Sweden, pt. 2: Artisanal death metal, reverent neo–hard rock and everything in between

"You can laugh at me but don't you ever make jokes about heavy metal. It's my religion." —Peter Stjärnvind

So this Swedish-death-metal obsession is lasting a little longer than I thought it would, which is all good by me. Both via the Daniel Ekeroth book discussed in that prior post, and by charting my own path through this vast universe, I'm waking up to tons of records I'd either overlooked or never knew existed. And as with Metallica, Obituary and many others, I'm discovering that what's speaking to me most is the later, often "non-canonical" work by many of the artists in question.

But there's something a little different going on here, a trend that's been slowly revealing itself as I follow the careers of different bands and musicians that catch my ear. It's not simply legacy bands sticking around and doing what they do, year after year, decade after decade. It's also the formation of an ethos, an approach, a way of thinking about not just metal but music — and art — in general.

Interestingly three of the driving forces behind this movement — and I use this term to signify not a concrete, deliberate or even conscious alliance but more a trend that I've noticed — are drummers turned guitarists, bandleaders, songwriters, musical prime movers. They are Fred Estby, Nicke Andersson and Peter Stjärnvind.

These musicians all started out drumming in first-wave extreme metal bands in Sweden: Estby in Dismember, Andersson in Entombed and Stjärnvind in Unanimated and, later, Merciless. Later, sometimes 20 years or more into their careers, they transitioned into a different, in a sense broader role within the scene. Partly due to what I've read — see Stjärnvind's quote at the top of this entry — but more importantly due to what I've heard, I've come to see each of these men as a sort of spiritual guardian of not just the sound of metal (from "death" to plain old "heavy"), in Sweden and beyond, but also the meaning of it, the strange subliminal force that keeps some of us, musicians and fans alike, coming back to this music time and time again, often throughout the course of a lifetime.

I see this trio, and their comrades and collaborators such as Ulf "Uffe" Cederlund, Matti Kärki, Richard Cabeza, David Blomkvist and others, not just as a death-metal old guard, but as a squad of determined preservationists, devoted to keeping alive a sort of musical folk tradition that they helped to found, and demonstrating through musical means how that tradition isn't now, and never really was, separate from the traditions that fed it, be they thrash metal, heavy metal or good, old rock and roll. (See also: Darkthrone's Fenriz.)

This is an in-progress list of records I've been obsessing over in this regard:

Necronaut, s/t (2010)
Death Breath, Let It Stink (2007)
Death Breath, Stinking Up the Night (2006)
Murder Squad, Unsane, Insane and Mentally Deranged (2001)
Murder Squad, Ravenous, Murderous (2004)

And tangentially:

The Dagger, s/t (2014)
Black Trip, Shadowline (2015)
Imperial State Electric, All Through the Night (2016)

I list the Necronaut album first here for a few reasons. One, I think it's an absolutely stunning album that I didn't hear thing about when it came out — which could be because it's a project spearheaded by Fred Estby, and I hadn't really woken up to the brilliance of Dismember at that time — and two, because maybe more than any other record on this little listening list I've made, it makes explicit those connections I was referring to above. This album is, honestly, one of the most sheerly enjoyable, and subtly radical metal records I've ever heard. What it is, is a kind of genre-overview suite, a chronicle of, as Stjärnvind puts it, metal as religion, which ignores ultimately pointless subgenre distinctions in favor of an overarching principle, not just a sound but a feeling.

So you have a gurgling, rollicking death-metal track like "Infecting Madness" (11:44) — featuring guest vocals by Autopsy's Chris Reifert, a key influence on, and a sort of patron saint of, the Swedish scene I'm chronicling in this post — following a dark, triumphant, invisible-orange-clutching heavy-metal track like "Soulside Serpents" (7:20):



(Quick note here re: Necronaut: Sadly, as far as I can tell, this extraordinary album isn't currently available for any kind of legal purchase or streaming, at least in the U.S.)

