More Feral House Trifecta: Choosing Death

Lords of Chaos was a bullshit rambling take on Black Metal, but Albert Mudrian's Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore is anything but! We don't want our nascent "Books, Check 'Em Out" feature to get too review-y, but we're real excited to have this thing in our library so you'll just have to deal with that opening sentence. We're not sure if you all know this, but it turns out that all that scary Death Metal stuff that your mamas think is some kind of "virgin goat sacrifice music" was started by just a few meddling kids. Some fifteen year-old Euro-boys with bad mustaches, black Levi's, and foreign pen pals. Kids who wanted to play as fast as possible and grunt about that one scene from that Fulci movie. Napalm Death, Carcass, Entombed, all those bands that created Death Metal and Grindcore were nothing but cornball small-town kids...bad-ass cornball small-town kids no doubt, but kids all the same. And then John Peel dished out some love to these scruffy lookin' noisy punks, dubbed Memorexes made the Stockholm to Tampa back-and-forth, and headbanging history was made.

Aside from that there's a ton of other great stuff in here, stuff like how Morbid Angel brought the epic to the grunts and blastbeats, how them seminal bands sold out during the post-Pantera '90s with their rawkin'-not-grindin' guitars n' bellowing, and how darn near every band went through a million line-up changes on the road to mid-sized venue stardom. And then we especially loved that final chapter about how them insane new bands re-energized stagnant Death Metal tropes and how Slipknot is pretty damn extreme to be so rich and famous. Choosing Death not only gets the Duty approval for making us so much smarter but really for making this blog so much greater! Why, we never woulda thought to search for "Alf Death Metal" if we hadn't read this!