Heavy metal's fall from disgrace over the last decade and a half seems to me, in retrospect, to be explained by five related developments. The first of these, ironically, seemed at first like one of the most excessive and frightening developments in metal: the Speed Wars. Speed Metal, a subgenre invented in the mid-Eighties by Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and a few others, had all the hallmarks of the apocalypse. It went beyond brooding, which was metal's traditional forte, into what appeared to be actual physical violence, barely channeled into nominally musical form. It was a massively underground movement, which meant that it appeared to parents a lot like a good viral plague appeared to pre-scientific physicians, namely that one day everything was fine and the next day everybody in your village seemed to be bleeding from the ears. The band names, particularly Megadeth and Slayer, were gene-tailored to trigger parental censorship enzymes, and the lyrics, to the extent that you could ever make them out, added an acrid sheen of raw panic over the whole situation. What the Speed Wars also did, though, was introduce escalation into heavy metal. They took a relatively static genre, whose single-mindedness helped to lend it persistence and gravity, and turned it into an arena that valued acceleration over mass, and thus one that couldn't help but tear itself apart from the inside. In their thrashing attempts to outdo each other, speed metal bands cannibalized their own prehistory, churning generations into the fossil layer at a pace that suggested that it was the only paving material they could think of to drive their tour vans over. And before long the speed movement hit its terminal velocity, everybody seized up with carpal tunnel syndrome, and that was the end of it.

The second and third things that happened came along at about the same time. One was the co-opting of metal's vocabulary and idioms by other genres. Between grunge's reinterpretation of metal as an extension of punk, and the incorporation of it via sampling into rap and subsequent hybrids thereof, metal was pulled, pale and blinking, into the brighter lights of bigger genres, and this further fragmented a genre already beset with internal instabilities. The other development was that all genres, especially grunge and rap, suddenly found themselves more visible by an order of magnitude or two, as both the industry charts and MTV realigned themselves to the polarities of the real market. The half-life of insular subgenres has now been radically shortened. A good underground movement that could have simmered for years in the Seventies, collecting acolytes and warping minds, has now got about two months of underground childhood, which it either spends in a mad push to be the next commercial explosion, or else it dies a quick death. The results of this are both that the music business moves too quickly for parental resistance to focus on any particular genre, and your parents' fears cease to be helpful to you in determining what to listen to, and also, more seriously, that the dilution of a genre by label opportunists and superficial imitators happens so quickly that it often has already taken place by the time you discover the style yourself.

The fourth thing, which follows directly from things two and three, was the supersession of metal as the music of defiance, by both "punk", in its new form, and variants of hip-hop, both of which were vastly better suited to the quick product cycles the business demands, as they require minimal technical skills to produce, and mount little in the way of principled objection to their own disposability. These are musical styles ideally suited to short-lived cassettes jammed into walkmen, and thus perfect complements to a youth culture whose defining icons are coming to be the beeper and conversations conducted entirely in slang that was invented only moments ago. Metal, born of endless hours locked in your bedroom watching the light from a glow-in-the-dark frisbee flicker across the spinning grooves of Paranoid, is a formal anachronism. Backmasking, the defining myth of metal as a subversive cult, doesn't even work with CDs or cassettes. The commercialization of youth music has bled it of all mystery, and thus left mystery no informed audience.

And the death blow, perhaps, which is in many ways an inevitable result of the other developments, is the defection of metal's last stalwart defenders. Metallica and Anthrax, the original kings of speed, are now hard rock bands, not fundamentally very different from Aerosmith. Queensryche and Soundgarden are writing pop songs. Slayer is doing hardcore covers. Sabbath and Iron Maiden are forgotten and irrelevant. Blue Öyster Cult is playing the summer circuit with Molly Hatchet. The genre has dispersed, and there is no such thing as a crowd without people.