What unifies these aesthetics is not just Estby's writing and playing — much like in Dave Grohl's Probot project, Estby conceived and performed the majority of this material himself, bringing in guest vocalists to complete the tracks — but a certain kind of spirit, a way of thinking about metal. This is not simply a rehash of early-'80s heavy-metal glory or early-'90s death-metal raunch; It's a vision of an idealized realm where those styles coexist in perfect harmony, an expression of a strategic and curatorial mindset — though one that sets aside a dry, didactic presentation in favor of one built around sheer fun and enjoyment and abandon and, yes, excellence.

That's really what Necronaut is: a demonstration of how truly excellent metal can be when you strip it back to its fundamental principles: concise, hooky writing; gritty, soulful performances; and perhaps most importantly, a deep allegiance to an organic sound, free from triggered drums, conspicuous Pro Tools (ab)use and other sonic sorcery that's become standard issue in all forms of metal. (I should note that in addition to writing and playing the majority of it, Estby produced Necronaut.) To put it in terms of food — something I'm always happy to do — Necronaut is an exemplary realization of artisanal metal, homegrown, nutritious and delicious.

Estby's next major statement was the Dagger, which also included his longtime Dismember bandmate David Blomqvist. They've since split up, but they released an excellent self-titled album in 2014:



Like a lot of bands playing what I'll call neoclassic hard rock — as we'll see, a common aesthetic destination for first-wave Stockholm death-metal architects — the Dagger can seem at a glance like some sort of '70s cosplay, but beneath the surface, there's nothing but quality and love for the period in question (Thin Lizzy would be my main reference point, but given the lifer ethos of Estby, Blomkvist and Co., I'm sure there are literally thousands of gradually more obscure reference points that are in play here). The band simply — well, not simply; actually in a very subtle and almost delicate way — rocks, and their music is sublime escapism and, yes, entertainment. I had a blast watching a few of their live clips, such as this one, in which you can see bassist Tobias Cristiansson, another ex-Dismember dude, beaming at the crowd as if to say, "Damn, death metal is great, but it's kinda fun to be playing such crowd-pleasing stuff for once," or this one, in which vocalist Jani Kataja enters after an instrumental intro and howls into the mic, "We are the Dagger and we love you all!"

Love would be the key would there. By all appearances, the ex-Dismember dudes didn't exactly find fame and fortune playing this more accessible music, but it's pretty clear that they found deep satisfaction. In terms of the intent behind it, I look at this project and, by extension, Black Trip (Peter Stjärnvind's current hard-rock band, recently renamed V.J.O.D.) and Imperial State Electric (Nicke Andersson's going concern, founded after years spent leading the very successful Hellacopters, and whose latest album, All Through the Night, contains some very nuanced, diverse and sophisticated neo–boogie rock), somewhat in the way I view Neil Peart's '90s Burning for Buddy series. Both in the case of these Swedish death-metal hellions growing up and going full '70s and in that of this former prog-rock maverick growing up and taking some time to explore the big-band music of his youth, there's this sense of mid-career artists having secured their own legacy as a pioneer in a given genre and then turning back to address their sort of ancestral sound, the root of what their own music would eventually become. There would be no death metal without classic hard rock, the same way there would be no prog without jazz, and these various Swedish hard-rock projects feel like offerings at the temple of rock. And more importantly, as I suggested above, acknowledgments that all this — any kind of metal or rock you could name, from anytime in about the last 60 years — is really just one thing.

The beauty of that way of thinking is that in some ways you can sort of toy with history, explore cool, slyly anachronistic hybrids. Like Fred Estby, Nicke Andersson isn't just a drummer, or guitarist, or songwriter, or vocalist, or producer; he's a 360-degree mastermind. It's not just about the sound with him; it's about the spirit. Which is why a band like Death Breath, Andersson's project with fellow current '70s-rock revivalist Robert Pehrsson, for all its willful silliness, reveals itself — when you really take time to steep in it — as one of the smartest and most carefully executed projects in modern death metal:


Yes, Let It Stink (this 2007 EP follows the equally essential 2006 full-length Stinking Up the Night). Yes, "Giving Head to the Dead." This band takes it there, so to speak, in every way, practically challenging you to dismiss them as a joke, but the music is so goddamn powerful, so flawlessly performed (and by that I mean with timeless punk abandon) and so gorgeously rendered (with a production sound that reeks of nicotine, vomit and stale beer) that you realize that, again, this project is an ultimate labor of love — in Andersson's case, a statement from a man who started out as the prime mover in the Stockholm death metal scene (if you trust the aforementioned Swedish Death Metal, Andersson was the true driving force behind scene kings Nihilist/Entombed), became a garage-rock and boogie king with his later projects, and then turned back to death metal to issue a sort of effortless "this is how it's done, people" statement. Death Breath wears its labor lightly — the whole project has the feel of being conceived in a single drunken weekend — but it's actually the result of years, decades even, of love and hard work.

