Published on Oct 19, 2000
Hey, look! A death metal CD that’s actually
fun!
No matter what your view is of death metal, you have to admire
the spunk of Six Feet Under to release their latest disc
Graveyard Classics. After the creative success of their last
disc
Maximum Violence, one had to wonder how they were going to
top themselves. The answer, of course, is that they’re not about to
try… not yet. Instead, they took 12 songs from bands who they
liked or who had influenced them and gave them a thrashing.
Admittedly, you have to take these performances with a grain of
salt. If you go into this disc thinking that vocalist Chris Barnes
will suddenly drop his “gargled-with-Lysol” sound for more
understandable vocals, you’ve got another thought coming. (It is
weird, though, to know just what he’s growling – it’s the closest
I’ve ever come to deciphering this genre.) If you pick this disc up
expecting to hear guitarist Steve Swanson play note-for-note copies
of the solos – well, he does come pretty close, you have to give
him that. But he still puts enough of his own stamp on them to let
you know you’re listening to a new translation of an old
favorite.
There is only one mis-step on
Graveyard Classics – namely, using Armored Saint/Anthrax
vocalist John Bush to do a duet on their cover of The Scorpions’s
“Blackout”. I am a big fan of Bush’s, but to hear him follow up
Barnes’s growls and grunts… well, it’s as out of place as Vince
Neil joining the Three Tenors. Stylistically, it doesn’t work.
Musically, it’s an interesting cover.
And you can’t help but smile when you hear Six Feet Under tackle
such songs as Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf,” AC/DC’s “TNT” or The
Monkees’s (The Monkees?!?) “Stepping Stone”. (They say the Sex
Pistols recorded it, and I don’t doubt that, but it is weird to
know where the roots of this song are.)
You don’t need to be fans of all 12 bands covered by Six Feet
Under; chances are, one or two of these performances might be of
groups you’re not familiar with. If anything,
Graveyard Classics does two things, and it does them well.
First, it shows a band having fun with a form of music that is
usually gloom and doom – and this is quite refreshing. Second, it
might just spur you to head down to your local music emporium and
pick up a CD or two from a band like Dead Kennedys or
Angelwitch.
Graveyard Classics almost makes death metal fun… who ever
thought someone would make a comment like that about this genre!
This disc makes me all the more eager to hear the next studio album
from Six Feet Under.