Late Saturday night I did a Katon W. De Pena: I put something on the turntable, popped open a cold one, put my feet up, and just let my mind drift away carried by the notes floating from the speakers. It was awesome. It didn’t take long for the buzz to kick in...
That something was Ghost’s Meliora album. It arrived in the mail earlier in the day together with Spinal Tap’s This is Spinal Tap. The two had been among the items I ordered before the lockdown in March that only got delivered recently following the loosening of quarantine protocols.
Listening to Ghost while chugging beer was the perfect way to cap a day that started with me reading Albert Mudrian’s Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore while sipping my first cup of coffee for the day. In the sunny hours that ensued I listened to Danzig, Motorhead, Deafheaven, Dangerous Toys, a Ronnie James Dio tribute album, and Accept.
Indeed, it was a Saturday of consuming metal and feeling good.
Vision Conquest: A Conversation With Albert Mudrian
If there’s anything Albert Mudrian is invariably aware of, it’s himself and how that identity fits in a scene that’s seemingly more and more self-obsessed with what everyone else thinks.
Mudrian is soft-spoken but direct, never compromising or apologizing for his unabashed affection for death metal as the greatest of all the heavy metal subgenres. The Editor-in-Chief and founder of Decibel Magazine, one of if not the most respected extreme metal print magazines in circulation today, Mudrian published Choosing Death: The Improbably History of Death Metal and Grindcore back in 2004, documenting what’s easily the most comprehensive history of two metal subgenres often relegated to the ugly stepsister to the more “intellectual” [your choice of gag noise here] siblings of post-something or other or, Odin forbid, black metal. But Mudrian is a fan first and whatever the hell else a distant second. In the ten years since the book’s first printing, a whole lot has happened in metal, whether you’re discussing the bands, the culture, or our reaction to both as fans, critics, and writers. In the spirit of documenting those dynamic changes, Mudrian is publishing an updated version of Choosing Death this year, complete with a revised look at how the genre has changed both for the better and worse and where we as fans fall in the middle of it (CVLT Nation even has a 12-page preview of the book you can glance at) I talked to Albert at length about the new version and about his own history not just as a writer but as a fan.
I wanted to start off by talking about the updated version of the book. It’s been ten years since the first edition. Why now? What was the catalyst for you in saying enough has happened that this needs to be updated?
There was a progression. Within a few months of Choosing Death being released, I remember David Vincent rejoined Morbid Angel so this was like the end of 2004. At that moment I was just kind of like okay, this is pretty fucked up, but I just thought of that as an anomaly. Then you had Obituary back together and making an album a year after that. Some of the bands I talked about in the last chapter of the original version like Nile and Hate Eternal ended up coming around and making their best records in 2005 and 2006. I mean, even Akercocke made their best record in 2005, but you had this little uptick thing, and you had your eye on it. Then there was the whole Death Breath thing with Nicke Andersson starting that band because he got all fired up about death metal again after reading Choosing Death and just trying to recapture the old days. I just thought that was fucking crazy, and it blew my mind that that was an indirect result of something like that.
I guess the moment for me where I was like okay, this is officially out of hand was at the end of 2007 when both At The Gates and Carcass announced that they were going to reunite and play shows. At that point it was just like – you know what? I’m gonna do another one of these. It was too soon at that point, but it was also the fact that Decibel was kind of coming into its own around that point too, so it wasn’t the right time, but I would say that that would have been the moment, the At The Gates and Carcass reunions, where I was like okay, this is all a little too crazy for me to not acknowledge. As a fan of the genre, you keep an eye on it, and you cover it and obviously with Decibel and death metal being such a huge part of what we do, it’s not like I’m not immersed in it to begin with, so I saw this stuff happening through my own lens and then through the lens of the magazine, but I would say that would have been the tipping point for me.
Decibel has been incredibly successful just from a comparative standpoint that it’s in very small company as far as in-print magazines covering extreme music goes and especially here in North America. What do you attribute that success to?
I think that we were fortunate in some ways that we entered the market at probably the last possible moment where you could still have a shot at it and not have it be a complete fucking disaster, and we entered a market that had nothing that was sort of universally accepted as the: “Oh, that is the magazine for extreme music.” I mean, obviously Metal Maniacs was still around, and they had a definite influence and a great history. Growing up, for me, that magazine was hugely important, and there were a lot of people my age who had that same experience. They had that legacy, so you had that, but they hadn’t really developed anything beyond the legacy. The magazine never really, for better or worse, evolved. It was the same fucking layout for twenty years or whatever. I mean, that was part of the charm but at the same time, for me approaching it as somebody thinking what should be in an extreme music magazine, it was limiting. It should go beyond that. I kinda remember going to the newsstand as I was plotting the beginning of Decibel and just grabbing a bunch of metal magazines, and there were a bunch.
