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| The remarkable thing about Schuldiner, aside from his
breathtaking technical expertise, was his ability to fuse a melodic,
squealing power-guitar metal approach with the heavy-low-end, force-for-its-own-sake
style that he spearheaded and which would become the standard in his
wake. You can hear the shadows of what must have been his inspiration
-- Iron Maiden armies-on-the-march rhythm guitar in “Crystal
Mountain,” Black Sabbath’s joy-through-gloom riffage in
“Scavenger of Human Sorrow,” bits of Slayer or Motorhead
and even a shade of King Crimson here and there. But the stop-on-a-dime
technical expertise, the way everybody (most especially the drummer)
is playing at the very edges of their capabilities without once losing
step: that was Schuldiner’s idea. He was the guy who proposed
that everybody just double a song’s speed every once in a while
to see what would happen. He was the guy who took Slayer’s grunted-bellowed
vocals and said: “What if I just shrieked the whole time like
a villain in a cheap Italian horror movie?” His is a case where
we can say without having to resort to analogy that he truly cranked
it up a notch. His guitar solos sound like they were beamed to the
stage via satellite from a distant, frightening city in the future.
They conjure visions of an open circuit furiously trying to find the
ground. |
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