When did Metal start to get structurally extreme?

What are the earliest examples of that kind of disjointed grindcore song structure in metal?
Like, abrupt tempo changes, riffs that don't repeat, unequal sections, etc...
I know Sabbath were already going beyond verse/chorus stuff, but that's pretty much a prog thang....
....maybe what I'm thinking of is just prog structures with shorter, faster, heavier, more aggresive songs? anyway, when did this start to happen?

probably not among 'the earliest' but iirc Slayer made a conscious decision to move in this direction (with a particular focus on "riffs that don't repeat") around the time of Reign In Blood...

(offering that more in the spirit of "good starting point for further inquiry"--but it would take someone far more knowledgeable about the thrash scene than myself to say what their influences might have been)

Hellhammer and Bathory were pretty extreme but to me they basically sound like ratty hardcore punk with Satanic lyrics. The earliest music I can recognize as death metal in the modern sense (which is basically what you are asking about) is the Possessed "Seven Churches" album. It's all there on the song "Death Metal", which I guess basically named the genre as well.

Repulsion deserves a mention as well, as probably the earliest band that signifies as grindcore.

cool. thanks for that, will check out possessed who i've never heard or don't remember....
re: hellhammer, bathory - i kinda wonder if some of this structural fuckery came from dbeat/hardcore; breakdowns for the moshpit and such.... seems to be at least from around the same time of "crossover" / early thrash?

slayer definitely do it, but also feel like they might not be first off the block.......

will also check out repulsion.....

Voivod also deserves a mention, but really nobody before or since has sounded like them.

Siege seem important here too. I dunno if they're quite grindcore, but close.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iWrsZRA0ws

I associate this with extreme metal like Metallica, Slayer, etc -- but directly as a result of NWOBHM stuff, and hardcore punk

It depends on what you think of as extreme... 80s Metallica and the "big 4" thrash bands were similar in extremity. The prototypical black metal sounds sort of formed in the late 80s, and really took off in the 90s.... same thing with death metal.

But in my opinion, when did metal get extreme?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0a/Scream_Bloody_Gore.jpg

Siege sound like the beginning of powerviolence if anything. But I think of them as squarely a hardcore band as opposed to a metal band.

^^^ seconding the mention of Possessed—they are a pretty crucial missing link from thrash to death metal. Also (criminally) out-of-print :/

Even though their riffing was very much 70s hard rock, Venom were structurally all over the place on Welcome To Hell, eg Witching Hour. Afterward they streamlined things a bit into the Motörhead-template everyone associates them with now but if anything they showed everyone (Hellhammer, Sodom, Slayer, Possessed, Mayhem) that as a metal band too you didn't really needed properly written songs if you made a loud enough racket.

Yeah and that bass sound.

^^^ seconding the mention of Possessed—they are a pretty crucial missing link from thrash to death metal. Also (criminally) out-of-print :/

Their albums are easily available on CD, actually. Except The Eyes of Horror.

!!! weird I couldn't for the life of my find Seven Cjurches earlier this year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHXKVlD_X1o

Jasiel Mendoza 7 months ago
Im impressed by the drums!

same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHflQYvZvsg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4g6cwlTIhM

fuck i lost that watchtower record when my hard drive failed and i am buying. it. again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EseW9DYGLTE

How about Slaughter? (not pop metal Slaughter, Canadian proto-death Slaughter) They were doing their thing the exact same time as Possessed, influenced Schuldiner so much he was part of the band for a while.

when did Extreme start to get metal

hey guys, thanks for all the links n shit.....
yeah, voivod are kind of in their own universe....
good call on the NWOBHM, for sure Maiden are a big link in fast n heavy prog combo....

also, to be clear, i'm not looking for when metal got extreme lyrically or sonically or whatever, i'm more looking for the roots of that specific kind of song structure.....

siege and possessed are both great, and right on the edge of what i'm looking for .... abrupt transitions, sudden tempo shifts.... but still kind of tied to trad song structure.... ie: that siege number upthread is pretty straight ahead music for the moshpit - slow breakdown/fast thrash (i fucking dig it big time btw)

possessed too.... they're starting to get kinda out there rhythmically, but for example that song "death metal" is pretty much verse/chorus/bridge .... (thanks for the name drop though, digging that album - production just slick enough, cool vocals and some fucking class a good ol' guitar solos...)

