Who was and is more influential to Death Metal?

Death!

My answer would be Death, Venom's influence is felt more in the speed/thrash and black metal that came afterwards. But I'm certainly happy to have both.

Joe Christianni

Death. No question.

DrinkHardThrashHard said:

I agree. Death had more influence on Death Metal, of course. I mean come on, they put Florida on the map.

although Venom were the apple of Chuck's eye, at least early on.

Death, hands down.

All hail Chuck Schuldiner.

litacore said:

And all that time I thought it was the singing, dancing mouse with his own amusement park.

Death doing Venom covers is the shit.

Death, when their goal was to be the heaviest band on the planet, were the greatest death metal band ever. Those '84-'85 demos have yet to be topped.

Death was amazing when they were actually death metal, once they got all philosophical and fruity (Human and beyond) I lost interest.

venom and death sound worlds apart as far as their unique sounds go, but they both rule

Josh_Martin said:

I have to agree I listen to em everyday and the old live shit from the Live after Dark club is priceless.

Death, no question. The first 3 albums are some of the best Death Metal albums ever to be released, and in my opinion "Scream Bloody Gore" is in the top 3.

Venom was more influential on the thrash/speed metal circuit.

Definately Death, the first 3 albums were Death metal masterpieces. As for the latter stuff, I still love it, just as much as the old stuff....it showed that Chuck wasn't afraid to push the boundaries and try new things. And for that, he's a true legend.

SeedBassist said:

well put. i did an interactive cr-rom about chuck after he died, so he gets my vote. i like venom too but as has been said before in this thread, they didn't influence death metal as much as they did thrash and black.

Death

I totally wasn't thinking right and was thinking comics... though Death is DC (I think) and Venom is marvel.

But, Death doing Kiss was bloody awful.

DEATH were great, VENOM weren't.

Death are one of my favorite bands, Venom bore me.

well I heard Venom first. Sometimes I wonder, if I'd heard Death first...

VENOM.

They were a Death Metal band, as well as Black Metal and Thrash.

The first band people threw around the term 'death metal' for was Possessed. It was the title of their first demo. So this thread should have been Death vs. Possessed.

Lyrically and conceptually Venom were NOT a death metal band (the term and the style did not exist), they were an over the top bastardization and a rebellion against the safer NWOBHM style of the time period, which the band has stated in their own biography. When I was about 8-9 years old and those first few records were over here and we heard them from our older brothers, cousins, etc, the term we always threw around for Venom was speed metal.

However, Venom were a MAJOR influence on both Possessed and Death, so they certainly had a hand in the creation of 'death metal' as a viable subgenre and you could definitely see them as a borderline death metal band for that reason.

DrinkHardThrashHard said:

Anthony nli said:

Hah. Oh man, it's always awful when I play the elderly card isn't it.

haha it was a good post dont get me wrong, it did sound like a Metal 101 lecture though heh

It did indeed.

Also, I just noticed the Rev's comic post and that was hilarious.

I gotta disagree. Though the term didn't come around for a few more years (it was actually probably a matter of months between when POSSESSED and ONSLAUGHT coined it on each side of the pond), I still think that conceptually, VENOM encompassed many styles of extreme Metal, as did POSSESSED, ONSLAUGHT, HELLHAMMER/CF, SLAYER, SODOM, SARCOFAGO and so many other bands. So I don't really see any error in calling the early works of those bands Thrash, Black Metal OR Death Metal, since all the subgenre segmentation that occurred really was from the next generation of bands that chose to focus on only the brutal aspects, only the Satanic aspects, etc. I think those bands continue to endure as some of the best and most important Metal bands ever, because they encompassed a variety of feelings in their sounds, rather than aiming to be, ya know, the most guttural/gorey band or the most lo-fi Black Legions worshippers possible. In an album like Welcome To Hell, I can hear a similar kind of brutal abandon to that on Severed Survival, a similar dark atmosphere to that on Thy Mighty Contract, a similar sheer metallic energy to that on an album such as Kill Em All.

