Aesthetic -- or styles, arrangement, and production decisions -- "works" where it supports the internal compositional structures of whatever music it encloses. With metal the question is of accepting the reaction of despair to the violence and paranoia and insanity of human world living in denial of fear/death, and turning it into a living, willful, and distinctive nihilism that affirms nothingness as a gateway into more profound realms of thought.

	Rhythm Syncopation By playing off of internal rhythms, metal bands achieve syncopation -- the inversion of stress in a passage. Normally strong beats are weak and the weak are strong; this effect is often achieved through polyrhythmic overlay by double-bass in death metal bands or by the chaotic, threshing blast beat of blackmetal drummers. The variation enables an excited internal sub-rhythm to drive the song, as many bands do with double bass drums, letting snare and high hat/cymbal disassociate for key structural textures. Slayer       "Hell Awaits" and beyond featured the granddaddy of double-bass technique. Deicide      "Deicide" featured songs with anti-synchronized pump-beat percussion a la "Jaws" theme. Suffocation       The master planners of moving syncopated air and bass drum integration. Unleashed       "Shadows in the Deep" used this technique to warlike effect via guitar player forearm. Polyrhythm Using multiple rhythms to enhance layering effects bands create multiple dimensions of rhythmic space, using a normally linear framework in new shapes and often long or indeterminate phrases. This can occur in the dominant rhythmic instrument (guitars) or the background rhythm (drums/bass). Some bands have taken this to extremes of chaos piling into itself, revealing an inner consistency and beauty, where others have interpreted this in the way of more contemporary ambient composers and have layered counterpoint or complementary rhythms in complex neo-electronic compositions. Immortal       "Pure Holocaust" features raging chaotic polyrhythm and ambient melody. Burzum       "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss" layered repetition to create epic meta-structures. Morbid Angel       "Altars of Madness" began with an inverted polyrhythmic beat. Mayhem       "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" used high-speed polyrhythms under ambient guitar. Percussion Explosive or definitive notes in a phrase are accentuated by percussion in drums or stringed instrument. Most often in guitars this occurs in the bands who muffle chords and strum staccato or interplay phrasing for conclusive effect, more than open-ended styles. Metallica       "Master of Puppets" used emphatic muffled chords for percussive centering in riffs. Suffocation       "Effigy of the Forgotten" used intricate polyrhythmic progressions to center complex songs. Sepultura       "Beneath the Remains" combined speed metal percussive strumming and death metal speeds. Texture Often bands give texture to rhythms by playing multiple levels of rhythm. For example, a guitar changing chords has a dominant rhythm in the beats on which the change occurs, but the chords themselves have a layer of rhythm in the speed with which they are strummed, or in death metal technique, at which their two most essential notes are varied through strumming or hammering. Even further, often the strumming itself has an independent texture which moves with the composition as a whole. Slayer       "Haunting the Chapel" invented the flying wrist technique of achieving hummingbird tremelo strumming. Unleashed       "Shadows in the Deep" featured slow masterpieces of micromotion and precision. Morbid Angel       After their monumental "Altars of Madness" which used this technique to create ambient melody and rhythm, Morbid Angel used it for prog-rock precision in the details of their epic "Blessed Are the Sick." Mayhem       "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" features ambient strumming over Bathory-style rigid percussion matrix. Rigor Mortis       "Rigor Mortis" and more significantly "Freaks" built this technique into classical melody and structure.
	Melody Consonance "Normal" melodies are used by older styles of heavy metal and sometimes by progressive bands integrating a jazz or rock influence. They are built around the scales used by these forms of music historically and in present essence, and as such are more easily recognized by listeners familiar with more mainstream music. Atheist       "Unquestionable Presence" built jazz harmony into a style of melodic progressive death metal. Metallica       "Kill 'Em All" brought metal's separate blues legacy into focus with new styles and heavy metal essence. At the Gates       "Slaughter of the Soul," this band's final work, made use of mainstreamification in the death sound. Dissonance Using dissonant alignment of notes in melodies produces a mournful yet technical sound, so many bands use this technique in both melodic and harmonic construction. Voivod       From "Dimension Hatross" onward Voivod have built songs around dissonant melodic tension. Obliveon       "From This Day Forward" established the ability of dissonance and atonality to build complex jazzlike compositions. Immortal       "Pure Holocaust" and "Blizzard Beasts" feature dissonant melody and use of inversion contra rhythm. Atonality Atonal arrangements of notes produce bizarre and perverse melodies, causing instigation of uprising in the mentality of the listener. The "not tonal" nature of this etymology comes from the lack of a fixed scale, or use of an cycling scale of arbitrary tones. Most metal musicians use this style of composition in conjunction with chromatic scales, dynamically acquiring tone centers through counterpoint and experimenting with classical music theory in key-less anti-melodic architectures. Morbid Angel "Altars of Madness" through "Covenant" used atonal solos to great effect over dissonant compositions. Deicide       "Legion" used atonal lead guitar to emphasize the nihilism of chromatic composition.