All this means that the few bands who find themselves wanting to participate in this lost genre are in a rather difficult predicament. They have about three options. They can ally themselves to metal tradition, heedless of the fact that only historians will appreciate their efforts; they can ally themselves, at least nominally, to some more current movement, and use metal as their variation on that movement's themes; or they can try to recreate metal itself, by finding some way to make music that is even more disturbing than anything metal has been before. Cannibal Corpse tries this third approach. On paper, it looks like a sensible idea. It is possible, if only just, to play faster than Slayer and Anthrax ever did. Vocals can be a little gruffer and more tuneless, still. The lyrics can be even more grotesque and explicit. "This recording is dedicated to all those who stayed brutal!!!!!", Vile's liner explains, and other than quibbling with the number of exclamation points, it's hard to argue with the sincerity of this dedication. Cannibal Corpse are brutal. Every element of this record has been carefully constructed to replicate the aesthetic experience of being jammed into a rock grinder. The problem, I think, is that being jammed into a rock grinder is a much less interesting experience than it sounds. There is a very loud noise, and then all your bones break and you are summarily pulped, and then it's over and you've got to go wait in line for another hour and a half to do it again. Cannibal Corpse is a lot like this. Everybody is playing too fast, or croaking too hoarsely, to introduce any dynamic range into the music, and so everything comes out as a featureless roar, and no matter how far I turn this up, it never sounds loud. The songs are different from each other, in some technical sense, but only in the way that no two bursts of raw static are ever exactly identical. The lyrics are gruesome, but to no particular end; after you've heard (or read, if you actually intend to make out what's being said) "Devoured by Vermin", you will not find "Mummified in Barbed Wire", "Puncture Wound Massacre", "Relentless Beating", "Eaten From Inside" or "Orgasm Through Torture" particularly shocking. Actually, to be fair, the denouement of "Orgasm Through Torture" is a little more repulsive than the others, but that's less a testament to its accomplishment than a reflection of the odd reticence toward explicit genital mutilation on the other songs. Of the eleven songs here, only one does not mention blood, and "gushing" occurs with about the same regularity as "girl" on Night Ranger records. And has about the same intellectual significance, too.

The more important detail is that they slow down enough that guitarists Bill Steer and Carlo Regadas can actually shape their streams of notes into vaguely musical form. The hints of melody in the instrumentation, then, allow the percussive vocals to function as a rhythmic element, rather than a melodic one. If you can't take this kind of singing, you're still going to hate this album, but I find personally that as long as there's a melody in there somewhere, I'm not dogmatic about which part produces it, and the novelty of having the singing contribute none of it is intriguing enough to carry at least one album. The overall arrangements are not as complicated as they would be on a Fates Warning or Dream Theater record, but the constant forward motion of the guitar parts is similar, and there are particular flourishes here that remind me of Fates Warning vividly, particularly the legato modulations on "Black Star" and "Child's Play". "Child's Play"'s rumbling bass and urban-decay lyrics also remind me of Metal Church, another of my favorite metal holdouts; the bouncy riff on "Generation Hexed" could almost be from a Gamma Ray song, though Gamma Ray would have bolstered it with keyboards and some extra soloing, I feel sure; the lurching progressions in "R**k the Vote" remind me a little of later Voivod. I think this album may be just a bit too European in flavor to make much headway here in the US, but for me it strikes a nice balance between songwriting and assault.

