THE WELL-DRESSED HEADBANGER

I'm pretty excited about the Summer Slaughter Tour, which hits NYC on August 1; ten of the most listener-abusive deathcore and technical death metal bands around, crushing it one after the other. I mean, seriously: Decapitated, The Faceless, All Shall Perish, The Red Chord, Veil of Maya, Cephalic Carnage, Decrepit Birth, Carnifex, Animals as Leaders and Vital Remains all on one bill? Sold!

The one thing that bums me out about the show is that as much as I like the majority of these bands (the only ones I'm not particularly looking forward to seeing are All Shall Perish, The Red Chord and Cephalic Carnage), I know I'm not gonna come home with even one new T-shirt.

Metal shirts, like metal itself, have gotten more and more "extreme" in recent years, with logos getting uglier and spikier, slogans getting more obscene/offensive, and imagery heading into territory that, frankly, I don't want on my chest where strangers can see. There was an awesomeness to metal graphic design in the '80s and even, to a degree, in the '90s that young bands don't care to match. To this day, old-school bands like Judas Priest, Metallica and Slayer offer good-looking shirts that a man in his late 30s can wear with relative dignity.

Iron Maiden used to be the gold standard for this. Their shirts, which almost always depicted mascot Eddie (I have one of the few that doesn't, a shirt from the 2004 Dance of Death Tour with a band photo on the front), were witty and cool-looking; you could wear them on the street and get unexpected nods of appreciation from strangers. I was hoping to buy a new shirt on Monday night. But everything on offer was ugly, and I left the gig empty-handed.

One option a few bands have exercised in recent years, which has pleased me greatly, has been the simple black-and-white logo shirt. I have one from Atheist, one from Entombed, and one that's not quite a straight logo shot, but features a logo and a simple white graphic, from the L.A.-based Native American crust/grind band Resistant Culture. And, of course, Motörhead has been doing that for decades—the classic "Motörhead/England" shirt, with their pig-demon mascot's head in the center, adorns hundreds of thousands of torsos worldwide, so many that Lemmy once told me, "I wish everyone who's got the T-shirt had the albums."

I feel like a lot of young bands are going out of their way to alienate older fans. There are a lot of metalheads in their late 30s who like new bands, but don't want to be walking around in a T-shirt that's been designed to piss off parents and high school principals. I think shirts designed for grown-ups would be a great marketing tool, and a way to bridge what I see as a growing generation gap in metal.

Of course, I could just be old and out of touch. That's not outside the realm of possibility. All I know for sure is that when I go to Summer Slaughter, I'll be wearing this classy, simple garment:

ENTOMBED, WOE OF TYRANTS, GWYNNBLEIDD

[Cross-posted here.]

Swedish death metal legends Entombed are on a short U.S. tour built around their performance at last weekend's Maryland Deathfest, and I'd never seen them before, so I figured I'd catch the New York show. I was kinda hoping to get their late enough to miss the opening acts, because the website said the relatively unimpressive metalcore band Woe of Tyrants and the totally useless hardcore band Merauder would be on the bill. Well, I got there only a few minutes after eight PM, and my information was only 50% accurate. The first band was not Woe of Tyrants, but Gwynnbleidd, a very pleasant surprise.

Gwynnbleidd are a Polish-via-Brooklyn blackened death metal band with some folk tossed into the salad bowl, too. Their 2009 album Nostalgia is terrific; it sounds a lot like Opeth at times, but in what universe is that a bad thing? They were the first band, so they got shafted by the soundman, who didn't give them even half the power or fullness their complicated and aggressive, but beautiful music deserved. Still, they pulled off a good set and had some loyal (and vocal) fans in the crowd. So good for them.

Woe of Tyrants were on the bill, and they were up second. They set up quickly, but took a long time to get their sound together (apparently their drummer had four toms, but only three microphones for them, which baffled the in-house engineer). When they did get rolling, it seemed like they were forced to perform an abbreviated set, 'cause they only bashed through about five of their stamped-out, melodic death metal/metalcore songs before leaving the stage. Instrumentally speaking, they're fine. They sound like At the Gates, they sound like Darkest Hour, they sound like a zillion bands you've heard before. Their vocalist is the problem. He's goofy looking. He looks like Michael McDonald from MAD TV, and it's hard to watch him. But again, it was over soon.

Entombed was up next (no Merauder), and they were one of the loosest bands I've ever seen onstage. They almost reminded me of Eyehategod, but without the deliberately sculpted feedback and at twice the speed. They played a lot of old material ("Demon," "Wolverine Blues," their cover of Roky Erickson's "Night of the Vampire"), but after all, isn't it all old material? They haven't put out an album since 2007, and when I interviewed vocalist Lars-Goran Petrov last week, he told me they have some songs, but no scheduled plans to record or release them.

