue in a class.

Death Metal vocals only need to be scary, period. You just do it using whatever you have according to the shape of your body and lungs.

Just grab any old DM albums from early ’90 or so: Malevolent Creation, Death, Autopsy, Vader, Cannibal Corpse, Suffocation, Dismember, Morgoth, Disharmonic Orchestra, Carcass, all of these had their own specific, readily identifiable characteristic way of singing. None of these bands had probably any real guidelines besides maybe oldies like Massacre, Repulsion or Deathstrike (for some), but what I want to stress out is that you cannot just pick up a mic and decide if you want to scream or growl. Dismember had neither kind of vocals and yet I dare someone tell you they’re not properly Death Metal. Moreover, part of what makes this music so unique is that it’s* spontaneous, holistic if you wish.

You just put things together and see if they work.

This obsession of classifying and cataloguing everything came with the swelling and inflation of the genre in that huge, universal pout-pourri of the “underground for everyone” that the ’90 brought us.

*should be.