DEATH METAL DECEMBER

[jawn galliano]

brought to you by the members of the kayo dot discord community. one (and sometimes two) notable debut album from the golden age of death metal for each day of the month. listen along if you like. discuss! pontificate! luxuriate! DEATH METAL

[zim]

i will attempt to do this thing

[jawn galliano]

man i forgot how hard seven churches goes, it's been a VERY long time since i've listened to this one. i'm still kinda ambivalent about classing it as DM specifically and that was kinda the group consensus when building this list, but they did get a nod for coining the phrase. there's a lot of it on there but it still feels very proto, but i guess that's kinda hard to avoid considering none of the major currents that would go on to define DM had yet fully congealed.

an underappreciated aspect IMO is that death metal the song really conjures up images of manowar and all the other silly bands whose whole thing is "writing heavy metal music which is about heavy metal" without really falling into that trap lyrically.

anyway great album, good times

[Ninny]

Funny how Larry LaLonde was in both Possessed and Primus

[jawn galliano]

yeah his was one of the weirder career trajectories for sure. insane that these guys were like 16 when they did seven churches!

honestly not sure if i'd ever listened to morbid visions in full before - but i thought it was pretty cool. definitely a bit loose in terms of performance, but a very adept step toward a more coherent death metal sound by way of a very pronounced love of slayer. accordingly, i'm not sure if i throw it squarely into the death metal pile because like so many of the early gestational releases, it has a lot of solidly thrashy/speed-metal elements. like possessed it's never gonna be the first thing i reach for if i want to listen to death metal, but for a bunch of teenagers figuring shit out in 1986, it's a remarkable piece of work.

[zim]

never listened to seven churches before but all i could think of was that this album was basically proto-altars of madness. there's even a wild guitar solo on satan's curse just like chapel of ghouls.

good album, the songs are kind of forgettable but for a 1985 release i can see how this was an early blueprint for death metal

[Methuselah Honeysuckle]

Always appreciated seven churches but don't ever really listen to it.

[jawn galliano]

never listened to seven churches before but all i could think of was that this album was basically proto-altars of madness. there's even a wild guitar solo on satan's curse just like chapel of ghouls.

good album, the songs are kind of forgettable but for a 1985 release i can see how this was an early blueprint for death metal

yeah it's IMO kind of a running theme with these early gestational efforts. cool historical curiosities, but very rarely essential listening. which is mostly my impression of necrophagia, i found i had a hard time concentrating on it in a lot of places. part of it was i think the setting, i listened to it on a walk this morning and it's cold and rainy out and that's just not a death metal atmosphere. but the music never really grabbed me at any point, there are some neat phrases and riffs but it never really comes together for me, it felt like if you chopped off the obvious intro/outro stuff, the album would feel the same no matter how you ordered the tracks.

[Methuselah Honeysuckle]

never listened to seven churches before but all i could think of was that this album was basically proto-altars of madness. there's even a wild guitar solo on satan's curse just like chapel of ghouls.

good album, the songs are kind of forgettable but for a 1985 release i can see how this was an early blueprint for death metal

Also worth noting that 2 of them were still teenagers and the other 2 barely out of the teen years.

[jawn galliano]

SBG is definitely worse than i remember (though i am going to stress that i don't think it's actually full-on bad), though notable for being chuck's least-worst vocal style. i think there are a lot of isolated riffs and passages that sound cool and fun... but there's a heavy predictability to the riff construction and songwriting here that's really hard to get past. i think if you cut this down to a four-track EP you'd have a much more compelling listening experience. a bit tighter on the whole compared to its proto-DM contemporaries, but otherwise doesn't do much to distinguish itself from them - it's very much of a piece with the 'well it's not exactly thrash but it's not far off' contingent.

i am probably being unduly harsh but it's just impossible to avoid, there is still so much revisionism around this band that vastly overstates their importance that 20 years on, it still feels like it needs correction

[jawn galliano]

malleus rules

severed survival rules (the mix absolutely fucks, i love the aggressive bass)

altars needs no real introduction, but MAN this really reignited my love for early MA. hearing it alongside its contemporary context really reinforces for me how singular MA were

slowly we rot i expected to hate, but i actually gained a newfound appreciation for obituary. this is straight up celtic frost worship, and very lovingly so. there's a brevity to the songs here that really works for me, lesser bands like death would flog every song way past its sell-by date and really hampered the impact of their early efforts. obituary make short, declarative statements and don't repeat themselves.

