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should Possessed be credited with inventing death metal instead of Death?


Serpentboi1992

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i feel credit for inventing death metal should belong to possessed. because, "seven churches" which came out two years before "scream bloody gore" was very death metal sounding in my opinion and i think the only reason it was classified as thrash was because the death metal subgenre hadn't been defined yet in 1985. if this is already a topic, i'll delete this

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I feel like Seven Churches is a transitional-sounding early DM record with a lot of heavy metal influence. People actually do tend to give it a lot of credit as an originator - too much credit IMO. I think it's fine to call it "the first death metal album" but that ignores the fact that Possessed, Death (Mantas), and Necrophagia were all writing and recording stuff that's recognizable proto-DM as early as 1983. By 85 there were more bands playing DM. So giving any one band the "originator" credit based on a first-past-the-post full length recording is missing a lot.

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5 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

I feel like Seven Churches is a transitional-sounding early DM record with a lot of heavy metal influence. People actually do tend to give it a lot of credit as an originator - too much credit IMO. I think it's fine to call it "the first death metal album" but that ignores the fact that Possessed, Death (Mantas), and Necrophagia were all writing and recording stuff that's recognizable proto-DM as early as 1983. By 85 there were more bands playing DM. So giving any one band the "originator" credit based on a first-past-the-post full length recording is missing a lot.

i guess if we count demos, that's a fair point

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Oooohhh I don't think you're allowed to re-define history even if you want to. I think it's frowned upon by those who might look down on us. Therefore if Seven Churches was released as thrash....Aahh what the fuck do I know? Me trying to debate genres is like me discussing which method of brain surgery is the best.

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3 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

Oooohhh I don't think you're allowed to re-define history even if you want to. I think it's frowned upon by those who might look down on us. Therefore if Seven Churches was released as thrash....Aahh what the fuck do I know? Me trying to debate genres is like me discussing which method of brain surgery is the best.

Says the cucumber who pretended to be a killer whale for two whole years and now won't even admit to being a cucumber anymore.

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5 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

I never pretended to be a whale, you lot wanted it so badly you convinced yourselves it was true. 

Nobody who remembers your old avatar is gonna buy this for a second. You're a fruit who dressed as a mammal. We all know it.

But I'm actually on the other side of this argument when it comes to genre labels. People struggle to figure out what to call bands on the edges of different styles, and maybe they settle on something for a while, and then more stuff happens and the boundaries need to be revisited. It's not "redefining history" in the way you're trying to do when you pretend you never pretended you were an orca, it's just (mostly) trying to integrate new information in a way that makes sense. 

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If everyone was that their avatar depicted then there would be more stranger than I

I'm not trying to redefine or integrate. I personally don't care what genre people want to place Possessed in because it takes nothing away from how I view the album. I don't put the album on and wonder if it should be thrash or death, I put the album on and enjoy the sounds I hear. I don't have any issue with people who have to define it in one genre or another but it's just not something I have to do.

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Possessed - 7 Churches is a thrash record. I've never understood why so many people want to call it death metal. I can only assume it's just because it had a song called Death Metal on it. You can reasonably call it proto death if you'd like, but that doesn't change the fact that it's totally thrash. Musically it has much more in common with Hell Awaits/Reign in Blood era Slayer than it does with Death. But then I suppose I've heard some people (wrongly) call Slayer death metal too. Which just shows me they don't fully understand exactly what defines the different metal sub-genres.

The only reason this 7 Churches thrash vs death is such an interesting debate/discussion which comes up over and over again even now 38 years after the fact, is because for those of us who enjoy death metal it's interesting to look back and see all the steps along the way of how the one sub-genre transitioned into the other. Most of the early death metal albums from the mid 80's up til about 1990 were pretty thrashy. I would think it'd be difficult if not impossible to pinpoint exactly when thrash became death, or in other words to definitively state what's the first death metal record, because the early ones were all transitional, containg elements of both sub-genres. So that makes it subjective for each of us. If a record sounds like death metal to you, then I guess to you it is, case closed. But 7 Churches will always totally be thrash metal to me, it's a no-brainer.

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I'd personally be inclined to say Abomination of Desolation (88 iirc) was the first real death metal album only because it's the first one I heard. Sure there were others before, but that's where my timeline starts. If I'm pointing newbies where to start, it's there or Slowly We Rot. But I'm a Florida DM guy and those are the sub-subgenre defining records. Possessed never comes up. Mediocre recorded bay area thrash, good record but not DM. Death is great but I just wasn't exposed until later. During that time, it was all about what was available to you in your local area, so my perspective will be totally different than each of yours. There was no European bands repped in my area or even the big NYDM bands to be honest. Those did come, but not in 89-90. This is the same debate as "did venom invent black metal?" I say no, Bathory did, but ymmv.

From a purely academic perspective, I don't think you can include demos for official credit, so first published would likely go to Death. There were probably more demos or garage bands lost to time than we'll ever know about so I think extending to those would be impossible.

I also vote once an imitation orca, always an imitation orca.

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3 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

I think it's fine to call it "the first death metal album" but that ignores the fact that Possessed, Death (Mantas), and Necrophagia were all writing and recording stuff that's recognizable proto-DM as early as 1983.

