Review by Sonny for Death - Scream Bloody Gore (1987)

OK, so first off let me say I am a massive jerk. Now hear me out before you try to argue with me on this! I have always been a bit dismissive of Death and failed to see the reverence in which they are held. The reason, I now realise, is that I have always taken them out of context, something I actually get quite chippy about with younger metal heads when they do it. The reason I bring this up is that I am not as au fait with DM as many other metal fans - doom, thrash and black being my personal areas of interest. So in order to cure this ignorance I have embarked on a voyage of discovery through death metal history, starting in the mid-eighties, which means that very early on I have encountered Death once more. Specifically, I first come across their 1984 Death By Metal demo, the three-track first side of which, although it is rough as a bear's arse, is amazing and features Scream Bloody Gore's Evil Dead in very early form. So, it seems things are looking up for my relationship with Chuck's mob and thus I arrive at Scream Bloody Gore itself, which happens to be one of the two Death albums I own on CD.

Now listening to this after Possessed's Seven Churches and the aforementioned demo, I can at last hear it for what it really is, which is a groundbreaking bridge between the more brutal thrash metal and true death metal. No, I don't feel that this is yet death metal fully-formed, as it still has too many thrash riffs and the drumming is still not quite there yet, but it has definitely advanced things on in extremity from Possessed's debut. Scream Bloody Gore takes riffs from the most aggressive thrash metal and brutalise them, turning them into something more primal and dark even than those cranked out by the likes of Slayer and Possessed. Chuck Schuldiner's vocals still don't really have that guttural quality that the best death metal singers possess, but they are still pretty evil sounding for 1987. The drums and bass are moving towards the more cavernous sound that would epitomise the death metal of the early nineties and the vocals have that distant quality that plays into this aesthetic.

This isn't cerebral metal, not by any means, this is visceral and dangerous music with extremely violent lyrics that would most definitely have upset Tipper Gore and the PRMC back in '87 (which has got to have been a good thing). This was blue collar metal for those who wanted to work out some aggression after a day of putting up with shit at their place of work and needed to put on a disc and bang their fucking head until it went away. And that is something I can really get behind. This was for people like me from shitty industrial towns who saw bands like Motley Crue and Ratt and thought "This isn't fucking L.A., these guys have nothing to do with me". In truth, if I had heard this when it was released (which I didn't, it was many years later when our paths crossed) then I would most definitely have lapped this shit up - something that out-brutalised Reign in Blood, fuck, sign me up! The tracks here are insanely brutal-sounding for 1987 and still manage to provide an adrenaline rush all these years later, such is their quality. So, on reflection, I must wholeheartedly apologise for my previous attitude towards Death and in particular their debut. I was probably guilty of misplaced expectations and was listening for what I wanted to hear, not what the band had presented, which is an album that pushed metal further than any other at that point and sowed the seeds for a whole new genre of metal brutality which would still be going strong these 35 years later.