Death.

For the most part I agree with everything you say (even though my earlier post did say that I could see them as a borderline death metal band).

There is definitely a strain of death metal that carried forth the over the top Satanic imagery and lyrics that Venom brought to the table (and Black Widow, Sabbath, Kiss, and others before them). First into Possessed, Hellhammer, etc like you mention and then on into 5 million other bands (Necrophobic, Vital Remains, etc).

But even listening back to the first two albums right here on my PC, the music has a far more evident pentatonic blues chord base with a lot of 70s hard rock riff flair, some of the tunes were simply NWOBHM style but with a filthy, aggressive production. Whereas when you got into 'Scream Bloody Gore' it was pure speed picking and power chords, not to mention Death, Slayer and Possessed (and by extension Onslaught, Sarcofago, etc) had far creepier chord progressions that are truly iconic to what I view as 'death metal' simply because that is when it came into creation.

Retrospectively, arguments could be made that Venom, and even Sabbath and Metallica, and other bands are in fact prototype death metal (certainly through some of their lyrical concepts). I just have the perspective of growing up entirely to metal music, so I have a tendency to stick with the classifications that were originally there before people even threw around terms like 'black metal' and 'death metal'. I think also death metal solidified itself with the more guttural vocal style, that's an important factor we shouldn't overlook.

Basically, Venom was such an early and revolutionary band that they influenced almost ALL metal from thereon. Can we agree to that?

But if some kid comes over and says, "You old bastard, what is this....this death metal" I am going to throw in Mallevs Malifecarvm, Consuming Impulse, Scream Bloody Gore, Leprosy, Seven Churches, Left Hand Path, Nocturnal Silence, Realm of Chaos, Altars of Madness, etc. I'm not going to play him Welcome to Hell. Because he probably won't be ready to get that yet

i love reading these super-intellectual posts about metal

and may i just add that Consuming Impulse is one of the coolest DM cds I own, from either the 'old school' or the modern/technical camp. Riffs/vocals/production/lyrics/artwork arrrrgh! It's just so damn good.

the_reverend said:
lol, me too. I thought this was gonna be an Infinity Gauntlet discussion ot something

Anthony nli said:

I do too, and I wish we had more of them.

As for Consuming Impulse, go to an Extinction Agenda show and you won't be disappointed!

I hope that Mental Funeral, Slowly We Rot and The Rack would be on the list after those.

AUTOPSY_666 said:

Of course! I was never huge into 'The Rack' but it's still my favorite ASPHYX.

DrinkHardThrashHard said:

no shit!! what song do they cover?

Why not go and hear for yourself?

Actually, we don't just cover Pestilence, but that influence is heavily infused into our originals. I can think of 2-3 riffs we use that are unconsciously derived from them.

you're a pretty clever fellow, you know that?

no really, i think you guys have awesome music and have been digging your mp3s for a while. A Pestilence cover just sweetens the deal. It just seems you always play at O'Brien's and I'm only 20....

I realize that. May 20th we are playing at Reflections, 19+

We're only a three-piece at the moment though. Sometimes I play bass and then sometimes I'll play guitar. But it's usually fun either way.

ill try to make it to that one. if you dont have a bassist right now you should play it live and do the power trio thing. thrash without bass is sadness.

At our last gig I did bass/vocals, but we've been jamming with the two guitars lately and frankly it sounds a lot better. The only time you notice the loss is for some of the songs off the newer CD with the more prominent basslines. Hopefully we'll get someone soon, there are currently two prospects but it's just a matter of gauging ambition.

Anthony - Well your band could respond to my Myspace message about playing a show with EA and age restrictions will suddenly lose meaning! Haha...