There were all these zines that were being printed and distributed at like Tower Records, and I think there was one called Slow Culture or something like that. You had Terrorizer and Revolver, which was still kinda like a real magazine at the time. (Laughs) There was a lot of stuff, though, and I just sort of put my foot down and was like okay, this is what we’re gonna do and this is what it’s gonna be. It’s gonna be an extreme music magazine for people who take this stuff seriously, but it’s gonna have a voice that none of these other magazines have. It’s gonna have a modern look, and it’s gonna do this and it’s gonna do that. It’ll pay tribute to the past without being too nostalgic all the time. I just had this vision of what it should be, and I think, again, that at that specific time around like 2004, I just saw people like the record labels that are still the core of what we do – there were a bunch of those starting to dry up at that time, and all of a sudden people were starting to get more and more selective about where they wanted to put their ad dollars and what they wanted to invest in.
So I wanted to have this product that was kind of visually and conceptually in the moment and narrowed the scene in some ways. For better or worse, those early years like 2004 to 2006, Decibel covered a lot of metalcore, but in reality we just wanted metalcore covers. We had all kinds of content that would not look out of place in an issue of Decibel that could come out tomorrow, whether it was the “Hall of Fames” or how the Q&As were structured or the band that was featured in the upfront section. Whatever it was it was extremely Decibel from Issue One. For us, though, we were putting these bands on the cover because nobody else really was. There really weren’t any other metal magazines that were doing that, so for us it was kinda like “Alright. Here’s what’s happening. This is the kind of stuff we’re putting on the cover.” I think it helped us more because people saw that we knew what going on, but it also had this sense of history.
A lot of what seems to drive that history at least right now is a sense of urgency and kneejerk criticism and praise. How do you kind of keep your finger on the pulse of discovering new bands and staying up-to-date without succumbing to the hype, so to speak?
I guess I just try to keep it really simple. I would say around 2006 was when I kinda decided that we’d start taking more chances with this magazine. And by chances, I was no longer going to put the band that I thought was supposed to be on the cover because that was the band at that particular moment. For me, I think the turning point was when we put ISIS on the cover I think it was in the November 2006 issue. Then we put Converge on the cover the month after that. These were the bands that I loved, and that I’d followed since their inception. It just kinda got to the point where it was like: you know what, I’m just gonna trust our audience. I’m just going to basically say, “This is what I’m into and what I’m into is awesome, and I think there’s enough of you who are smart enough where you’ll go, ‘Okay, I get it. I’m onboard,” and it was basically just being a little more honest with myself. I still kinda hold that approach today. Sometimes it gets weird the way the a year goes where the schedule really doesn’t shake out for you, or where you’ve got some bigger bands that you know who are really in the core of what you do and you put them on the cover. You wanna put them on the cover, like I love Napalm Death so of course I wanna put them on the cover this year. But it’s not really taking a chance.
I mean, I guess it is in the grand scheme of things. I think the record came out in January or February, and they’ve sold like 7,000 copies of it so far. I guess you’re taking your chances doing stuff like that, but for me it starts with the things like putting Pallbearer on the cover or putting Leviathan on the cover or putting Noisem on the cover, which we’re going to do. These are bands that excite me personally. To me, again it comes down to I like this. I listen to these Pallbearer records all the time. I listen to these Noisem records all the time. It really excites me, and I try to do that with all the facets of what we’re doing in a sense. Whether it’s the tour lineup or whether it’s the Flexi series that we’re doing – I feel like that when you’re being honest with yourself and with your readers, that that enthusiasm is gonna come through. I mean, why the fuck do we have to put Noisem on the cover? What do we stand to gain financially? To me, it’s the fact that you want to feel that rush. How old are you?
I’m 32.
Ok, so you probably started getting into this stuff like twenty years ago or something, right?
Yeah, thereabouts.
Right, so you know that feeling when you were first discovering this music like extreme music or extreme bands, whether it was something like Heartwork or Dissection or Slaughter of the Soul or whatever it was. You know the feeling that came along with that. Just that rush or that adrenaline that comes along with the sense of discovery even though it’s not really the band being discovered just by you, it still feels like this personal thing for you, and you’re still amped for it. You know that feeling where you were in school, and all you wanted to do was go home and listen to Slaughter of the Soul. But that idea, I somehow want to articulate that through the magazine. I don’t think most magazines do that, so I will say that maybe that’s some revelation I had like eight or nine years ago or whenever it was. Sticking to that I think has served us well. It doesn’t always yield great results on the newsstand, but you just kind of have to think of the big picture.