Got to disagree with FA here regarding Mantas...even if we're including demo work, that was a thrash band through and through.

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48 minutes ago, navybsn said:

Possessed never comes up. Mediocre recorded bay area thrash, good record but not DM

 

41 minutes ago, SurgicalBrute said:

Got to disagree with FA here regarding Mantas...even if we're including demo work, that was a thrash band through and through

 

2 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

But 7 Churches will always totally be thrash metal to me

I'm not saying this stuff isn't thrash. I'm saying it's also something else, and that something else is part of the roots of DM, in a way that some other thrash isn't. More savage, more chunky, less rock n' roll. So when you're interested in the history of DM you inevitably get led back to those first few bands who started doing the stuff that would eventually become the death metal we all know and love. I don't hear a discontinuity.

56 minutes ago, navybsn said:

I'd personally be inclined to say Abomination of Desolation (88 iirc) was the first real death metal album only because it's the first one I heard. Sure there were others before, but that's where my timeline starts. If I'm pointing newbies where to start, it's there or Slowly We Rot. But I'm a Florida DM guy and those are the sub-subgenre defining records.

I started listening to DM in the early 90s in North Carolina and had a similar experience. I guess we were all at the mercy of regional or local metalhead culture that included some stuff and randomly omitted lots of other stuff. The Florida bands and a handful of NYDM bands were the biggest names when I was growing up, although we also had a little bit of Swedish and Finnish DM. I never even heard of Possessed until I moved up to NY for college. The metal people I met up there seemed to universally regard them as DM originators. The first time I listened to the album, I was like, what the hell is this... sure as fuck not death metal. Took me a while to hear it. Or maybe I'm fooling myself. 

1 hour ago, navybsn said:

From a purely academic perspective, I don't think you can include demos for official credit

I have to disagree. The demos were getting traded around and the bands were playing shows and influencing each other before the full-lengths started coming out. Studio albums are the tip of the iceberg. I think the demos help flesh out how it came together and take away some of the mythical "from the head of Zeus" quality that gets attributed to whichever album is the earliest to sound sufficiently death metally in our pantheons.

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24 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

I have to disagree. The demos were getting traded around and the bands were playing shows and influencing each other before the full-lengths started coming out. Studio albums are the tip of the iceberg. I think the demos help flesh out how it came together and take away some of the mythical "from the head of Zeus" quality that gets attributed to whichever album is the earliest to sound sufficiently death metally in our pantheons

Yeah I meant from an academic perspective. In that world, many may have similar thoughts or projects that are unpublished but feed into another work that is first to publish in a journal. The published author is going to get the credit while the others may have their work acknowledged as "attributed to". It's splitting hairs, but that's what academics do. So the argument there would be "what's the first DM album" vs "what are the acts that originated the style" or something along those lines.

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7 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Possessed - 7 Churches is a thrash record. I've never understood why so many people want to call it death metal. I can only assume it's just because it had a song called Death Metal on it. You can reasonably call it proto death if you'd like, but that doesn't change the fact that it's totally thrash. Musically it has much more in common with Hell Awaits/Reign in Blood era Slayer than it does with Death. But then I suppose I've heard some people (wrongly) call Slayer death metal too. Which just shows me they don't fully understand exactly what defines the different metal sub-genres.

The only reason this 7 Churches thrash vs death is such an interesting debate/discussion which comes up over and over again even now 38 years after the fact, is because for those of us who enjoy death metal it's interesting to look back and see all the steps along the way of how the one sub-genre transitioned into the other. Most of the early death metal albums from the mid 80's up til about 1990 were pretty thrashy. I would think it'd be difficult if not impossible to pinpoint exactly when thrash became death, or in other words to definitively state what's the first death metal record, because the early ones were all transitional, containg elements of both sub-genres. So that makes it subjective for each of us. If a record sounds like death metal to you, then I guess to you it is, case closed. But 7 Churches will always totally be thrash metal to me, it's a no-brainer.

you have made a good point. proto-death is a valid argument and a fair classification since like black metal, death metal also originated from thrash. seven churches is proto-death. now their follow up "beyond the gates" is very much a straight up thrash metal album. no argument there. probably why so many fans considered "beyond the gates" a down grade. but i didn't mind it, though. i think "beyond the gates" is a decent album. b.t.g. was a tad generic, but still good.

hell, possessed weren't even the first to use the term "death metal" lol. noise records put out a comp in '84 called death metal, but i believe the title was probably due to the lyrical themes of most the songs on it and the cover art too i guess. you gotta admit that is some wicked sick album art, death metal or not

Death Metal (1984, Vinyl) - Discogs

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On 1/27/2023 at 9:24 PM, FatherAlabaster said:

Nobody who remembers your old avatar is gonna buy this for a second. You're a fruit who dressed as a mammal. We all know it.

But I'm actually on the other side of this argument when it comes to genre labels. People struggle to figure out what to call bands on the edges of different styles, and maybe they settle on something for a while, and then more stuff happens and the boundaries need to be revisited. It's not "redefining history" in the way you're trying to do when you pretend you never pretended you were an orca, it's just (mostly) trying to integrate new information in a way that makes sense. 

Oh shit, I was wondering where the cucumber guy went.

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