The whole concept here seems to be: "You all fucked up death metal with your Pro Tools and your five-string basses and your triggered drums and your dorky technicality. It's supposed to be about death, you idiots. And it's supposed to sound like and feel like and, yes, reek of pure analog filth." The irony is that no late-'80s/early-'90s death metal or grindcore (including that of Entombed, or that of the mighty Repulsion, whose frontman Scott Carlson is a quasi-member of Death Breath and handles lead vocals on "Giving Head") sounded this incredibly crunchy and warm. Like Necronaut, this is artisanal death metal, lovingly informed by the values of '70s rock, '80s hardcore and many other substyles.

(And along those lines, I should note that these Death Breath releases, the Necronaut album, etc. represent sort of a revisionist incorporation of a warm analog drum sound into the Swedish death-metal tradition, given that most of the original classics in the genre — e.g., Left Hand Path and Like an Ever Flowing Stream — were recorded on Sunlight Studio's electronic drum kit, as Fred Estby discusses here.)

Which brings me to Murder Squad, which features Peter Stjärnvind on drums, along with Entombed's Uffe Cederlund on guitar, ex-Dismember (and ex–many other bands) bassist Richard Cabeza and ex-Dismember frontman (then still a member) Matti Kärki.


Murder Squad's music is the kind that immediately turns my mind to mush, in the best way, unleashing the lizard brain within seconds of me turning it on. This band's two albums — Unsane, Insane and Mentally Deranged and Ravenous, Murderous — are filled with the some of the purest, most raging, riff-centric death-metal filth I've ever heard, rendered in phenomenally full, clear old-school tones. The groove and swagger and monstrous elephantine girth of this music is wondrous and, as in the case of Death Breath, frankly, innovative. The outstanding and groundbreaking Autopsy, whom Murder Squad formed in tribute to (at first, they only played Autopsy covers) — and whose leader, Chris Reifert, another musician who clearly understands the death-metal-to-vintage-rock trajectory, cameos on Ravenous Murderous — never sounded this sharp and massive, and even their excellently recorded post-reunion albums don't quite reach the flawless fidelity levels and raw, seething abandon of these Murder Squad discs.

Everyone's pulling their weight in a band like Murder Squad, but as you can see in this live video, Peter Stjärnvind is simply beasting, uniting the bash and the finesse vectors into a perfect percussive whole. (His cymbal work on these Murder Squad records has frequently brought me to the verge of tears; he is a poet of the ride bell — listen to the pattern he busts out at around the 2:02 mark in the track above.)

I woke up to Stjärnvind's brilliance slowly. He drummed for Entombed for years, appearing as many of their full-lengths as Nicke Andersson did, but especially while reading Swedish Death Metal, I had come to associate that band so fully with Andersson that I viewed that band's later, post-Andersson output, i.e., from 1998's Same Difference on, as somehow non-canonical. Same Difference itself is an odd departure (as this great Decibel post indicates, it's your chance to hear Entombed going for a post-Unsane/AmRep sound, with mixed but often fascinating results — well worth hearing for any serious fan), but the two records after it, Uprising and Morning Star, are very solid efforts that expand on and refine the raucous death-rawk madness of Wolverine Blues and the far less well-known but nearly as good To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth. (Note for fans of the latter record: I highly recommend this 1997 gig, from the twilight of Entombed's Nicke years.) As you can see here, the Stjärnvind-powered Entombed were an absolute leveling force circa Morning Star:


(I should note that Andersson is now back in the Entombed camp, having done some gigs last year honoring the band's first two albums with help from Cederlund and fellow core guitarist Alex Hellid. Meanwhile vocalist L.G. Petrov continues on in a project now called Entombed A.D. — here's hoping they can all just get along.)

