Review by Rexorcist for Death - Human (1991)

The creators of death metal, the very band the genre is named after, weren't just a bunch of guys that did really good metal.  They KEPT ON revolutionizing the genre.  All this started when they released what was potentially the heaviest album ever made with their debut: Scream Bloody Gore.  It ended when they made death metal an accessible genre with their sixth album, Symbolic.  And in the middle of that was a strange progression from the ultra heavy sophomore, Leprosy, the more technical but still underwhelming Spiritual Healing, and the album that turned death metal into an intelligent genre where one had to actually think, you know, beyond making gory sentences out of long words and medical terms.  They turned death metal into a metal genre for thinkers and intellectuals, one that was all about exploring the human condition, and that album was named: Human.

This is the second-to-last album to feature the traditional tone of Death albums before they raised the thrash influence on Symbolic.  This also means it bridges the gap of general accessibility between the raw thrashing and the lighter and more melodic introspection.  So suffice it to say, this is the most representative of the whole Death catalogue.  Because this is the first to get really technical, the drummer hired from Cynic was allowed to get crazy with it and build a real beat-based album by just being himself.  The intro of our first track, Flattening of Emotions, literally opens up with the drummer bridging a weird gap between tribal atmospheres and jazzy technicality.  This is a major factor for what makes Human one of those albums where tempo changes feel so fluent and natural, and the rest of the band is doing what they can to keep up with that technicality.  This also has to do with the clean production and the flawless flow of the album, the latter of which leads me to call into question the typical criticism I have where an album's songs are a little difficult to truly differentiate from each other because of so few changes in style, save for the softer and more melodic instrumental, Cosmic Sea.  I mean, how many blastbeat sections need to be at 200 BPM?  This isn't a symphonic power metal album.

Human redefines death metal in a plethora of ways.  It captures the roughest and nastiest sides of the band's music without relying on the goriness of previous albums, because there's a lot of room for intelligence and sophistication that they rarely wasted.  This album is the definition of effort, as an overwhelming amount of it was put into the idea of composition.  Death pulled a Wes Craven by focusing less on the rated-X sex, gore and yadda yadda, and focusing more on themes.  In other words, Chuck grew the hell up.  And while the recycling of the same base structural ideas does get on my nerves slightly, I'm still going to commend this as the standard sound for what a death metal album should be like.