Anyway, the set was terrific. Petrov is an entertaining frontman, dressed half scruffy-rock 'n' roller and half homeless-guy and kinda shambling back and forth onstage, half hunched over like a cross between a gorilla and Ozzy Osbourne, and his voice is just as leonine and room-filling as it is on record. Even though the band only has one guitarist these days, that guitarist, Alex Hellid, keeps the trademark Entombed ultra-distorted roar going at full strength, and the rhythm section has death metal power but rock 'n' roll swing. They reminded me of Motörhead or one of Scott "Wino" Weinrich's bands—Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand—more than a standard "death metal" act. And even though it wasn't a super-packed house, everyone there seemed to be into it, too—they had one of the bigger moshpits I've seen in a while. These days, a lot of audiences, especially in New York, just kind of stand around watching the band like they're at a zoo or something. But Entombed got the people moving. This was a great, loud, aggressive rock show, and I had a blast.

THIS WEEK IN CLEVELAND

Fatalist Attraction
Entombed lead a new wave of old-school Swedish metal

Ask your average music fan to name the most important and influential group to ever come out of Sweden and the answer will be Abba. Ask a metalhead the same question, and he'll tell you about Entombed. Daniel Ekeroth — author of the obsessive, passionate, and personal genre history Swedish Death Metal — says, "The Scandinavian metal scene would never have exploded without them. They changed everything. They were way ahead of any other Swedish band around 1990, with better songs, better sound, and above all, they were much better musicians than the rest."

That about covers it. The band formed in 1987 as Nihilist, blending Discharge's raging punk with Motörhead's speed-crazed metal with a side of distinctive distorted guitar tone. Rejecting the crisp, martial discipline of U.S. death-metal bands like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse, they pioneered a looser, more groove-oriented sound known as "death 'n' roll." After splitting with bassist Johnny Hedlund, who soon formed Unleashed, they changed their name to Entombed and released 1990's Left Hand Path.

The album created a sensation throughout the worldwide metal community almost as soon as it was released. Its raw power and ferocious intensity were most apparent in Lars-Göran Petrov's gravelly, roaring vocals. Instead of the guttural grunts and blood-gargling sounds of other death-metal singers, Petrov came at the listener like an enraged bear. And behind him, the band straight-up rocked, attracting listeners from across the global underground, a fan base that remains united to this day. As the frontman points out, "If we play festivals around Europe, there are punks and death-metal people, everyone just headbanging to it. It's good to connect those different people to each other."

Last month marked the 20th anniversary of Left Hand Path, but unlike Slayer and Megadeth — who are co-headlining a tour and playing their 1990 releases, Seasons in the Abyss and Rust in Peace, front-to-back — Entombed aren't planning any elaborate celebrations. "It actually just passed by us somehow," laughs Petrov.

They'd rather look forward. Though peers like Grave and Dismember quickly emulated their style — creating the impression that, like AC/DC or the Ramones, every album is more or less the same — Entombed tweaked their sound quite a bit over the years. Uprising (from 2000) threw some bluesy riffs and rock grooves into the sonic stew, 2001's Morning Star was sweeping and epic, and 2003's Inferno had a punky edge and a deliberately rough mix. The group has also covered songs by a wide range of bands (Venom, Kiss, Hüsker Dü, Alice Cooper, Stiff Little Fingers, and Bob Dylan, to name a few) that can be heard on 2002's two-CD Sons of Satan Praise the Lord.

The common denominator is a loose, live feel that Petrov says is a main goal. "We try to do it as good as we can, but you have to have that live feeling," he says. "If you record something in one take and it sounds good and it doesn't have to be perfect, then we just leave it that way. There's nothing wrong with being perfectionist, but it loses the spontaneity."

The only misstep Entombed ever made is 1998's Same Difference. At the suggestion of their new record company, they steered into an alternative-rock direction, with Petrov adopting a clean singing voice, and guitarists Alex Hellid and Uffe Cederlund cutting way back on their distortion. "We had a record label that wanted to try new things, and we're always open to new stuff," he says. "But I think it was too much astray from what we wanted. I wasn't too comfortable recording that."

Entombed haven't released an album since 2007's Serpent Saints — The Ten Amendments. The band isn't even seriously planning one at the moment, but Petrov says it's got some new songs. "We just gotta put them together," he says. "We don't want to rush and just put out an album because we have to. It's just a matter of sitting down, putting [the songs] together, and recording it. We go once or twice a week to rehearse, but we mostly rehearse old songs. But once we have time, we will sit down and concentrate on the new songs."

These days, there are young bands explicitly modeling themselves on Entombed's pioneering Scandinavian death-metal sound — like California's Fatalist, who even use the same font Entombed uses for their logo. Petrov knows about the youngsters, and it makes him laugh. "It is exactly the logo," he says. "I think it's great. Somebody's taking over — they're following in our footsteps. We have some bands here in Sweden that are holding the flag for old school. It's the new wave of Swedish old school."