Carcass' Jeff Walker, regardless of your opinion of the guy, is a legend alongside his band in the metal world. Carcass was the progenitor of melodic death metal with its 1993 album Heartwork (alongside bands like In Flames and Dark Tranquillity). The band also helped out with a lot with the generation of extreme metal with its early work, and finally called it quits in 1996.
Carcass then came back in 2013 with Surgical Steel and the album, and tours, did well. Why'd they do so well? Walker, in a recent interview, thinks it's because people are used to death metal being not so great.
"I think there's two factors at work here. One is nostalgia. And two, there's been a demise in quality of, whatever you wanna call it, death metal or extreme metal, for me personally, since the mid-'90s. So there's been kind of a vacuum created where bands have got bigger than we ever were, or At The Gates, but not necessarily better. So people have been tolerating a kind of substandard product. So when, for want of a better word, the masters of the craft come back, people are hungry for it. 'Cause there's been lots of bands that have ripped off Carcass, but, arguably, have they been better than what we did? I don't know."
Agreed on the nostalgia, but I think the idea of "substandard" death metal might be a little off the mark. Sure, there are a lot of clone bands, and some even do moderately well… but man, metal has gone in a extremely different direction between 1996 and 2013.
So maybe not substandard as much as it there became an inherent void as metal splintered off into 100,000 different subgenres and directions.
Thoughts?
