Review by SilentScream213 for Possessed - Seven Churches (1985)

By name dropping the genre in the album’s closing track, Possessed invented Death Metal just as Venom invented Black Metal. The only difference was Possessed actually were Death Metal, through and through.

Naturally, this album is a bit messy, and the production isn’t the best. There are quite a few mistakes from the musicians you can pretty easily pick up on, and many instances where Becerra can’t get the words out in time and just screams nonsense. They were armatures. But their vision and their passion was incredible, and yes, they created a full-fledged Death Metal album on their first try.

Those buzzsaw guitars were shredding out some seriously deranged, dissonant riffs, and the drums were just smashing everything as hard and fast as they could. It wasn’t that fast, and one might even say mid-tempo compared to today’s metal, but certainly Becerra’s screaming growl drove all that home and shook any doubts that this was indeed the heaviest music on Earth at the time. Lyrics focused exclusively on Satan, and though they weren’t well written or often intelligible, they never surrendered an inch to worshipping the great evil so necessary to Metal.