Death metal = loud, heavy, corrosive-sounding music with harsh (often "cookie monster") vocals and extremely upfront guitars / drums, often playing complicated riffs and patterns, mainly played by long-haired dudes who look like they just got off work from a loading dock. Think Cannibal Corpse, Death, Obituary, Exhumed, Autopsy, Morbid Angel, Suffocation, etc. (you can see a theme developing here in the names alone). Of course, there's now about a zillion subcategories based on whether or not they play complicated / simple stuff, focus exclusively on gore or not, incorporate other elements like doom / black metal, do or don't have Slayer / Venom / Sodom in their pedigree, or come from Florida or the Scandanavian area.
Death rock = Pretty much everything else that's obsessed with death and decay, but isn't actually metal. That would encompass everything from Christian Death to The Gun Club to Bauhaus to Siouxsie and the Banshees to the Cure to Marilyn Manson -- most goth music is pretty much in the "death rock" category . Here we're talking about stuff that's more concerned with exploring a semi-nuanced (well, maybe not in Marilyn Manson's case) approach to the whole death rehearsal motif, rather than just a splatter-flick aesthetic drowning in metallic angst that's just short of being white noise.
Death rock = Pretty much everything else that's obsessed with death and decay, but isn't actually metal. That would encompass everything from Christian Death to The Gun Club to Bauhaus to Siouxsie and the Banshees to the Cure to Marilyn Manson -- most goth music is pretty much in the "death rock" category . Here we're talking about stuff that's more concerned with exploring a semi-nuanced (well, maybe not in Marilyn Manson's case) approach to the whole death rehearsal motif, rather than just a splatter-flick aesthetic drowning in metallic angst that's just short of being white noise.
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