	Harmonic Classical Classical harmonic formations stay within the same key and manipulate different registers of mode or tone. The chromatic scales and intricate arpeggio formations of death and black metal lay their ancestry here and develop into a more direct sense of musical motion. Morbid Angel       "Altars of Madness" evolved this technique into fast-picking and ambient relationship to beat, accentuating it with atonal lead guitars. Deicide       "Feasting the Beast" demonstrated this technique in an ambient but violent setting. Burzum       "Det Som Engang Var" built simple classical music out of power chord arpeggios. Jazz The freedom and complexity of jazz harmonics attracted many metal composers, who have worked in that area to create bizarre and startling freaks of brutality. Atheist       "Unquestionable Presence" built jazz harmony into a style of melodic progressive death metal. Metallica       "Kill 'Em All" brought metal's separate blues legacy into focus with new styles and heavy metal essence. Demilich       "Nespithe" built bizarre harmonies from rudimentary fusionesque randomness Rock Oftentimes rock-n-roll influences creep into metal bands and are easily identified by their influence on the dominant rhythms, and by the more mainstream tonal ideas of the pieces. Since rock is essentially blues filtered through the cowboy hobo country music eyepiece, these bands often bear a lot in common with jazz-influence acts. Metallica       "Kill 'Em All" brought metal's separate blues legacy into focus with new styles and heavy metal essence.
	Structure Cyclic Most rock songs come of the verse-chorus tradition and consequently so does unstudied death and black metal, as well as most grindcore. The tedium of this technique is sometimes temporarily alleviated by adding another structure or riff pattern on top of the double elements of cycle but even this is transparent. Venom Hypocrisy Narrative When many riffs are joined to form a progression of ideas not as much concerned with creating a piece but a sequence of moods a narrative composition occurs; others call this "riff salad" or "grab-bag metal." Malevolent Creation Massacra Architected Music created with massive conceptions in mind often builds entirely unconventional structures to serve the individualized needs of each song. At this level of composition, nothing is as fits the norm as each piece has an entirely custom use in unique and intricate compositions where details matter. Emperor       "In the Nightside Eclipse" featured drifting and meandering songs built around central melodies. Burzum       "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss" used bafflingly simple and distinctive riffs in layers to create epic compositions. Morbid Angel       "Altars of Madness" often sequenced seemingly jarring changes in the smoothness of compositional integration. Metallica       "Orion" from Master of Puppets introduced this technique to the metal community at large.
	Vocals Sung Like rock and blues before it, people sing these. With melodic voices and enunciation of words. Though sometimes it seems bizarre now, most people like ALL of their entertainment to sound this way. Chaotic Order       A mid-eighties hybrid of Slayer metal and Iron Maiden rock, their album Helstar used sung vocals to pragmatic effect. Shouted Hardcore punk brought us angry shouting for vocals and it re-appears from time to time in death and black metal but is limited by the clarity and monotone of vocal it produces through uniform emphasis. DRI Distorted The majority of modern metal works utilize this style, yet it arose from crossover music like grindcore after being inspired by the grand old growler of metal, Lemmy Kilmeister of Motorhead, whose membership in both heavy metal and punk communities affirms his historical importance. Metal originally adopted the gravely cigarette-burnt and alcohol-eroded voice of punk rock's more deested vocalists, favoring its obscurity and the difficulty of marketing such an indistinct image in the world of concrete images concealing nebulous actualities and negligible rewards. Napalm Death "Scum" revealed extremes of this technique for their potential in disturbing the aesthetic sensibilities of listeners. Possessed "Seven Churches" brought the voice forth in primal form. The Exploited With a sequence of groundbreaking hardcore albums the Exploited let the voice get growlier each time. Morbid Angel Death metal cofounders Morbid Angel implemented this technique to great effect on "Altars of Madness" and beyond.