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I Was going to finish this post at home last night, and wouldn’t you know it, our internet was down most of the night. So here we are Tuesday morning, revisiting my Metal Monday. For this particular Monday of Metal, I give you the fairly hard to find Ripping Corpse - Dreaming With the Dead on Maze records. This is pretty easy to track down on CD, but since it was released in 1990 the vinyl doesn’t turn up too often, and was probably mostly relegated to Europe anyway.

Ripping Corpse took their name from an early Kreator song, and for the first part of their existence (the demo phase) were basically sub-Kreator/Slayer/Dark Angel evil-thrash. A bit techy, a bit predictable, but good mosh parts. While I’ll always prefer their Splattered Remains demo recording, Dreaming With the Dead is still a great chunk of not quite Death Metal tech-Thrash. You can tell that by the time they got to record this album, the Thrash thing was already waning, Death Metal and Grindcore were on the rise, Metallica and Slayer were long gone from the underground, and Ripping Corpse were basically obsolete. Their solution is basically to get a little more technical (like Kreator “Extreme Aggression”), try and sing a little harder, and kind of just cover up for the fact that they’re not really a death metal band. Maybe that’s an inglorious view of the whole thing, but lets be real, I’m probably not far off. Rift Of Hate, a holdover from previous demos now contains sections that are much slower and more sinister sounding where previously there was just a heavy slam section. Unearthly death grunts and shrieks are now added in places for emphasis while Tom Araya style “high-notes” are gone.

Part of what makes Dreaming With the Dead kind of awesome though is that it really could have only been made at this one point in time. When a New Jersey thrash band was trying to adapt itself to new extremities and depths that they couldn’t have been expected to predict. Erik Rutan’s notable guitar shredding helped them through to at least gain minor notoriety in metal circles, but there was no place for a band like Ripping Corpse by the time this album came out.