Left Hand Path

Seven minutes of Swedish death metal that essentially defined an entire national scene and influenced the next decade of extreme music, "Left Hand Path" opens with a passage borrowed — without apology — from horror film scoring before collapsing into a guitar tone that remains arguably the most influential in death metal history. The "Stockholm sound" that Entombed produced by pushing a Boss HM-2 pedal into the red creates something that shouldn't work on paper: massively distorted, almost absurdly saturated, with a chainsaw buzz that somehow retains rhythmic definition and harmonic character. It sounds alive in an unpleasant way, like the guitar itself is diseased. L-G Petrov's vocals have a different quality from the American death metal contemporaries — slightly more melodic in the phrasing, occasionally almost anthemic in the peaks, which gives the song an unexpected sense of dynamics. The composition moves through several distinct chapters across its runtime, incorporating a genuinely mournful slow passage midway through that drops the temperature dramatically before the final assault. There's a horror-film sensibility to the whole record that distinguishes it from Floridian or New York death metal — this is specifically Scandinavian darkness, the kind that comes from long winters and an apparently inexhaustible capacity for bleakness. Experienced at high volume on good speakers, the low-end presence of that guitar tone becomes a physical sensation in the chest. This is a record for the initiated, and "Left Hand Path" is the initiation rite itself.