So my growing Peter Stjärnvind obsession led me to the interview linked at the top of this post, which concerns his recent Black Trip project, in which he plays guitar. I sought out their record Shadowline — recorded, for those keeping score, by none other than Nicke Andersson, who also, incidentally, designed the logo for the Dagger and contributes guest vocals to one track on Necronaut — and I was absolutely riveted within seconds:


The Dagger's self-titled debut is an excellent record, but to my ears, this is on another level. It's a more aggressive and urgent sound, which for me again evokes Thin Lizzy, but Thin Lizzy at their roughest and toughest, as on the Thunder and Lightning album, when they sounded like they were racing against time. All respect to Black Star Riders, the occasionally excellent post–Thin Lizzy band led by the master Scott Gorham, but Shadowline is hands down the most compelling reanimation of that classic sound and vibe I've ever heard, one of those "Jesus Christ, sometimes this even sounds better than the original" sort of retro projects. Listen to this entire record and savor it — to my ears, it's an instant classic. The writing, the performances, the sound, the fucking cover — I honestly can't find a single flaw.

So when Peter Stjärnvind says that heavy metal is religion, he really means it, and clearly Fred Estby and Nicke Andersson feel the same. As the above records show, these men have gone to the mat for this style time and again, harnessing their adolescent drive and wildness to co-create the now-legendary first wave of Swedish death metal, moving forward (or backward) into the glorious, richly textured rock of their youth, then entering a sort of golden middle age in which both of these styles, and anything else they feel like playing, all coexists and commingles in this sort of magical boundless space where, as I consume more and more music along this continuum, learn to feel ever more deeply the Sabbath and the Blue Öyster Cult and the Autopsy and the Entombed and the Chuck Berry and the Sheer Mag and every other glorious rock sound I can get my hands on, all these sounds come to seem like facets of the same primal source. The less I divide these styles in my mind, the more profound they all seem, the more eternal, the more life-affirming. Whatever you want to call it, it's my religion too.

Recklessness and refinement: In praise of Dismember

I've been doing that thing again, that immersion thing that has spawned so many posts on this blog. It's become the way music happens to me, a framework for how I (ideally) engage with this infinite, and infinitely pleasurable, sea of sonic information we look out on every day.

For me, it's pretty simple: You get ahold of a large discography by a given band or artist, and you just run it down. Backwards, forwards, randomly. Take as long as you want. For me, the less "relevant" the band/artist is to the current "conversation," the better. Because of my job, I live daily within the stream of the news firehose; what a pleasure it is — maybe something like the quiet life of an academic, which seems so far removed from what I do, so appealing, in some ways, but also maybe somewhat foreign to my nature — to just get away from all that. It's like taking a weekend trip to the woods. I think what I crave more than anything as a listener-for-pleasure is just peace and quiet.

Often, somewhat ironically, I guess, via loud and aggressive sounds. Metal works so well for the above "run it down" practice. And death metal works particularly well, because you run across these gloriously lengthy, rich discographies, often largely unswayed by trends. Hence the obsessions with Obituary, Bolt Thrower, Immolation, Incantation and the rest. And now, Dismember.

I've developed such affection for this band during the past few weeks that I feel like I've known them my whole life, so to speak, but unlike with Obituary, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse and a few others, Dismember are a relatively new discovery for me. I first heard their classic 1991 debut, Like an Everflowing Stream, a few years back. I loved it but didn't go deeper, and it appears that many have similarly short-changed this truly phenomenal band. It's a trend that often frustrates me in the discourse that surrounds metal — i.e., the forsaking of works, usually later ones, that fall outside the acknowledged canon. You see so many bands where 10, 20, 30 years of work gets reduced to a single iconic record that came out during the glory years of said band's subgenre. First-four-albums Metallica worship (and, conversely, instant dismissal of their more recent output) would be the most visible example here, but this kind of thinking extends vastly outward. You don't run into many folks who want to sit around and talk about why A Skeletal Domain, in its own way, rules just as much as The Bleeding, or why Back From the Dead is actually a more enjoyable record in many ways than Cause of Death. (At work, I've become known as Late Album Hank, a mocking tribute to my affection for such supposedly past-their-prime records.)

