Don't have an account yet? Get the most out of your experience with a personalized all-access pass to everything local on events, music, restaurants, news and more. Support the independent voice of Houston and help keep the future of Houston Press free. Death metal has a genre has a history of doing covers songs, but they're mostly all novelty songs. It's become a played-out gimmick to take any pop song, speed it up, play it on highly distorted guitars, and gutturally scream the lyrics. That's been done. What's less common is a great death metal cover of any given song that isn't just silly. That's harder to find, but it does exist, and there have been some truly awesome ones from some of extreme metal's biggest names. Neverthless, Born Again is a highly underrated record; apparently the guys in Cannibal Corpse knew that, because they dug out "Zero the Hero" around the time "Hammer Smashed Face" was getting big.
1. Megadeth - These Boots Are Made for Walkin'
Lingua Ignota – Jolene (Dolly Parton)
John Doran suggests 10 others from the world of metal. Despite the album being full of songs about Satanism, drugs, serial murder and sex, These Boots, a cover version of the Nancy Sinatra hit with a fairly explicit lyrical 'reinterpretation' would go on to become its most controversial moment. Some 10 years after it was first released, the song's author Lee Hazlewood called the obviously parodic cover "vile and offensive", and demanded that the song be removed from all future copies of the album.
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Metal and pop music often feel so far removed from each other. But when heavy bands give their take on mainstream hits, the results are often really fun. Most metalheads are highly opposed to the bubblegum dance beats that dominate the tracks. Slap a few breakdowns and gnarly riffs over their structure and their stances quickly change on metal-pop-covers. Go figure the metal band with one of the most diverse sounds around would take a stab at covering Queen. Their cover still packs a punch and has some shredding guitar solos, but it manages to stay fairly faithful to the original. Somehow, melodic death-metal band Arsis took it up a notch. They tossed in some ultra brutal blast beats and guttural shrieks over the entire thing. The thrash kings included a gem of a cover that most forget about. Nevertheless, their spooky take on the classic track is a far cry from the original and brings a truly satanic spin to the song.
Why does Justin Bieber look so disheartened, you ask? It's not because his last fan finally hit puberty -- he just heard the death metal version of his hit 'Baby' and realized it blows his original away. This list is a celebration of Internet culture and the creative minds who keep us on YouTube for hours while we're supposed to be working. So cheer up Biebs, if your pop career fizzles out, you can reinvent yourself as a death metal singer. Just pretend that this is the world we live in -- the Jonas Brothers' voices finally crack with wonderful results and Regis Philbin is no longer the loudest person in the room. This version of 'Paranoid' takes painfully cliche lyrics and turns them into gold with delightfully brutal death metal gutturals. Think Death were the first "death metal" band and Suffocation's Frank Mullen was the innovator of the death metal growl? Think again. As you can see, the duo invented death metal 30 years before it was "originally" developed. It has been reported that the mafia, unhappy with Sinatra's new direction, successfully buried the footage after shooting up Sinatra's Cadillac El Dorado and leaving a horse's head in Armstrong's bed.