Where did all of this begin for you where this was the genre, the music, and the culture that you wanted to write about and invest your time and basically your life into?
It’s funny because I wrote an Afterword to the book this time. I just felt like I needed to do that because I felt like I needed to kind of justify why there was a new version of this book, and in that I talk about the origin story of how I kinda got into this stuff. The truth is, I had a friend named Scott, and we grew up together, and he was always a bit more adventurous than me. I remember in 1990 I guess it was, he would play me Carcass’ Symphonies of Sickness, and I was just like “Dude, what are you doing?” (Laughs) I was fifteen or whatever and just like, “Man, you’ve gotta be kidding me? How are you into this?” It was freaking me out. It took me a little while to kinda get my head around it. The first death metal record that I ever bought would’ve been, and it was around early 1991 when I bought it, but it would’ve been Obituary’s Cause of Death, and for me it was kind of a gateway in that it was melodic enough and not blasting all the way through, but it was extreme but tuneful enough where it was like okay, you can work with this. I liked stuff like Sepultura and obviously Metallica before that, but the truth was I wasn’t a big thrash guy at any point. I think I was into thrash for like six months or something, (laughs) and it was because death metal was right around the corner. I’ve been trying to like thrash for like twenty plus years. (Laughs) I mean, don’t get me wrong. Metallica and Slayer are fantastic, but to me they just transcend the genre. It’s really hard for me to sit down and go, “Okay. Testament! Exodus! Let’s do this!”
It’s funny you mention Metallica since critical revisionist history has kind of started to deride that band, which is funny and also ridiculously stupid.
Here’s the thing. Let me give you this anecdote. I hired a guy to work with me out of our house as our marketing/promotion and doing online kind of stuff and just helping me in general. He’s 28, and we’re talking about Metallica. He doesn’t like Metallica, and I started to see it from his perspective. He’s born in 1986, ok? He is two when …And Justice for All comes out. He is five when the Black Album comes out. When he’s ten and he’s cognizant of music, his first real exposure to Metallica is something like “Until It Sleeps,” so you gotta think about it in that sense. If someone’s not in their 30s, and they’re like “I don’t like Metallica,” or “Metallica sucks,” I get it. If that’s the only that you’ve known, and nobody forced you to go back and listen to the first four, or you can’t separate what you know of that band as they are now when you’re listening to those first four, I get it. But people of our age or anyone who’s over 30 who says something like, “Oh, Metallica – they suck,” at that point you’re like: “Wait a minute. Of course they suck now, but are you going to really tell me there’s nothing good about those first four records?” So I get it, but I think now because I’m so goddamn old, I’m able to see things through another generation. I’ve got no time for whatever fifteen-year-olds are listening to or whatever’s on the cover of AP. I’ve got no time for it because I’m old. (Laughs)
So no Black Veil Brides on the cover of Decibel anytime soon?
You know, it’s funny. Motionless in White and Black Veil Brides – I’ve never heard these bands. I’ve literally never heard a note of their music, because I see their names and I look at them, and I just know it’s not for me. (Laughs) This was not created for me. This was created for someone else to enjoy so go enjoy it, somebody else. Knock yourself out.
Yeah, but at that age, I bet you saw a poster of Mötley Crüe looking somewhat similar, and I’m just guessing here, but I bet you thought that was pretty cool.
I don’t know. I was always a Def Leppard guy through the first four records. It’s funny to me. It’s all transient. A band like Mötley Crüe, in their heyday, that was back when the industry could support a band like that because they knew they were gonna sell like a million records. Now with a band like Motionless in White, what do they sell? 100,000? 200,000? I’m guessing because I don’t fucking know, but they’re not gonna have any radio hits. They’re not gonna define the generation. It’s not gonna be the soundtrack to their lives. It’s just gonna be part of what they do, and the kids who are into it I’m sure are fully invested in that band, but five years from now – they’re not gonna give a shit. I just don’t see fifteen years after that these bands coming back and having this career renaissance. It’s just different now, man. This isn’t the scene or that scene wasn’t born to support itself over multiple generations. (Laughs)
That’s something that I love about death metal in particular is that it managed to do that. It has now survived multiple generations. Like the 28-year-old who works with me, he wants to hear all these old school death metal records, and I’m like “Fine. We can listen to ‘em all day.” Like today I put on The Erosion of Sanity, and I got wrapped up in some conference call or something and came back, and he was like “Dude, we gotta listen to this more. Who is this?” And I just said, “This is Gorguts,” and he’s just wowed and super into it. I don’t think you have that with everything. Like, is there a Fallujah fan out there who’s curious about Morbid Angel? Probably not. I think that it’s always something that I wanted to do with Choosing Death, even back in 2002 or whenever I started working with it, it was like “This might get lost. This history might get lost and people aren’t gonna know where these things come from.” These stories – there’s just so much of the tissue to connect and weave together.
