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So I guess now when a death metal band adds melody to their music, they automatically become lame talent-less sellouts. Heaven forbid a death metal band should EVER stray away from anything but constant in your face blast beats and unwavering death grunts. At one point I thought that people could tell the difference between the natural progression of a bands music, and them selling out. Now, I’m not so sure. It seems like nowadays anytime a band starts off straight death metal and slowly, over time, adds melodies into their music they become a target for the classic attacks of ‘selling out’ or ‘going soft’. I think the primary thing is when a bands adds a significant amount of keyboards and (or) clean vocals people just go off the deep end. A good example here is Soilwork. The moment Strid starting displaying a very impressive amount of vocal range in their music, they became pussies and were no longer ‘metal’ but ‘modern rock’.
Adding keyboards, melodic guitars, and clean vocals adds several layers to a bands music. Sure it changes a bands sounds, a lot of the time drastically, but I don’t see a problem with wanting to branch out, add more sound, and more creativity. These things in themselves do not take away from a bands talent, and if anything, add to it. Of course there are plenty of bands out there that do sell out and do lose a significant amount of their talent the more melodic they become (Come Clarity anyone?), but the simple fact of transforming from death metal to melodic death is nothing but a natural progression and evolution of music.
Now don’t get me wrong; although I am partial to melodic death metal, I still love me some Suffocation, Bloodbath, Decapitation, Deicide, and so on. There is nothing wrong with straight in your face death metal. I love metal in pretty much all its forms, its just sometimes the ideology that comes along with it is retarded (maybe another day I’ll get into black metal…).