Review by Sonny for Deicide - Deicide (1990)

Deicide are one death metal band I have been quite familiar with for quite some time, mainly due to a workmate who loaned me their first three albums when I returned to metal in the late nineties. Led by the inverted-cross branded, religion-despising, bassist/vocalist Glen Benton and featuring the Hoffman brothers on guitar I found Deicide to be an intimidating proposal and, in all honesty, back then I wasn't particularly keen as I found them far too abrasive. So, it's a measure of how far my taste has changed in the intervening twenty-odd years as, listening to this now, I found an awful lot to appreciate and actually really enjoyed it in a fuck-everything kind of way.

On this, their debut, it is evident that Deicide had no intention of fucking around. Ten tracks and a runtime just a bit over half an hour, this is a release that hits fast and hits hard. The memorable  riffs are exceedingly tight with a really cool guitar tone, the drumming of Steve Asheim is devastating and precise and Glen Benton's vocals spit bile and venom at his preferred target of organised religion with a genuinely disturbing spite and evil-sounding growl. Deicide is an album that is trimmed of all fat and is made of nothing but muscle, bone and gristle, getting straight down to business and never diverting from the path of intimidating and scaring the living shit out of anyone and everyone. The Hoffamn's solos are not really anything more than functional, but this album isn't about anything as superfluous as fancy guitar solos - it is pure distilled essence of death metal and as such may actually be toxic if taken internally.

But seriously, Deicide have had quite an inconsistent career and Glen Benton hasn't always been the most likeable individual, but on their debut they instantly got to the very core of death metal, illustrating an inate understanding of what it meant and creating an absolute textbook release that could be held up as an example for future generation of death metallers. If a band were getting too pretentious or arty-farty for their own good then they could do worse than sit themselves down with a copy of Deicide to reconnect with the beating heart of death metal and shear themselves of any unwanted pretentions. All-in-all an exciting and dangerous-sounding album that is the sort of release that reminds me why I got into metal in the first place, all those oh, so many years ago.