Demilich’s guitarist/vocalist Antti Boman has a bizarre throat. I don’t mean that he makes weird sounds with it (which he does), I mean that it is physically different than your throat or mine. His singing sounds like a close-mic’d gastrointestinal tract trying to digest an entire Meat Lovers pizza. Boman gurgles, groans, and bellows in a way that sounds more like a Hellraiser monster than a human being. Hendrix was so good at hammer-ons because his hands were literally twelve inches long, Ozzy Osbourne could handle so much booze because his DNA literally allows him to metabolize alcohol better than normies (seriously), and Boman has such an expressive fry register because this throat is geometrically special.
Demilich didn’t let such a special talent go to waste. They surrounded it with the weirdest music 1993 could offer.
Eventually we’ll have to do one of these about Morbid Angel, Death, or Obituary as a more standard introduction to death metal, because I don’t think anyone would use Nespite as an onramp to it. It’s like trying bath salts as a gateway drug. Suffice to say, death metal became the metal underground after thrash started selling millions of records and turning up on MTV.
Truth told metal in general, but death metal in particular, is for the booger-eaters of the world. It’s for the outcasts among the outcasts, kids who always have their hands down their pants, kids who are into serial killers, kids who’ll eat stuff off the ground to get attention, kids who have favorite male porn stars. It takes a lot of time spent indoors to get good enough at guitar to play death metal, and a lot of experimentation to find the exquisitely dissonant sounds that make it special. It also helps to have a sick set of interests.
I couldn’t tell you a single lyric off of Nespite (which is an anagram for “the spine”) but I could list the song titles and you would get the point: “The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)”, “Inherited Bowel Levitation – Reduced Without Any Effort”, “When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water.” Someone who scored a date to prom is not writing a song called “The Planet That Once Used to Absorb Flesh in Order to Achieve Divinity and Immortality (Suffocated to the Flesh That It Desired…).” This is the gibberish you write immediately before dying of pussy-starvation.