My apologies, Chapel. I attended public school and comprehend the qualifier "outside of" but I obviously wasn't reading very carefully -- probably had a cock in my eye -- and must of interpreted your statement to mean "most of Swedish death metal including ATG and Dismember". Whoops.
I by and large agree with your assessment. However, you're forgetting Sacramentum's EP -- a fine example of Swedish death metal.
No problem. I usually classify Sacramentum, Dawn, Mörk Gryning, Unanimated and the second Dissection album as black metal rather than death metal, but I guess Sacramentum's early stuff is a bit more death metal-y. Dissection's first album sounds like total death metal to me, just with more arpeggios and acoustic guitar stuff going on. There are some other decent bands that came out of the Swedish death metal style like Gorement and Utumno, but something about that style's popularity really bugs me. I don't think that your music should be considered awesome just because of its guitar tone and "heaviness." It sounds more like ear candy.
While not original, bands like Moonblood, Maniac Butcher, Nargaroth, Watain and the likes can have a few good tracks. If you got time to waste to search them.
I agree with your assessment of most of those bands, but I have to say that Moonblood is quality music undeserving of the scorn it gets from the anti-kvlt backlash.
Blut & Krieg,
Dusk Woerot, and their 12th rehearsal are A-list material in my opinion. I see them as one of the natural continuations of Absurd's legendary stuff, together with Urfaust and Akitsa at their best. Nargaroth is definitely a patchy band at best, though.
Amarok and
Herbstleyd have a lot of cool stuff, but it's often buried under repetition (to the point of tedium) and extra-musical intro/outro bullshit that doesn't add anything to the music. Nargaroth is at its best when they either go into
Klaus Schulze with black metal guitars territory or
improve on the Dark Medieval Times formula by adding a shit-ton of Graveland to it. This band really shot themselves in the foot when they went for the hype. Maniac Butcher seems decent but not spectacular from what I remember. At their best, they remind one of early Immortal or Graveland. Watain has always been shit.
Some of the Polish bands like
Fullmoon,
Sunwheel,
Thunderbolt, and
Kataxu that put out awesome demos but went populist for their full-lengths (or in the case of Fullmoon, simply broke up) might fit into the category of one-hit wonders. Maybe Rob Darken and his spiked maces kept them honest during the '90s.
This song strikes me as something of a diamond in the black, liquid turd that is retro-metal-era Darkthrone, in that it actually captures some of the magic of '80s metal like Manilla Road and Cirith Ungol rather than just sounding like mid-life crisis stuff.