And, pleasingly, this turns out to be an enormously improved album in every aspect I can think of. The most obvious change is that the band has acquired a lead vocalist, Pasi Koskinen, who actually sings, and who they use in addition to, not in place of, Koivusaari. The tension between the two voices, often within songs, holds my attention much better than either would by itself, and this goes a long way towards redeeming Koivusaari's especially monochromatic rasp. The songs are still awesomely intricate and obsessively detailed, and choruses and verses in the usual senses are still not much in evidence, but this time around the songs seem to me to progress, rather than meander, sounding much less like the erratic middle sections of discarded fugue variations, and more like Mussorgsky at quadruple speed. How much of this is due to the influence of wizardly new keyboardist Kim Rantala and new drummer Pekka Kasari, and how much is just the three original members getting better at this, I don't know exactly, but the improvement in production quality, even though the band again produces themselves, suggests that everybody is involved. There is more instrumental variety here, too. Tales From the Thousand Lakes had a couple of murky piano interludes, but this one has acoustic guitars, atmospheric synthesizer textures, piano integrated into songs rather than merely interposed between them, and even a startling momentary mid-song digression into techno. The guitar parts, both rhythm and lead, are vastly more legible, and seem to have clearer senses of purpose. The lyrics this time are taken from the Kanteletar, another traditional Finnish text, and where the Kalevala excerpts cleaved to a stilted and archaic sort of "O you mistress of Northland" nationalism, the Kanteletar verses find their subjects actually living their lives, and this turns out to convey their nature and strength of spirit, I think, far better than any direct claims about it could, inspiring patriotism instead of just invoking it. "The kantele was fashioned by a god / Out of a great pike's shoulders". "The farmer...marries off his sons, / Hands out his daughters, / In boots clogged with clay, / In fancy mittens". "For no horse can draw / No iron-shod jerk / Without the shaft-bow shaking off / The cares of this skinny one, / The sorrows of this black bird". Or, more concisely, "The ptarmigans babble". Where it is tempting to conclude from Tales From the Thousand Lakes that things are just different in Finland, Elegy captures and communicates what seems to me to be an unmistakably heroic national grandeur, which is a much more impressive artistic achievement than most metal albums ever aspire to, and which tempts me to violate my general (and wise) policy of never recommending metal albums to non-metal audiences. But only momentarily.

For one thing, this new admission of possibilities allows the band to write some of the new lyrics without using the Macabre Motif mad-lib generator. Almost all of these songs are still familiar heaven/hell fare (except for "Midnight Dreams", an odd first-person portrait of lycanthropy, which is certainly a related subject), but the sentences in them have conjunctions and pronouns and things, and so feel like coherent thoughts, and not like the guy with the pen kept saying "okay, I got that, what's another good word?" In parts, perhaps inevitably, this album is actually quite a bit faster and brighter than the others. In a slow metal world, it would have been possible to create dramatic relative effects at much lower absolute note rates, and songs here like the square, charging "Phantoms", the surging, cascading "These Are the Nameless" and the lean, muscular throb of "Deathwish" all take advantage of this fact. Other parts of the album, unsurprisingly, make exactly the sort of music that would have defined slow metal as a genre. The ghostly voices on "Only This (And Nothing More)" drift over waves of undulating guitar noise. "Midnight Dreams" sounds to me like "Rainbow in the Dark" at half-tempo. "Together and Wither" trudges from one booming bass note to another with the unhurried deliberation of a baggage elephant on its day off. "Elysium" is a swirling, experimental sound-effects piece that makes "E5150" sound, by comparison, a bit like "Axel F". "Chapel of Burning"'s long piano introduction and eerie vocal harmonies help set up the transition when it lurches into motion as the chorus comes around. And "Concern", the finale, pulses thickly, a distant guitar solo spinning across its face like a crack traversing the surface of a frozen lake. If this were a genre, and you liked it, Downfall would be one of the albums in it you'd want.

But those of us who still believe, know. We read "Dry Lung Vocal Martyr" and "Maximum Effective Pulse Generator" in the credits, and think of Voivod's "Throat, Insults, Screaming Mike Torture" and "Blower Bass". We listen to the razor-sharp stop-starts and think of Master of Puppets and So Far, So Good ... So What!. We wonder, if we transposed "A Therapy for Pain" up three octaves, if Bell would turn out to be Geoff Tate with a vocoder. We expect "Your Mistake" to segue straight into Anthrax's version of "Got the Time". We hear Bell shout and we keep thinking we're hearing the start of the theme music to Headbanger's Ball. We keep hoping that, if we just play "Resistancia!" loud enough, that heavy metal, in every guise we ever loved, will come back.