[User]

i was shocked reading zim had never listened to possessed then i realised i had never listened to morbid visions

so i am doing that now

[zim]

i have embarrassingly not listened to a lot of essentials

[jawn galliano]

yeah i have skipped over a ton of stuff over the years, laziness and incuriosity intersecting i suppose. i haven't heard a good chunk of stuff in the third column! have not yet listened to left hand path today but of course that will be a revisitation

[User]

deicide s/t a good time, fucking blast it

[jawn galliano]

get a load of mr time zones over here!

[droidspawn]

Curious to hear your thoughts on the Infester and gorement debuts when the time comes. Both are among my absolute favorites.

[jawn galliano]

looking forward to those! both are in my neglected list, along with iniquity, molested, necrophobic and maaaaybe the chasm? that one i'm honestly not sure on. i know i've listened to them before but i couldn't tell you what i've heard

[Methuselah Honeysuckle]

I love those early necrophobic albums

[deckard]

this is the worst bit of graphic art ive seen

[zim]

that's just part of the charm

[jawn galliano]

you've seen much worse

[jawn galliano]

Curious to hear your thoughts on the Infester and gorement debuts when the time comes. Both are among my absolute favorites.

most of the way through gorement now and wowee this is fantastic. going to have to give it another listen after work so i can give it full attention, but this feels like a much better and more interesting manifestation of a more doom-inflected DM than early amorphis' take on the sound. not remotely what i expected from a band called 'gorement'! this is a hidden gem, no idea how this band flies under the radar given the outstanding quality of their one proper release.

[zim]

holy shit how is it the 26th already, i failed hard at this

[droidspawn]

Curious to hear your thoughts on the Infester and gorement debuts when the time comes. Both are among my absolute favorites.

most of the way through gorement now and wowee this is fantastic. going to have to give it another listen after work so i can give it full attention, but this feels like a much better and more interesting manifestation of a more doom-inflected DM than early amorphis' take on the sound. not remotely what i expected from a band called 'gorement'! this is a hidden gem, no idea how this band flies under the radar given the outstanding quality of their one proper release.

Hell yeah, glad you dig it. It is my favorite Swedish album I think. Can’t get enough of it. I didn’t discover it until maybe a year and a half ago or so. A stone cold classic and definitely way under appreciated.

[agony bagony]

deathcember

[droidspawn]

looking forward to those! both are in my neglected list, along with iniquity, molested, necrophobic and maaaaybe the chasm? that one i'm honestly not sure on. i know i've listened to them before but i couldn't tell you what i've heard

Infester time! Keep in mind these guys were 16-18 when they made this album in 94.

[Methuselah Honeysuckle]

What did you think of those necrophobic jams

[jawn galliano]

looking forward to those! both are in my neglected list, along with iniquity, molested, necrophobic and maaaaybe the chasm? that one i'm honestly not sure on. i know i've listened to them before but i couldn't tell you what i've heard

Infester time! Keep in mind these guys were 16-18 when they made this album in 94.

it feels to me like the first (or certainly an early example anyway) congealment of the 'fruital DM' style which is consciously informed by suffocation. compositionally and texturally it's pretty impressive, especially considering their age, though it's difficult to fully appreciate owing to the absolutely abysmal production. but alas, between that, and its enthusiastic embrace of rather explicit misogyny and bigotry makes it a bit of a nonstarter for me. which is par for the course, i honestly dislike pretty much everything downstream from suffocation, who are still IMO the only necessary expression of that style.

What did you think of those necrophobic jams

only gave it one listen so far and kinda distracted, but my surface level takeaway is it rests between left hand path (much worse than i remember) and everflowing stream (much better than i remember) in the canon of swedish DM debuts

[droidspawn]

[deckard]

intestine baalism

[droidspawn]

All 3 albums rip!

[jawn galliano]

jesus fucking christ molested is INSANE. how am i only discovering it in 2023, this is like one of the best DM albums i've heard

[droidspawn]

Correct! Wish it was streaming somewhere

[jawn galliano]

yeah i actually had to download it off soulseek it is, incredibly, still alive and kicking. i'm yet to fail to find what i'm looking for!

[droidspawn]

That Adramelech is probably my favorite Finnish album aside from Nespithe.