Daniel Ekeroth: Swedish Death Metal

I heard about this book from an Ian Christie interview on Talking Metal. He started his own imprints and this is one of the first books to be released. If you have not heard of Christie before, he wrote an excellent book called Sound of the Beast, which was a history of heavy metal that both very good and easy to find in bookstores. He also hosts a show on satellite radio that I have heard a little of once, but since I do not have such luxuries can only listen to by borrowing Shannon’s car. Sometimes I feel like borrowing her car just so I can sit in the parking lot and listen to the show, but I digress.  I asked for it for Xmas, and on Christmas Eve I opened a gift from my wonderful wife and found this book inside.  I have an awesome wife.

Books about death metal usually come from two different pools of writers. One pool is people with journalistic background, usually in the zine scene with a lot of reviews and interviews under their belt. The other group is academics who usually look at cultural elements of the music form and expression, often from the broader level of heavy metal in general. Ekeroth is a musician who lived the scene and had some first hand knowledge of the information he was presenting. The book is exhaustive and huge, a greatly researched piece of work.

From an anthropological perspective this might be described as a bit of an auto-ethnography. Some would consider it music journalism, but as opposed to writing a critical review of several albums and publishing a bunch of interviews and structuring the book into chapters that take representative bands as expressions of the wider scene and using that format the author took time to detail the esoteric of Swedish death metal. Instead of a paragraph making note of these less successful bands Ekeroth devotes whole chapters to bands from the smaller sub-scenes. While there is that journalistic element of criticism that creeps in, there is also a broader appreciation that shows a trained and received subjectivity instead of an inauthentic authenticity that is often found when music journalists attempt to present genre history but cannot help but only show their own tastes in experiencing the genre. I don’t get this feeling reading the book.

Not only is there great depth to the description of the bands and the individual personalities, there is a considerable amount of direct quotation from individual musicians, producers, label people and other contributors – but mainly those from the bands themselves. These quotations are integrated into the text, creating a native voice of the people being discussed. I figure about 10-20 percent of the book was in the form of direct quotations, maybe more.

There are also many, many images of original flyers, demo and album covers and photographs from the time. The book is well illustrated without distracting from the text, which in music writing that is this highly illustrated often happens. This is a professional piece of work though, not one of those “instant remainders” from China that are always “marked down” at Barnes and Noble. All the photos are in black and white, which for the demos and flyers was the original format of the printing, but for some of the album covers later in the book feels lacking. The black and white does aid the tone of the book in general though, keeping that certain darkness and DIY element found in the early zines. It was probably printing costs and not aesthetics that were at work here, but it works just the same.

The book does not just concentrate on the musicians, but paints a broad picture of the times and culture that led to the creation of the music. The social situation of Sweden, combined with the particulars of the various places that demos and albums were recorded is recounted with details that are left out by many other authors. There are recounts of recording methods, effects, guitars, amplifiers, tunings, and drum patterns, all of the technical elements involved in production. This is important because often in the course of writing a book the author will presuppose that such detail will be lost on readers who might not have any experience with being a musician. I am very happy that Ekeroth did not make such details a lateral element with scant mention but an integral part of the writing, making us musicians out here very happy to read something that is not dumbed down for the general audience. It should be obvious by this point that the “general audience” of death metal is fairly competent and can navigate these details about recording processes and instruments. The average death metal fan is not interested in reading the equivalent of the supermarket biography of Madonna. We like the details because that is where the devil is. I don’t know how I feel about that line but I wrote it anyway.

I also really enjoyed how the author put himself into the book at times, breaking from his job as genre historian to place his own recollections into the narrative. Maybe you can call this past-tense gonzo, I don’t know, but I found it very interesting and honest in understanding the author’s connection and approach to the subject. This reflexive approach is very engaging. I usually hate it when non-fiction authors use exclamation points in their prose, but in this case it expressed his obvious attachment to the subject. His enthusiasm is contagious.

The book deals with the late 1980s and early 1990s, the heyday of early death metal and the explosion of the Swedish death metal scene as the bands began to emerge like flies in a dumpster on a warm day. That is not to say that they are flies, just that I am suffering some metaphorical writing block at the time. The emergence and codification of the death metal genre in Sweden makes for an important story in the history of metal and demands attention. The book moves from the epicenter of Stockholm to the second center of Swedish death metal of Gothenburg. From there the book details the smaller cities and their emerging scenes and bands, as death metal becomes more popular and the act of seeing death metal live forms the inspiration for many young musicians to start their own bands.

The transition from death metal to black metal in the early 1990s forms the end of the book. This is a difficult thing to parse, since the transition was far from seamless or perfectly categorical. But there was a shift there that does draw the line between those who would call themselves death metal and those who call themselves black metal. The boundary is very permeable and very sloppy. Things become much more complex as the subgenres emerge from a core of a core. Musical generations are not like people, musical generations happen in a few years.

This wonderful tome also features a huge appendix which acts as a reference of Swedish death metal bands. This well researched and developed section of the book provides some great information for collectors, researchers and fans of this music. It is an encyclopedia of its own, full of listings to pour over and stimulate your eBay purchases.

This book is an admiral format for the covering of this topic. As much as I love it, I find myself wanting more. I want a book like this that covers Brazil, another one about Florida, one about the Texas metal scene, one on New York hardcore – reading Ekeroth’s opus has made me realize just how good a book on death metal can be, how interesting. I might have been motivated towards this book because I have been a huge Entombed fan since they came out with the Hollowman EP, but this has made me take notice of some bands that I have never really checked out before, like Autopsy, Carnage, Dismember and At The Gates. I was more of a fan of American death metal, but now I have been inspired to check out a whole slew of bands and albums. Hopefully this book will have that inspiration with others who read it. It is my dream that this book will cause all of these bands to reissue the out-of-print CDs and rejuvenate some reunion tours. Even if it does not, the book stands as a major achievement and Ekeroth deserves a massive amount of praise for this opus.