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What's the difference between Black Metal and Death Metal?
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3 Answers
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dm = gore
bm = evil
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alright here's a huge earful:
in the beginning you had thrash metal. venom. celtic frost. bathory. it served as the common ancestor for both of the genres in question. as with any genre, different people took different things from it and ran with them. and then there were three -->
*keep in mind these are mostly generalizations*
first off - vocals. more than anything vocals. (obvious shriek vs cookie monster thing going on here). black metal frequently also uses vocals more as an additional instrument (much akin to shoegaze).
and of course lyrical content. (though different themes create even more subgenres within the subgenres [i.e. depressive suicidal black metal etc]).
Both styles can sometimes be focused on things as varied as satanism, occultism, death, suicide, etc. (though black metal tends to use paganism much more extensively, and as odd as this may seem- is not always inherently negative [the use of nature and folklore are prevalent themes in black metal as well).
lyrically, the difference between the two, i find, is that death bands often focus on the details of the acts themselves whereas black metal bands more often than not mention them for their symbolism.
guitars to a smaller extent. black metal guitars are frequently tuned to e, whereas usually death metal guitars are tuned down; both as a result of the aforementioned vocal ranges...
the much-hated (unless you're into it) blast-beats are used differently by the two genres as well: black metal artists (frequently big on dissonance) use it as an annoyance (for lack of a better term) and follow the general flow of the drumming, whereas death bands usually play off of its technicality (thus you have all the technical _______ death metal bands).
another important point is that death metal is openly international - there's a whole lotta bands from florida and sweden and tons of other places with not a whole lot of animosity existing due to nationalistic differences.
on the other hand, it's not an unexpected thing to hear someone talk about 'true norweigan black metal' - a result of the genesis of black metal in norway being due to a 'fed-upness' with the rest of the world's collective metal scene (especially the death crowd in sweden). this 'the only real black metal bands are from norway' attitude has remained strong for some time. fortunately a lot of bands out there (notably xasthur) are giving america a good name (many of them local - leviathan, velvet caccoon, i shalt become, the ever-more-famous wolves in the throne room, etc.). though i feel like i should point out that most of the well-known american black metal artists are not plain-old-black-metal but usually of the atmospheric and/or DSBM variant.
unlike most musical genres - many black metal bands never perform. an equal amount are one-man-bands (like the aforementioned xasthur), with all of the instrumentation and vocals being performed by one person.
also important: black metal bands pretty much always use corpse paint and have huge boners for anything Tolkien related. so if you see a picture of some dudes in the woods at night making a snarly corpse paint face while holding a huge mace with a bunch of nails in it - it's probably a black metal band.
both camps are full of posers. both camps are full of legit bands. both camps are full of themselves. both camps have colorful histories. Both have hilarious anti-genres created out of misguided desperation (life metal, and more awesomely - unblack metal)
black metal, however, is the thinking man's metal :)
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Death Metal: drop-tuned guitars and Cookie Monster vocals
Black Metal: more treble and faster picking (tremolo) in the guitars, and screaming/shrieking vocals
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