Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky.John Milton, Paradise Lost
Ten songs, under forty minutes, not a chorus anywhere in it, and a drummer who had spent the previous two years playing grindcore in Los Angeles. Altars of Madness is the record that turned a regional noise into a working method, and almost everything the popular account says about how it was made is wrong. It was not engineered by the man everybody names. It was not released in America when everybody thinks. And it was not the band's first attempt at an album.
There was already an album in the cupboard
Morbid Angel had a finished record three years before this one. Abominations of Desolation was cut at the same Tampa studio in 1986, with Mike Browning drumming and singing, Richard Brunelle and Trey Azagthoth on guitars, John Ortega on bass, and a young producer called David Vincent behind the desk. The release was cancelled. Browning left the band in 1986 after an altercation with Azagthoth, Vincent talked the group into replacing Ortega as well, and then Vincent took the vocal job himself, which is a producer walking out of a session with the band he was hired to record.
Earache eventually put the shelved tapes out in 1991, once the band was famous enough that people wanted them. That sequence matters for one reason: by the time the debut proper was tracked, these musicians had already made an entire album together and thrown it away. Nothing on Altars of Madness sounds tentative because nothing on it was being attempted for the first time.
The line-up was assembled, not formed
Four men, none of whom had arrived by the usual route. Azagthoth had been there since 1983 and wrote the guitar parts. Vincent had come in through the control room. Brunelle held the rhythm chair. And Pete Sandoval, who joined from Terrorizer, brought a vocabulary from grindcore that no death metal band had yet had access to: a blast beat that could be held for as long as the song required rather than dropped in as a shock.
That single hire is the reason the record sounds the way it does. Put a grindcore drummer behind two guitarists writing in tritones and long chromatic runs and the music stops being fast thrash and becomes something with a different pulse entirely. The riffs are not the innovation on this album. The floor under them is.
Put a grindcore drummer behind two guitarists writing in tritones and the music stops being fast thrash and becomes something with a different pulse entirely.
December 1988, three weeks, and the wrong engineer in the story
The sessions ran at Morrisound Recording through December 1988, about three weeks of them, with Tom Morris engineering and mixing, the band credited with the arrangement and production and Digby Pearson of Earache as executive producer. Scott Burns, whose name is attached to Florida death metal as if he made all of it, is not on this album at all. The most influential record to come out of that building was made by the other man in it.
The budget allowed no second guesses, so the band arrived with the material drilled and moved through it at the speed the clock demanded. Guitars were tracked dry and close, the kick drum was compressed and gated to recover the attack that a blast beat destroys, and Vincent's vocals went down last, at two or three takes a song. Every one of those decisions is still audible, which is why the album sounds engineered rather than merely captured.
Britain paid for the American record
Here is the fact that reorders the whole story of the Florida scene. Morbid Angel were signed by a British label run out of a bedroom in Derbyshire, on the strength of a 1987 demo, and Earache put the album out in the United Kingdom on 12 May 1989. American listeners could not buy a domestic pressing until Combat released it on 7 December 1990, nineteen months later. An American band from Tampa was therefore a European act first, reviewed in European magazines, sold in European shops and toured on European bills before its own country had it in stock.
What it actually sounds like, and what it does not do
The critical readings agree on the direction even when they disagree on the value. Jason Birchmeier at AllMusic wrote that no metal band had previously carried guitar playing that fast into territory that horrific. Kerrang! gave it five stars on release and Metal Hammer four, which is a rare unanimity for music this hostile in 1989. Decibel inducted it into its Hall of Fame in April 2006, and it has been at or near the top of every serious list of death metal albums since.
What all of them are pointing at is a record with no rest in it. There is no clean passage, no acoustic interlude, no half time section offered as relief, and the solos are not melodies but events, whammy bar dives and dissonant bends that function as noise rather than as tunes. Vincent's voice sits higher than the guttural standard that came afterwards, which means the words are followable, a priority the genre abandoned almost immediately afterwards.
Four songs and a missing one
"Immortal Rites" opens the album on the slowest thing on it, a figure that arrives before the drums do and gives the record its only moment of ceremony. "Chapel of Ghouls" is the one everybody knows, and it survived every line-up change the band went through afterwards because it is the closest thing here to a conventional song, built on a riff that repeats often enough to be remembered. "Maze of Torment" is the exercise in speed, and "Bleed for the Devil" is the shortest thing on the record and exists to prove that nothing here needs to be longer.
There is also a song that most people who bought the record in 1989 never heard. "Lord of All Fevers and Plague" was not on the original vinyl or the cassette and appeared only as a bonus track on the compact disc, which is a fair description of what format meant at the end of that decade: three different pressings of the same album, carrying different music, sold to the same audience.
The material had been circulating before any of it was pressed. The demo Earache heard in 1987 was called Thy Kingdom Come, and a good part of what became this album had already been played to a few hundred people by post before a British label put money behind it. None of these songs were new when they were recorded. They were finished.
The verdict
It is the most important record the state produced and it is not the most enjoyable one, and both halves of that sentence are true at once. The ten tracks blur into one another on any honest listen, the songs are attacks rather than compositions, and a listener coming to it from outside the genre will struggle to tell the fourth from the seventh. That is a real cost and the reissue campaigns never mention it.
What it bought with that cost is everything that followed. Two hundred bands took the drumming, the guitar sound and the refusal of relief as a specification, and almost none of them had the writing to survive it, which is the ordinary fate of a template. If you are coming to this music without a map, start from the beginning rather than here. And if you want to hear how differently the same city could sound in the same eighteen months, the answer is slowly we rot, made by a band who wanted none of this.