Scott - I do agree that VENOM was certainly much more based on a traditional Blues Rock formula then the bands that followed, but for me, there's certainly a feeling present that represents "Extreme Metal" as a whole to me in all their classic material that does seperate it significantly from the rest of the NWOBHM and the Hard Rock/HM/Punk bands they took influence from. Certainly the bands that followed moved further away from the traditional Rock/Metal formula than VENOM did, but I certainly think of it as an evolutionary process rather than anything where distinct lines can be drawn. While on a technical level, VENOM is in most ways closer to, say, JUDAS PRIEST than KRISIUN, I think in essence, they are much closer to the latter... But that's certainly subjective.

While you may be old as hell and have been listening to some of this stuff almost a decade or so longer than I, that doesn't mean the classifications you and your pals were using were the same worldwide ;) I agree that in general, most of the bands we're talking about were generally referred to as Thrash or Speed Metal, but the impression I get is that terms like those two, BM, DM, Power Metal, etc. really were used more as descriptors, rather than strict classifiers... Which is why there are flyers/ads/reviews/etc. that refer to bands like VENOM, BATHORY, SLAYER, VOIVOD, POSSESSED and so on as all sorts of different things. I think people WERE throwing around terms like Black Metal and Death Metal quite a bit, at least by the mid-80's, but without nearly so much concern for sticking to a set of technical rules for what each subgenre consists of. I prefer that approach to the way the styles have become so segmented, thoughthat was probably an inevitable process.

What I can definitely agree on is that I wouldn't throw on any VENOM as a basic example for Death Metal... And the albums you listed are certainly more representative of the genre as a whole. But if this WAS a Death Metal 101 class and Dr. Onslaught was the prof., you can be sure the required listening would include a couple Lant/Dunn/Bray compositions!

I thought it sounded great with you playing bass.

BestialOnslaught said:

I'm a few years younger than hell. I must point out though that actually the classifications we were using were pretty much the same worldwide...that's where we got them from, magazines and tape trading from everywhere...we didn't create them ourselves. Tape trading from Sweden, Germany, Canada, France, Brazil, Mexico, and all over the States. But none of these people were calling Venom death or black metal (even though it was the name of one of their records). Then again, even the abbreviation NWOBHM was not in widespread use until the 90s.

If I was teaching any course of Metal 101, I would definitely have Venom in there, they'd be the 2nd or 3rd chapter in.

BUT DAMNIT THE KIDS WILL KNOW CIRITH UNGOL!

I'm just saying, as a n00b, looking back at old articles and ads, I do see those bands mostly referred to as Thrash, but not always. It's not unheard of to see BATHORY referred to as Death Metal or MERCYFUL FATE as Black Metal. I know it wasn't so much geographical, but it does seem like there was a more flexible and more subjective approach to genre tagging at that time, at least within the Metal underground.

i hate Dio

I agree completely with Bathory, their first few records were really hard to get over here but when they were more common (by late 80s) people definitely called them death metal and then viking metal. Once black metal as it is now arrived, a lot of people were already calling Mercyful Fate, Bathory and Hellhammer black metal. Ironically, we were already calling that stuff black metal when Darkthrone's first LP came out and we called that death metal...(which it actually was).

I can't allow you to call yourself a n00b though, because you played "Commandments" at the last HMB and have an old metal spirit even if you are young in age.

whiskey_weed_and_women said:


Shocker. So do I, except for a few of his old Rainbow and Sabbath songs.

naw as much as Ozzy has ruined everything he did with Sabbath, i still gotta go with the first 8 Sabbath records over all.

"Symptom of the Universe" is still in my opinion the heaviest song ever made, that riff.....that riff still terrifies me even today,
but they were never my favorite band. Some of their records were way up there though, certainly.

ill agree with that

We should have more threads like this, where people actually discuss this stuff, except with more obscure bands....

Here, I'll go start one right now!

BestialOnslaught said:

i know sorry! ill get back to you soon

Do it Anthony. We've been wanting to open up for you guys.

38 days!

I checked out that Despotic Robot band, great stuff and this should be a fun show.

I can fully see the arguments for Venom, but for death metal as a single genre, Death wins this hands down.