Death metal. That most shadowy—some would say sick—genre of rock music A grotesquery of morbidity, song after song about mortality in dreadful incarnations. Bands with names like Suffocation, Deicide, Morbid Angel. And they don’t stop at death; it goes on from there, into reanimation and desecration, so gratuitously bad it descends into dark humor for listeners not imbued with an obsession with the subject matter.
Frontman and “cookie-monster” vocalist Chris Barnes is a pioneer and legend. Out of the gate in 1988 with Cannibal Corpse, he plied their deathly trade until 1995, at which time creative differences surfaced (one can only imagine). While still under contract with the Corpse, he formed his own side project, Six Feet Under, and was ultimately fired for refusing a CC tour in favor of taking his new aggregation on the road. Releasing their first album Haunted that same year, SFU eschewed the breakneck speed of thrash and black metal’s Satanic imagery to explore death and dying with a slower, mid-paced groove. Acclaim and invitations to play at large international metal-fests followed.
Thirteen years later, 2008, SFU was still going strong, having avoided a reaper’s scythe that laid waste to other musical purveyors of gore. The official video for “Seed Of Filth” from the band’s eighth studio album Death Rituals, includes a reference to William Golding’s classic novel in the chorus while mixing sludge and a maggot infestation to create one of the most on-the-nose post-mortem celebrations in the genre. Guitarist Steve Swanson, who left the band in 2016 to concentrate on family life, achieves a singular downer heaviness in his solo. Glimpses of women in the bar classic (2.6 million views) suggestively conjure impulses of dark-angel sexuality in a musical community that preponderantly includes dudes.
Extreme metal—thrash, death, and black, with countless subgenres—owes much to 1970s forefathers like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, but is a more direct outgrowth of proto-extreme acts like Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth that broke in the early-1980s.
As the 2000s marched on, with time and marijuana having its way with Barnes’s throat, fans noticed a diminution in the “quality” of SFU’s vocal performance. There was a concurrent phoned-in derivative mediocrity in the lyrics. The low point came with 2020’s Nightmares Of The Decomposed wherein Barnes spectacularly failed to capture the stark gutturals of his glory years. The reviews were awful, and fans called for Barnes to rest on his laurels and retire.
Barnes has reportedly quit weed, and the latest album, Killing For Revenge (2024), is being heralded as a return to form. The buzz is good after some recent smaller-venue appearances in Barnes’ Florida stomping ground. Looking like nothing so much as a darkened Santa Claus who sodomizes Mrs. Claus against her will and butchers reindeer, the 57-year-old voice of gnarl is proving that even death-meisters can find new life.