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 Metal Monday vol. 20:

You could say this is maybe a sequel to last week’s Metal Monday posting - a sealed copy of Death’s “Scream Bloody Gore” (original Combat pressing). While this doesn’t have the distinction of being the first commonly accepted death metal release, it’s a much more fully formed take on the style than the first Possessed which still has a lot more thrash-metal in it. Personally I’ve always been more of a Scream Bloody Gore man than a 7 Churches one.

Looking at the foreboding cover art for the first time, (I don’t exactly recall when), and seeing this over the top rendition of some kind of zombie temple and just knowing right then it would be the musical equivalent to a horror movie. It’s probably my favorite piece of Ed Repka art ever. Such a perfect summation of what the band is all about, and what they sounded like. When Infernal Death kicks off with the crunching intro and the first word out of Chuck Schuldiner’s throat is a lengthy “DIIIIIIIIE”, well that pretty much sums it up. The band is Death and this is Death metal.

Death Metal music is inherently powered on some kind of anti-pleasure. The riff to Death’s Zombie Ritual is like taking a sip of toxic waste or swamp water (both in ample supply in their home of Florida, Death Metal’s first home), it’s disgusting and poisonous. It’s a whole genre essentially built on that kind of aural sadism. It’s like they were working to shock themselves back to life out of the drab Reagan-ified 80’s suburban hell bands like Death, as well as fellow Floridians Obituary, Morbid Angel, and Amon came from. These bands were almost all made up of teenagers. No doubt bored, and looking at their rather bland selection of possible life paths in a world where the only things that actually made sense were the sound of a BOSS HM-1 pedal, and the plot to Evil Dead II. Chuck Schulinder and Chris Reifert were both 17 when they recorded their Mutilation demo (the 6th Death demo overall), which got them a record deal with Combat, although as this excerpt from a Reifert interview (from metal-rules dot com) shows, they weren’t exactly confident in what these guys were doing:

Combat was supposed to state on the album that Chuck and I played all the music on the album, but they ignored our request, leading to confusion for years. Also, they printed on the inner sleeve: “This album is Don Kaye’s folly”, meaning that Combat saw us as sort of a joke even though they were putting out the album. Death metal had yet to prove itself at the time and Combat were skeptical about the whole thing, I guess. I have only one copy of the vinyl left and on the inner sleeve where the Don Kaye comment is, I scratched it out and wrote ‘fuck you!’ over it with a pen.

 A few years later they had to play catch-up by licensing American pressings of releases on Earache. Dummies.