But the question for me is, if a band you love keeps making records and doesn't totally jump the shark à la Morbid on Illud Divinum Insanus (being the Morbid die-hard that I am, I have even found a few things to love in that deeply flawed, probably justly vilified album), why wouldn't you want to relish every last one?

I digress. What I mean to say, really, is that Dismember's eight-album run, from Everflowing Stream through 2008's self-titled — and, to date, final — LP is a frankly shocking achievement of consistency and quality. Let's compare their body of work to that of Bolt Thrower, the subject of my last immersion-listening program. Like most metal bands, "extreme" or otherwise, BT took a few albums to really fine-tune and get down to the business that would ultimately prove to be their calling card. Again, I know the metal community at large wants to brand an album like War Master an untouchable classic, but to me, it's just a warm-up for the truly mature Bolt Thrower that emerges on The IVth Crusade, or even …For Victory, and from that point on, we only get a precious three albums before the band's breakup.

Dismember, on the other hand, emerged with an essentially perfect statement. Not just a first album, but a first song on that first album, that sums up everything they do well. If you're a more casual listener than me, this might be all the Dismember you need, and if so, well get ready to fucking rock:



I'm only about a quarter of the way into Daniel Ekeroth's essential Swedish Death Metal tome, so I don't have all the deep background on that country's storied scene that I'd like to in order to truly reckon with Dismember's place in the lineage. But one fact that was pretty much obvious to me before I dove in to this catalog was that Entombed tend to overshadow all of Swedish death metal, and the common notion is that everyone else's records are a sort of consolation prize when compared to theirs.

All respect to Entombed. They're an outstanding, justly legendary band. But their discography is not the monolithic monster that Dismember's is. I've been working my way through their records recently too, in a less feverish and systematic way, and it's a bit of a rockier path. You have these two early masterpieces, Left Hand Path and Clandestine, which, as fully realized as they are, still sound formative to me, and then you have this whole other thing on Wolverine Blues, a phenomenally heavy, enjoyable record that sends the band in a very different direction that, honestly, I greatly prefer. (In the end, as much as I love underground and "extreme" music, I'm often after the more polished, pro-sounding statement from a given band, hence my love of major-label post-hardcore.) I'm still working my way through, but from there, things get weird: Labels change, key members start dropping out, etc. I will have to report back to you, but I already felt my interest waning ever so slightly when checking out the fourth, relatively obscure Entombed record, 1997's DCLXVI: To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth, the last one to date to include all the key players from Left Hand Path.

Anyway, all I mean to say is that Dismember tend to get this sort of second-place treatment (or worse) when the topic of Swedish death metal is discussed. (And I ought to clarify here that I'm talking about the so-called Stockholm / Sunlight Studio sound, not the Gothenburg "melodic death metal" one, as exemplified by At the Gates et al.) But if you really lay out the evidence, regardless of who came first (and we're talking about a matter of roughly a year here between the releases of Left Hand Path and Everflowing Stream), Dismember are the band that really lived and breathed what I hear as the essence of this music for way longer. Their consistency, both in terms of aesthetic and quality level, is honestly insane.

Compare "Override of the Overture" above to this, from the self-titled album, which came out 17 years later:



Some things have changed, of course. Drummer Fred Estby, one of the three true core members of Dismember who where there from the Everflowing Stream period on (the others being guitarist David Blomqvist and frontman Matti Kärki), left before this final album. His indefatigable, punishing-yet-groove-drenched, reckless-yet-relaxed style is so absolutely essential to the band's classic sound that I was at first inclined to "asterisk" Dismember slightly. But after spending some good time with it, I realized it was just as essential as all the others. Yes, Dismember belong to the No Bad Albums Club, a distinction I'm not yet prepared to bestow on Entombed.

