Kelly Conlon

Kelly Conlon — born in the United States in 1969 — was the bassist on Death's Symbolic (1995), the only album of the band he recorded. His function on the record is to hold up music that had become harmonically complex without losing weight. Symbolic has changes of metre, progressions that depart from the death metal norm and elaborate instrumental sections; the bass has to follow those shifts while keeping the ground solid, which demands structural reading more than speed. He came in replacing Steve Di Giorgio, and the contrast is instructive: where Di Giorgio used a fretless bass and independent lines in the foreground, Conlon took a more conventional, anchored approach, leaving the melodic room to the guitars of Chuck Schuldiner and Bobby Koelble. After Death he joined Monstrosity, the Florida death metal band, and remained active in that state's scene, which in that period was the genre's main centre in the United States.