That story is something that, again, I think creates another point of distinction for Decibel, and it’s also what’s been the driving force for what I’ve done with SfB from the very beginning. I don’t want to write something or about something that has no shelf life because immediacy is too easy and everyone else is doing it.
I mean, we live in a world where – what’s the average lifespan of a tweet? What is it, like thirty minutes? That’s the world we live in, so you almost feel this civic responsibility to be like “Okay, I don’t give a fuck if anybody’s reading this, but I need to make sure that this is at least written down somewhere in case somebody needs to find it one day.” You’re creating a hall of records almost just in case when the apes come down, they’ll know Napalm Death were pretty good, I guess. (Laughs)
For you, what’s been the most significant point of growth for metal or death metal specifically since you started Decibel? What’s the future of the genre look like just from your perspective?
I thought about where the book ends in the original version. I think it ends around 2003 and Napalm Death are just starting to get revitalized, and you’ve got all this stuff that’s kind of up in the air. I never felt like Choosing Death ended on a super positive note. I felt like there was almost a sense of the bands who were involved in it were like “This is what we do because this is what we do,” which that’s fine. Obviously they’re passionate about it. Now, eleven years later, I think it’s a culmination of things with new bands coming up, older bands coming back together and revisiting older sounds. New bands paving crazy new territory like Portal, when they put out their first record was the year I finished writing Choosing Death. I think about what that band has accomplished not just sonically but thematically and theatrically just bringing those elements to death metal that weren’t really there before. You have all this stuff going on like the technical death metal movement, which I’m not the biggest fan of, but I do think that within those eleven years was when all of that became the kind of thing it is now. You had bands in 2004 who were playing technically or were being influenced by certain Death albums or certain Atheist records or whatever, but you didn’t have a whole movement. I wish I could say there was like this one thing that is guiding all of it, but I think that would be bad if there was. I think that there has to be all this movement and that movement intersects in a lot of different places, and I think that’s good. That’s really what it has to be for a scene to thrive.
It doesn’t just have to be a thing where here are the five bands who are gonna carry it. It has to be all kinds of stuff. In terms of death metal in particular, I think that the biggest problem is gonna be creating or bands establishing themselves at the level of those kind of legendary progenitors. Like a death metal band that can draw what At The Gates, Carcass, and Gorguts can draw at a show. Behemoth are that band now, but I think Behemoth are a bit of an anomaly because again they’re not one hundred percent in that genre. Amon Amarth would be another one but, again, an anomaly. Not a prototypical death metal band. Plenty of death metal influence and definitely death metal at one point, but I don’t think of them as death metal now outside of the vocals. For me, it’s like figuring out or hoping that that band that rises out of a generation like some band that’s in their twenties who are going to, ten years from now, play death metal and have as many people coming to see them as Cannibal or Carcass. That, to me, is establishing that next generation at that level. It’s so funny because you think that those bands at that level, like Carcass or At The Gates, you think eventually they’ll pack it in and create space for these other bands but, you know, Black Sabbath are still touring. (Laughs) It’s like, who knows? Nobody wants to shut it down. Nobody can.
Exactly. I mean, the greatest band that’s ever existed is still in existence, Albert. You know I have to shoutout Rush, regardless of how irrelevant it is to the conversation. I know I’m crazy.
(Laughs) No, but it’s the same thing really. I’m not an enormous Rush fan. I’m an admirer. But would you say, qualitatively, they’re making their best records now compared to Moving Pictures or 2112?
I honestly think Clockwork Angels is by far one of the best albums they’ve made yet. Yes.
Was that their last album?
Yep.
Ok, so then you are a crazy Rush person. (Laughs)
That’s true, but I also admitted it beforehand. (Laughs)
That’s true. You were up front. I shouldn’t have even bothered, should I? (Laughs)
Death Metal/Grindcore book Choosing Death to be reissued
Death Metal/Grindcore book Choosing Death to be reissued
Back in 2004, the same year that the first issue of Decibel was published, longtime editor Albert Mudrian published Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore. The book, originally released by Feral House, has been out of print for a while. Plus, 11 years later, there’s been a hell of a lot more death/grind released and bands that were in their infancy have gotten larger…
bueno es simplemente brutal este gran libro que ustedes ya conocen, una obra increible de un gran guerrero de el metal albert mudrian y retomando sus palabras "Estoy super feliz de que los metaleros ahora puedan contar una versión del libro en su propio idioma. ¡Es un gran honor y espero que a todos les encante!”—Albert Mudrian
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