Wherever the growl goes, the rasp is never far away (and vice versa). There are two extreme vocal styles on Miasma - death metal's deep, guttural growl and black metal's high-pitched rasp - and throughout the 33-minute disc, the growl and the rasp interact in a duet-like fashion.
Miasma is hardly the only 2005 release that combines death metal and black metal elements, but the way BDM handles the vocals - although not innovative - is noteworthy. recording with a very Scandinavian sound BDM are from Detroit, but their bombastic death metal/black metal assault is greatly influenced by the extreme metal bands of Sweden and Norway. This 2005 release is a perfect example of a U.S. Any band that would name itself after Short's killing is obviously fascinated with dark subject matter, and shock-value lyrics are quite plentiful on the Black Dahlia Murder's second full-length album, Miasma. The United States was, generally speaking, a more innocent, less jaded country (at least on the surface) in that pre-Manson Family, pre-Hillside Strangler, pre-Night Stalker era - and Short's mutilation horrified a lot of Americans. The brutal murder of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, in Los Angeles in early 1947 went down in history as one of the most gruesome and shocking crimes of the '40s.