Review by Sonny for Morbid - Year of the Goat (2011)

I paid a mint for an original CD copy of Morbid's seminal December Moon demo a few years back, but it is also available here on this comp of Morbid's demos and a couple of live sets. Whether you enjoy this is dependent, I suppose, on how you feel about listening to demo and bootleg quality material. Personally I don't have a problem with it, but I understand if people do. Unfortunately Morbid, who featured legendary Mayhem frontman Dead before he joined the black metal legends, never released any official studio stuff, so this is pretty much the sum total of the band's output. The sound on the four opening tracks, which comprise the December Moon demo, is pretty good and give an indication of what great potential the Swedes had, especially considering this was recorded in 1987. The sound quality of the rest of the tracks is not so great, but if you are conversant with 80s demos and bootlegs you will have heard far worse! The remaining six tracks on CD1 are rehearsal recordings of December Moon's four plus a short instrumental, Citythrasher, and the track Deathexecution which  was the opener on an earlier cassette only demo, Rehearsal 07/08/1987. All these tracks are great examples of the melting pot that was underground metal of the mid-to-late 1980's with thrash metal mutating into the bastard twins death and black metal and bands being unafraid to explore new realms of extremity.

The live material is taken from two shows, the first from a show at Stockholm's Birkagarden recorded in late October '87 (this show is available as the 2000 album Live in Stockholm) and the second was recorded earlier in the year, in April, at the Ultrahuset also in Stockholm. The sound isn't great and the crowd noise is obtrusive, but these two shows give an insight into the early Scandinavian extreme metal scene and it is always great to hear a Dead live show (if you know what I mean)!

So, as a record of an important underground band that was influential in the very early years before the explosion of Scandinavian extreme metal, this is interesting stuff and, despite any qualms about the quality, these six or seven songs are fucking awesome. To be honest, I kind of love this dodgy-sounding crap to hell so I'm like a pig in shit with this sort of thing.