so far i've narrowed it down to mid-eighties........

this came up after the siege vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N49ya0DPeGo

...it's an evolution of grindcore, starting in 82 with a ton of bands i've never heard of, lots of south american/european cassette release shit, the samples are too short to really tell, but i'll follow up on some of the early ones when i get time, see if i can find band zero of fucked structure.... (doesn't have to be grindcore btw, that siege is pretty damn close......)

thanks for the rest of the links y'all, looking forward to giving them all a listen.......

they were just so darn cool. and so weird that swedish metal dudes were trading siege and deep wound tapes. well, not weird, just cool again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvnclqWFL9M

is deep wound boston?
grindcore darwin started his vid with them ('82), so they're first on my list to listen to for potential fuckedstructure pioneers.....

Western MA, I think. They were Mascis and Barlow's early band. I only know them from the book Choosing Death, which you might find interesting - it provides a deep account of the formative period of grind and death metal.

Deep Wound, Siege, LARM, Septic Death are all extremely fast hardcore bands to me. Precursors to grind and powerviolence. Not really riff-based in the death metal sense.

The Possessed is what predicts stuff thrashy death metal like Autopsy. Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse, Gorguts which are just straight up modern death metal. It's hard to tell just where exactly that hypertechnical style came from. Which I think is the original question.

Entombed (my favorite death metal band of all time) have been around in some form since 1987 or so so what was happening in Scandinavia is like a parallel process to all this. They tended to use fairly traditional, almost classic rock structures, just with a buzzsaw guitar tone that sounds like nothing else.

Western MA, I think. They were Mascis and Barlow's early band

And the singer, Charlie, was later in GobbleHoof, who put out records on New Alliance (same time as or after Dinosaur Jr were on SST).

The 'odd structures in metal' thing always seemed to me to come from metal dudes listening to hardcore, post-punk, jazz, etc but I never had any specific evidence to back that hunch up.

I feel like Napalm Death's "Scum" and "From Enslavement..." might've been shortcuts for a lot of metal dudes who might not have heart Deep Wound/Siege/Repulsion. I remember buying the latter when I saw it and not knowing it was supposed to be grindcore, which wouldn't have meant anything to me in 1988, and was just some crazy new style of metal.

Growl, growl, growl your throat
Droptune down to C
Metal is
Metal is
Metal is
Metal is
Structurally extreme

Larks' Tongues in Aspic is the progenitor of exploded structure in metal for me. The first time I heard it I thought "oh, Metallica!" Not sure who the first metal band to take insp from Larks was though.

Red! by King Crimson.

there is no end to 70's stuff though. as far as fucked-up hardrock/metallic/prog goes. an ilxor recently put this up on facebook. 1976. it shreds like a beast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11dagduA0A

I haven't read this thread yet but there probably are bands similar to Voivod, perhaps inspired by them
If You Like Voivod, You Are Sure To Like...

The only record that sounds like Voivod at all to me is Die Kreuzen's October File...

i dunno about the historical facts of it but yeah 'scum' seems like a good idea to me, throw a buncha brief little misshapen blurts together and you've got a weird structure right there

alright, i kinda lost steam on the whole archeology project so i'm going to go ahead and say late '81 .... combination of us hardcore; deep wound, seige, black flag, youth korps, etc... swedish punk like asocial... uk crust like heresy....... i'm not strictly talking grindcore or deathmetal or techy prog metal, it's more of a disjointed structural thing that i don't think i explained very well but i think that's where and when and with whom it started....

nd's scum fits the bill, but that's '87 - apparently they used to gig with amebix and varukers and such, so i'm sticking with my half-assed theory......

anyway, thanks for some great tunes y'all, watchtower are rocking so hard, dude's got legit set of pipes......

two more things i discovered:

-don't do a youtube search for "deep wound" unless you got a strong stomach......

-there is metal in nunavut:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAflHne54fA