Part V Page 3
On the other side of the coin is black metal, a branch of death metal that began as an underproduced and noisy type of music ("black" being a connotation of Satanic imagery) as far back as the first half of the Eighties with Bathory. Although bands such as Slayer and Venom are called "black metal" at times due to their Satanic imagery, it was until Bathory that black metal truly took shape, with high pitched growls and snarls, "blast-beat" drumming, extremely distorted but normally tuned guitars, an utter lack of melody and subtlety, and a nihilistically Satanic or pagan ideology being at the forefront of the subgenre. Soon after the first wave of black metal was starting to brew in the underground, with its most extreme and important exponents hailing from Norway and consisting of acts like Immortal, Darkthrone, Burzum, and the savage and undeniably influential Mayhem. Although the Norwegian Inner Circle was plagued by an infamous and certainly not recommendable legacy of murders, incarcerations, and Church burnings, it was also the start of what was to be a rapidly expanding underground movement that was to take the fundamental elements such as savagery and corpse paint from its initiators.
It was thus that the second wave of black metal, which is still present today and has easily become the most popular, began a few years into the Nineties, with bands such as Satyricon, Dark Funeral, Emperor, Dimmu Borgir, and the English Cradle of Filth bringing in keyboards, a much greater sense of melody, and a host of new influences, such as Scandinavian folk music, into the mix. And although this second movement has left the wave of crimes of its predecessors in the past, the music remains savage, uncompromising, and with little commercial appeal, despite the expansion of borders that it is currently going through. Meanwhile, black metal legends Samael and Bathory have long since moved away from the cliche's of the subgenre, the first always having been a highly unique and unorthodox black metal offering with a slower and much darker approach that in recent years has brought in an enormous electronic influence to its style; a transition that began on the innovative Passage.
