The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

Pantera-Vulgar Display of Power.

In the aesthetics of metal, it is pretty much impossible to describe a song, a band, a guitar riff, or a performance, without using one, or all of four adjectives: "brutal", "sick", "hard", and "heavy". If you asked a typical metalhead to sit down with a number two pencil and a sheet of college ruled paper and define each of those terms, he or she would probably stab you in the hand and leave. Listeners are amazingly consistent, however, in the way they use these terms. Some bands are great without ever being brutal. In Flames is almost never brutal. Sonata Arctica and Nightwish do not do brutal at all-EVER. Some of it is seems to be in the lyrics, some of it in the melodies, and a hell of a lot of it in the rhythm and the structuring of tempos, but "brutal" is pretty easy to put a finger on when you experience it as a listener. It is that feeling of wanting to put a hammer through four inches of plaster and lath, knock out a hole, reach through, and wring your goddamned neighbor's neck for blocking your driveway with his fucking SUV. That these feelings can be invoked and channeled, through music, is a powerful statement about who we are as a species. Brutal is all about testosterone. Brutal is not about killing orcs on a distant battlefield, it is about killing the man who mistreated your sister, or the pit bull who is loose in the alley.

Pantera pioneered brutal, and in many ways, nobody has ever gone farther. This particular album is, in my opinion, absolutely the most brutal metal album ever recorded. A great deal has been said about it musically, and it is regarded as a masterwork. Lyrically, it goes to some deep dark places. I have trouble listening to it, because it inspires me to go out to the nearest street corner and start beating up drug dealers with a bat, then set them on fire. This feeling persists for days and could cause me legal problems sooner or later. One thing that makes this particular album so successful is the personal nature of the lyrics-they seem pretty much from the heart and that is a chilling realization. It is pretty hard to find a place for these emotions, once uncaged, so I save this one for special occasions.

Some other albums that, to me, stand out as some of the most brutal:

Napalm Death-Mentally Murdered EP. More abstracted, more ambitious, and a much harder listen,.

Kreator-Pleasure to Kill.

This is one of my favorite albums ever, though the lyrics are far less personal (and much harder to make out) than any Pantera post Cowboys from Hell, and it creates a much less focused feeling of rage.

Macabre-Murder Metal. This is a masterpiece of brutality. I think it pretty much comes down to whether you can buy into their extreme flights of fantasy. I saw them play live, many years ago, and it was a little like seeing Gille de Rais on one of his killing sprees.