Review by Sonny for Atheist - Piece of Time (1990)
I'm not the biggest champion of technical death metal to say the least and Piece of Time is an album I have heard before, without it really making much impression on me. So I went into it this time with a determination to get to the bottom of why it is so well-received and simultaneously to try to get something out of tech-death that has eluded me in the main up to this point. The first thing that leaps out at me is that this is quite obviously a unique record for early 1990 and, to use a much-abused cliche which is actually true on this occasion, it genuinely sounds ahead of it's time - maybe it should have been entitled Piece Out of Time! OK, so I don't know what I was thinking when I originally rated this as a 3/5 because I got far more out of it this time around than that score suggests, so it is definitely long overdue for a reappraisal.
Firstly, this is not that overtly technical as I have come to understand the term. I associate the phrase "technical" metal, be it thrash or death metal, with unlistenable time changes and excessive guitar wankery, bass lines bursting in and out seemingly at random and a drummer who desperarely seems to be trying to make up for the fact that he is the drummer! In other words a general lack of the things that originally drew me to metal music - riffs that will blow your bollocks off at fifty yards. For me "technical" metal (as opposed to progressive metal) is more for students of music theory and those who understand what the musicians are about - which I can assure you does not include me - rather than a visceral, emotional experience which is much more what I look for in music. So either I have completely misrepresented tech-death in my own mind or this isn't as technical as I thought it was because this has got some awesome riffing and the technical work is nothing like as jarring as I have found it elsewhere, being more interesting than annoying to my more literal way of thinking.
Basically, on Piece of Time, Atheist have taken the nascent death metal genre as a foundation and recast it with a completely different approach from the full-on brutalisation of Morbid Angel, Autopsy or Obituary, producing the tightest-sounding death metal album released up to this point. The technical, jazzy showcasing does definitely rear it's head at many points, but it never seems to be merely for it's own sake and it never disrupts the flow of the tracks which is where I think many tech bands go wrong when they sacrifice the songs upon the altar of technicality. Anyway, I have harped on about the technical nature of Piece of Time for long enough now - what we really have here is a super-energetic death metal album that is full of life and is a powerful representation of what can be achieved when a band take a different approach to what is becoming established as the norm in any given genre without sacrificing what has made that genre so appealing in the first place. The guitar work is exemplary, the riffs and leads are plenty aggressive as are the vocals spat out by Kelly Shaefer whose delivery is especially venomous-sounding. The drums and bass are given more freedom than usual up to this point, but this certainly doesn't undermine their ability to propel the tracks forwards, rather they enhance the lead work with interesting contributions of their own.
In conclusion, I have got to say that I was originally very, very wrong about Piece of Time and, having stripped away the prejudices the "technical" tag produce in me, can now see it for the ground-breaking and original piece of work that it really was and found myself enjoying it immensely.