"The Hills Have Eyes" may not have every Dismember hallmark, may not sum up their strengths as insanely well as "Override of the Overture." But what gets me is how intact the spirit of what they do remains here. Dismember's core principle is this kind of glorious turbulence, a primal and punky heave, wherein you feel constantly threshed and swept along by the sharpness and momentum of the riffs. The music just moves, and moves you, in such a thrilling way. I've rarely encountered metal that's so ruthlessly devoted to the art of making you bang your fucking head. Hearing this music over and over, I'm more and more bummed I never got to see this band live. (I'm praying that, as Estby said in a 2016 interview, they might get back together in the future for more shows.) I can only imagine the monster rush that this stuff would provide in person.

And of course there's that absolutely disgusting guitar tone, the classic Stockholm hallmark — the Swedish Chainsaw — again largely associated with Entombed, or more specifically Nihilist, that band's prior incarnation, and even more specifically, that band's late guitarist Leif "Leffe" Cuzner, who didn't graduate to Entombed along with his comrades. Listening to so much Dismember, I have to ask: Did any band revel in the crunch and filth that the Boss HM-2 pedal spewed forth to a greater degree than Dismember?


That sensation of thin, serrated nastiness. That unrepentantly gross, brittle, hacking texture that has become world-famous to the point that it practically signifies an entire genre. Has it ever been so extensively and skillfully and, I would argue, profoundly applied as in the work of Dismember? This band made a nasty sound and a breakneck, punk-indebted feel into something like a religion, driving further and further into the center of that holy combination — wherein each stop-time clench and righteously unspooling riff seems to send your teeth rattling around in your skull and your eyes rolling back in your head — and never wavering from the attack mission.



And yet there's also this element of grand refinement. Something Bolt Thrower brings in as well, and that obviously Carcass incorporated as well as anybody ever has. That classic British sound of elegy and victory and valor and, well, honestly, fucking Iron Maiden. I've gotten wind of a sort of controversial aspect of Dismember's Massive Killing Capacity album, and even the band itself seems iffy on it. ("On Indecent and Massive Killing Capacity we tried different approaches to making the music, but it didn't really work out," Kärki said in 2000.) But I frankly adore this side of the band — I think albums like MKC do an incredible job of marrying that awesomely raw quality you hear on a track like "The Hills Have Eyes" with the grandeur of classic, pre-"extreme" metal. (Check out the gorgeous and entirely convincing melodic instrumental "Nenia," Dismember's own "Orion.")

A lot of that has to do with Kärki. Like John Tardy or Karl Willetts or Martin Van Drunen or any of these truly great death-metal vocalists, his is a shamanic presence, one that takes a rough instrument and makes it feel so true and focused and essential and spiritually potent. Even on a track like "Collection by Blood," where he sounds a little out of his element in terms of the intensely melodic quality of the music around him, Kärki brings this sense of total engagement and authority. The act of bellowing and growling over loud metal music is a fundamentally weird one — though I guess when you get down to it, maybe it's less weird than refined singing, which requires a willful refinement of the natural sound an uncivilized human animal makes when it opens its mouth — but a frontman like Kärki just seems so immersed and so at home in the practice. His is the bellow, the ever-Hulking-out voice of arrrrrggggghh that powered every single Dismember full-length. (Until I really spent time with Dismember, I never quite understood how indebted fellow Swedes Sorcery were to them, and specifically to the combo of Blomkvist's merciless riffs and Kärki's booming roar.)

The recklessness and the refinement, the snarls and the soaring melody. The wrath and sickness of hardcore and the pride and drama of the NWOBHM bands. Over eight incredible albums, Dismember somehow managed to build these bridges and keep all the foundations sturdy, combining the rawness of drunk teenagers spilling vomit into the street after, or during, Friday night rehearsal (a spirit clearly gleaned from the members' Autopsy obsession; I love Kärki's characterization of that band's Chris Reifert as the "Midas of death metal"; and on a similar note Blomkvist's matter-of-fact this-ain't-rocket-science viewpoint: "We try not to be in the studio too long [laughs]. I mean, we play death metal.") with an epic, theatrical sweep that suggests an ancient amphitheater as much as a sweaty club.

I feel so goddamned enriched and energized by this catalog. If any of the above resonates and you haven't taken the full plunge, by all means, get to it. No Bad Albums!

Here are a bunch of other awesome Dismember tracks (sadly sans several gems from 2006's The God That Never Was, the band's final album to date with Fred Estby, which isn't on Spotify):