Heavy bulky riffs, hurricane hammering of twin drums, inhuman horrible growls spewing out of human throats, spewing out words covered in blood, covered with pieces of meat and guts, soaked with the vile stench of rotting corpses… That’s it, harsh extreme “death metal”, the great and terrible Death Metal.
Let us remember how this style began.
Aggression of thrash, anger of black metal, dirtiness and baseness of hardcore – in such atmosphere death metal appeared in the middle of 80s, in which all these qualities were amplified several times. But the main component of this genre, strange as it may seem, is the most usual heavy metal, although there is nothing common between them at first sight. Slayer, Venom, Celtic Frost, Kreator, who are considered the main cultivators of the idea, had a great influence on the formation of death metal. And the main and first death bands were Possessed from San Francisco County and a band from Orlando with the symbolic name Death.
It was Possessed that connected all the dots that had been previously arranged in a mess by various metal heroes. In 1985 they released their debut album Seven Churches, in which they presented a heavier version of thrash that transcended the genre. A little later journalists called the band the first death metal band. However, the team that was active at the same time in Florida – Mantas – could claim this title with much more success. That was the name of Chuck Schuldiner’s project, which later changed its name to Death. Back in 1984 they released four demos and live on cassette tapes with a vocal manner as close as possible to what would later be called growling.
Had the Mantas recorded a studio album, it would hardly have been the same pure death that was heard on the band’s 1985 debut record Death. It was another in-between project between genres, like Possessed, but it was closer to death at the expense of fat overdrive and deeper growls.
But Mantas remained a teenage amateur trio that didn’t come out of the basement, which is why Possessed is considered the first step. After all, it’s one thing to be the first, but not to present your work to the general public, and it’s quite another to have a professional, officially released work that begins to influence followers. And the Mantas are nothing more than a precursor to Death.
Possessed were more extreme than their metal counterparts, being on the edge of thrash and death, leaving a dirty guitar overdrive in their sound. This ensemble was the first to open the gate, in which a little later the roaring torrent of new heavy music fell on the heads of enthusiastic public. They opened the gate, but didn’t enter the band as a whole; they only took a step into the future of metal. Nevertheless, their step became a landmark for the whole genre. The band’s debut, titled Seven Churches, was innovative. Bassist and vocalist Jeff Beserra used growling for the first time in an official release.
However, Beserra’s hoarse screams are not the juicy growl of Barney Greenaway on the first Benediction album or George Fisher, the current Cannibal Corpse frontman, but they are not the scream of Tom Araya, not to mention the melodic vocals of Daddy Hatfield. The accompaniment has largely remained within the thrash framework. However, if before it was possible to set certain limits, nowadays almost every trend has expanded to such an extent and took so many different guises, that the notion of “genre purity” has become almost conditional.
Seven Churches was the band’s only success. Their next album did not reach the level of the debut, disappointing fans and critics, and soon after that the band broke up. And that’s another reason why Schuldiner’s Death is more significant for death. Each of their subsequent albums continued and built on past developments, had some success, and are now all considered classics of the genre.
Both their debuts, Possessed and Death, were produced by the same specialist, Randy Barnes. Thus, Randy turned out to be a kind of “grey cardinal” of death, contributing just as much to the birth of the new genre.
Death was the first band to introduce the genre in its purest form. Chuck Schuldiner and drummer Chris Reifert honed the ideas of their predecessors to the point where the new music gained an identity, a name of its own, and a platform for further free development. At the same time, they laid the foundation for the development of a subgenre that would emerge a little later – progressive-death, metal-fusion, later developed by such bands as Atheist and Sadist. Sometimes it is also called jazz-death, jazz-metal.
The debut album, Scream Bloody Gore, was released in May 1987, and by that time the style was almost complete. This disc was the final step.
Like almost all successful debuts, Death’s debut also did not avoid force majeure. At that time there were only Chuck and drummer Chris Reifert in the line-up. Another Death member, John Hand, even though he is listed as the rhythm-guitarist on the record’s cover, cannot be counted, since he did not take part in this or any other record and never played a single gig as a member of Death. Since 1987, Hand did not show any signs of creative life until 2010, when Death Resurrected was presented to the world. Therefore, we can only mention him in passing as one of the members of the early line-up.
Reifert joined the band in 1986, replacing drummer Erik Brecht, and made his first appearance in the demo known as Rehearsal Tape #13, recorded on March 10. After the release of Scream Bloody Gore, he left the band and started his own, which later became a legend of the genre – Autopsy.
Autopsy, along with Death and Possessed, is considered the third band who founded Death Metal. Although, to be fair, they should be considered pioneers rather than founders, as they started to play actively after the first two bands had become famous. In 1987-88 Reifert’s band released only seven songs in two demos, but the debut album was released only in 1989, when the genre was already thundering all over the world, and Death was already preparing their third program. But it was the breakthrough of their career, and the band entered their name in bloody ink into the annals of death.
The undisputed king of the genre today is an American band Cannibal Corpse, which since 1988 has been slashing brutal, vicious death in almost unchanged form, delighting its fans with its uncompromising, energy and inexhaustible power every time.
