DEATH — Scream Bloody Gore (review)

Album · 1987 · Death Metal

2/5 · 2012-08-24
kluseba

Many people recommended me to try out some records of the legendary death metal band Death and I decided to start chronologically. During the last months and years I got more and more into progressive and twisted extreme metal music from underground black metal such as Putamen Insula over pagan metal stuff such as Pagan Flame to melodic death metal in the key of In Flames, experimental extreme metal such as the last effort of Morbid Angel or simply avant-garde extreme metal like UneXpect. I also like thrash metal and liked the last records of Anthrax, OverKill or Heathen as well as the classics from Loudness to Voivod.

But the Death's debut album really isn't my cup of tea. It's simply put ordinary death metal with a lot of thrash influences that remind me of Slayer or Venom. There is also a slight hardcore punk attitude within some of the tracks. The band shows some glimpses of their true talent as in the track "Sacrificial" that has some interesting slow breaks and a sharp but melodic guitar solo, the short atmospheric introduction of "Baptized In Blood" or the different kinds of screams and stunning guitar solos on "Torn To Pieces". The most interesting track on the record is probably "Evil Dead" with a great atmospheric opening, a dominant bass guitar and a simple but addicting riff. There is some light on this record but the shades are really predominant to me. That's why my final verdict is a little harsh as we don't have some dumb amateurs on here that don't know how to do a better job but some gifted musicians that lose their time and energy and lack of the creativity that could have been in here.

But most of the songs bore with similar approaches, exchangeable high speed riffs without emotions and mediocre vocals. The album feels long and is very hard to listen to from the beginning to the end. The lyrics are as superficial as the childish album title. Songs like the mediocre opener "Infernal Death" or the dumb "Mutilation" among many others only repeat other tracks on the same record and literally bore me to death, maybe that's the reason why the band called itself like this. Interesting passages of thirty seconds in many tracks are not enough to weight up the value of the songs that are generally around seven times as long as the promising passage.

Today, the death metal genre has so much diversity to offer and many excellent bands started and excelled in this genre such as my favourite's Therion and Amorphis for example. But this kind of music here is even quite closed minded and generic if we take into consideration the age of the record. At that time, many bands already experimented a lot with heavier music and developed more and more complex music. Death may be among the pioneers of their genre but even the first thrash records of Metallica or Loudness were already way more original than this soulless output. My final verdict can only be that this record is heavily overrated and not a good introduction to the works of the band.