Six Feet Under - "Maximum Violence", 1999

The split between Allen West and Chris Barnes happened shortly after "Warpath"'s release and wasn't exactly friendly; Barnes was then in dire need of a new guitar player to keep on touring and to save the future of his relatively new creature. Enters Steve Swanson; the musician didn't have much of a résumé at all, except for a brief stint in Massacre. Still, he proved to be a loyal and worthy addition to the band over time.

With a title like "Maximum Violence" and a new, relatively unknown guitarist to fill in for a legend like West, the expectations were pretty high, and the band did its best to avoid disappointing its followers. Apparently it was rewarded well enough, since the album went on to sell in excess of 100,000 copies and the band quickly became one of the top-selling death metal bands ever, right behind Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, and Morbid Angel. Considering the amount of online ridicule and outright hostility that Chris Barnes and his band have been subjected to for years and years now, that's a pretty impressive achievement.

On "Maximum Violence", Swanson's riffing didn't possess the Celtic Frosted quality of Allen West nor the clarity and precision of his guitar sound; he just went for a different approach, favoring a downtuned and more distorted guitar attack as well as writing slightly more dynamic songs. His contribution can be heard on songs like the excellent opener "Feasting on the Blood of the Insane" and "Mass Murder Rampage", mixing groovy rhythms with faster and thrashier ones, as well as on the brilliant lead single "Victim of the Paranoid"; the latter is probably the song that resembles "Warpath" the most, specifically the past single "Manipulation", but it just works, and it manages to become an earworm very fast. The rest of the album sees Butler and Gall coming to the forefront as songwriters, offering some classic, slower, Six Feet Under-style numbers such as "Short Cut to Hell", "Brainwashed", and the ridiculously heavy "Torture Killer", or the anthemic and moshpit-inducing "No Warning Shot".

Tracks like "Bonesaw" and "Hacked to Pieces" also introduced a faster, more typically death metal pace that was missing during Allen West's tenure with the band; this forced Greg Gall to get out of his comfort zone and adapt his drumming to this newfound brutality, although he seems to be capable of keeping only one kind of blast beat, placing the snare on 1 and 3 and the kick on 2 and 4, as opposed to what the majority of death metal bands normally do (like the classic Swedish death metal bands, for example). It works in the context of this record, but it will become a bit tiresome over the course of the band's discography, exposing the limits of his otherwise solid drumming.

Even Chris Barnes manages to write the music for a song, the doomy "This Graveyard Earth"; unsurprisingly, not being a proper guitar player, it's a fairly simplistic exercise, but still the main riff is actually very powerful and catchy. Vocally, he seems to be in pretty fine shape throughout the album; his growling here sits in between the deeper "Haunted" tone and the more aggressive - albeit less guttural - "Warpath" one, with the occasional higher screams that many people seem to detest; I personally think they sound sick, and they were still not as extreme as on the records that followed. He also displays some very rhythmic singing that makes songs like "Victim of the Paranoid" and "Feasting on the Blood of the Insane" more dynamic, even akin to a growled version of rap-metal on the latter. As outrageous as it may sound, it totally works.

I honestly could have done without the Kiss cover version of "War Machine"; although the main riff fits quite well within the style of the record, it's a display of death 'n' roll that kind of detracts from the darker tone of the other songs. They could have kept it as a bonus track, but they probably needed it to round out the album's running time.

The production is alright, while not great; the guitars and bass sound a tad too muddy and subdued in the mix, while the vocals and drums are more upfront, with the snare sounding particularly stripped-down and dry. Overall, the sound could have been a bit richer, especially if compared to the excellent productions of the previous two records and the EP.

"Maximum Violence" is a record that started the second part of the band's career on a high note; it helped define the Six Feet Under sound that most people came to love or hate. It's an album that earned its place in death metal history, served as a gateway record for many kids approaching the genre, and contributed to keeping the genre afloat when a lot of metal fans were tempted by other trends.