Review by Sonny for Autopsy - Severed Survival (1989)

I have made no secret of my love of Autopsy and especially their sophomore album, Mental Funeral. In truth Severed Survival, whilst not quite sitting as high in my estimation as the follow-up, is still a brilliant slab of early death metal and is one of the first to go down the doomier route, alongside previously mentioned Dutch crew Sempiternal Deathreign and New York's Winter. I don't want to overplay the doom elements of Severed Survival as they are nothing like as prevalent as on Mental Funeral, but they are definitely present, especially in the prominence of the deep, rumbling bass sound and the playing of future Testament bassist Steve DiGiorgio who turns in a performance that would make bass legend Geezer Butler jealous and stamps his mark indelibly all over this album. The Sabbath influence doesn't end there either, with a number of tracks such as Disembowel, Impending Dread and Critical Madness containing Sabbath-like riffs, at least in small measure before the inevitable faster-paced sections kick in.

As we are all aware Autopsy founder Chris Reifert was a member of Death and featured on Scream Bloody Gore, but as Chuck Schuldiner started looking to move in a more progressive and technical direction he bailed and I think this debut illustrates exactly why - it is obvious that Chris desired to go in a more extreme direction, emphasising the necrotic filthiness of this new sound and really putting the death into death metal, complete with doubling down on the horror and gore-themed lyrics just as Death started to move away from them. Reifert's drumming is totally in synergy with this direction and his stickwork sometimes sounds like a man beating a rotten carcass with two severed arms! Vocally he has become gruffer and his growls now resemble more fully the deep rumbles that became a mainstay of the early death doom sound and he seems to become more evil-sounding on every release.

The downtuned guitars pull off the trick of sounding loose and even messy, when in fact they are pretty tight and technically adept, but they just make the riffs sound so fucking sick! The riffs aren't just a matter of blasting the balls off everything that moves, as I said there are nods to doom metal riffing, but even at their most frantic they are still recognisable and fairly memorable - Gasping for Air and the title track should still be bouncing around your noggin long after the disc has stopped spinning. With Severed Survival Autopsy signalled an intent to come up with the filthiest, most rotten- and foetid-sounding metal that had ever seen light of day and although that would take another album to accomplish their debut certainly set them well on their way.