AUTOPSY — Severed Survival (review)

Album · 1989 · Death Metal

3.5/5 · 2019-04-24
siLLy puPPy

Long considered one of the pioneers of death metal, the Bay Area based AUTOPSY was started by drummer Chris Reifert after leaving Chuck Schuldiner’s Death in Florida and relocated back to his home turf. Reifert was good friends with another Bay Area band Sadus and it was Steve Di Giorgio who introduced him to guitarist Eric Cutler who shared a similar passion for extremely heavy music, gory horror flicks and together they quickly set out to record some demos. The first appeared in 1987 and a second titled “Critical Madness” in 1988. The band recruited another guitarist Danny Caralles and the band chose the name AUTOPSY after reading an obituary and liked the ring of it. At this point there was no permeant bassist by Di Giorgio from Sadus lent his talents and the four recorded this debut album SEVERED SURVIVAL which was released in April 1989.

While the Bay Area’s Possessed bridged the gap between the early thrash metal years into what would become called death metal, Reifert will go down in history for participating what many including myself consider to be the first true fully functioning death metal album, namely “Scream Bloody Gore” by Death. While still clearly rooted in thrash, Chuck Schuldiner ratcheted things up a few notches by focusing on more gory lyrics, even more extreme technical styles and heavier emphasis on percussive drive. Reifert’s new baby AUTOPSY was signed to Peaceville Records and joined the growing death metal scene with not only Reifert’s former band Death but a new legion of deathly noise makers like Morbid Angel, Bolt Thrower, Obituary and Necrophagia.

SEVERED SURVIVAL very much continues the early death metal sound of “Scream Bloody Gore” with doom metal influences that keep the tempos tamped down and a deep bass driven groove. Despite the leaps and bounds of the death metal sound by the likes of Morbid Angel who evolved the subgenre into a formidable energetic spastic flow of caustic riffs, atonal brutality and blastbeat drumming with more insanely regurgitated vocals, AUTOPSY’s first release very much sticks to the early Death playbook and keeps things humming along fairly safe with an overall feel that this is still just a couple baby steps past the subgenere’s thrash metal roots, however with the growly guttural vocals and outburst of energy that set the death metal riffs on fire, the album certainly comes off as a death metal reality than what thrash bands like Sadus or Forbidden were releasing.

It seems that AUTOPSY’s debut has become a classic due to its influential mix of doom and death metal and how it’s all wrapped up together along with the extremely gory subject matter and has been c item by bands such as Cannibal Corpse, Entombed and Dismember as an album that they built their sounds off of, however i personally find the album to be a couple years stuck in the past as the musical drives seems a little too primitive for my liking and then i find the album to be a tad monotonous as the tracks tend to all start sounding the same without any substantial variation other than doomy mid-tempo riffs alternating with more punk rock sounding heavier passages and the occasional bombast of what contemporaries like Obituary and Morbid Angel were dishing out. Yeah, it’s influential and it does symbolize the early old school death metal era but for my tastes i find that the earlier “Scream Bloody Gore” satisfies those cravings.

SEVERED SURVIVAL has been re-released many times since its 1989 debut. The original vinyl and CD editions donned rather amateurish cover art with pink dude getting chopped up and in 1990 the album came out with bonus tracks and the much better cover of the perspective of looking up at a crew of zombie emergency room doctors performing who knows what kind of unthinkable experiments on the poor soul strapped on the table out of the picture. My personal copy is the 2009 - 20th Anniversary Edition which contains a whole extra bonus disc of rare demos as well as rehearsals. All good extra features but nothing i would consider essential by any means. The interviews in the liner notes are cool though. I can’t imagine any death metal collection not including AUTOPSY’s debut album SEVERED SURVIVAL but when it comes down to it, i find this the least interesting album of the bigwigs of 1989 when the subgenre was really kicking off.