UMUR
"Ready for Death" is an archival album release by US death metal act Necrophagia. The album was recorded in January 1986 but was shelved until Embalming Records got a hold of the master tapes and released an unofficial bootleg version of the album in 1990. The first official release of the material featured on "Ready for Death" was as part of the 2000 "A Legacy of Horror, Gore and Sickness" compilation album (November 2000, Baphomet Records). It was however not until 2020 that "Ready for Death" saw an official individual album release through Dismal Fate Records and a reissue in 2021 through Xtreem Music.
Necrophagia´s official debut full-length studio album "Season of the Dead" from February 1987 is already counted among the seminal death metal releases (although it´s still in many ways a thrash metal release), so the fact that Necrophagia had recorded a death metal album already a year before the release of "Season of the Dead", is quite the revelation.
In terms of death metal credibility I´ll give it to Necrophagia that although some of the riffs on the album are still thrash metal oriented, they do take things in a more brutal and death metallic direction than many of their contemporaries, and "Ready for Death" should arguably be counted among the very first death metal full-length studio albums in history.
When it comes to the quality of the music it´s another story though, as this sounds pretty amaturish and badly produced compared to other early proto-death/early death metal recordings by artists like Possessed, Xecutioner, Morbid Angel, and Death. This sounds like a demo recorded by a bunch of teenagers not really ready to release a full-length studio album yet, and as it is history made sure a release was prevented. A 2.5 star (50%) rating is warranted.