Twenty four months. That is the gap between the tape being finished and the record reaching an American shop, and it is the single fact that decides how this album is remembered. Atheist recorded Piece of Time at Morrisound in Tampa across November and December 1988 with Scott Burns producing alongside the band, which puts it in front of almost everything the genre is now given credit for. By the time anybody in the United States could buy it, in 1990, the four musicians who made it had already written a considerably stranger follow up, and the genre had spent two years catching up to a tape it had not heard.
What the band was before it was a death metal band
The four from Sarasota who spent five years learning to play before anybody asked them to formed in 1984 as Oblivion, became R.A.V.A.G.E., which stood for Raging Atheists Vowing A Gory End, and settled on the shorter version of that by 1987. Kelly Shaefer sang and played rhythm guitar, Rand Burkey played lead, Roger Patterson played bass and Steve Flynn played drums. What separates the line-up from every other band in Florida is where the rhythm section came from. Flynn had a jazz background and phrased like it, and Patterson wrote bass parts that behave like a second lead guitar rather than like a foundation.
That is not a small distinction and it is the whole album. In the standard arrangement of 1988 the bass doubles the guitar an octave down and is inaudible by design. Here it argues with the guitar, takes the melody when the guitar is busy, and moves between registers inside a single bar. Turn the volume up on any thirty seconds of this record and the instrument nobody was listening to in this genre turns out to be running the song.
What jazz fusion actually contributed
The phrase gets used loosely about this band, and what it usually means to people who have not listened closely is chords. It is not chords. The inheritance is rhythmic, and it arrives in three specific ways. The metre changes inside phrases rather than between sections, so a riff can be counted in five and resolve in four without a seam. The drums do not keep time under the guitars, they answer them, with Flynn using the ride cymbal and the toms where a Florida drummer of the period would have used a blast. And the songs stop developing when the idea is finished rather than when a verse structure says they should, which is why almost nothing here repeats the way the ear expects it to.
Everybody else in Tampa was writing riffs and hiring a rhythm section. This band wrote the rhythm section first and hung the riffs off it.
Hold that against the room it was made in. Morrisound with Scott Burns is the address that standardised the genre's sound between 1988 and 1993, and a great many records made there are indistinguishable from one another below the vocal. This is the least standardised thing that ever came out of it, made by the same engineer at the very start of the run, which suggests the uniformity people blame on the studio was mostly a matter of what the bands brought through the door. Hillsborough County gave the building a historical marker in May 2025, which is a strange and rather good end for a room where most of this was tracked on a shoestring.
Two years in a drawer
The delay was not artistic and it was not strategic. Atheist's original company, Mean Machine Records, went bankrupt, and the finished album sat unreleased while the band found somebody else to press it. Active Records put it out on 30 August 1989 and Metal Blade handled the American release the following year. Two years is long enough for a genre to move, and this genre was moving faster in 1989 and 1990 than at any point before or since.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| November and December 1988 | Recorded at Morrisound with Scott Burns |
| 1989 | Mean Machine Records collapses; the album has no label |
| 30 August 1989 | Active Records releases it in Europe |
| 1990 | Metal Blade finally puts it in American shops |
| 1991 | Death releases the Morrisound album that gets the credit for making technique the subject |
The songs
Nine tracks. The title piece opens on a figure that changes its footing twice before the vocal arrives and never settles for long enough to be hummed. "Unholy War" is the fastest thing here and the closest the band came to writing something a Tampa audience of 1989 would have recognised as normal. "Room with a View" is where Burkey's lead playing stops sounding like thrash soloing and starts sounding like somebody improvising over changes. "No Truth" closes it. Shaefer's voice is the least remarkable element, a mid-range rasp that keeps the words legible, and that is a deliberate arrangement decision rather than a limitation: a guttural on top of this writing would have buried the very thing worth hearing.
The critical record is mixed in a way that suits the album. AllMusic gives it three stars out of five, Rock Hard eight out of ten and a place at number 402 in its 2005 ranking of the greatest rock and metal albums, and Terrorizer's James Hinchliffe has called it the band's least technically accomplished release while also calling it an exceptional piece of late eighties death thrash. All of those are defensible at once. It is the roughest of the three records this line-up made and the one that made the other two possible.
A first album is usually a band doing what it can. This one is a band doing what nobody else could, two years before the audience for it existed.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
What it cost
Roger Patterson died on 12 February 1991, aged 22, in a road accident while the band was on tour with Candlemass. Unquestionable Presence was recorded that year at Morrisound with Scott Burns and Tony Choy playing the parts Patterson had written, and Shaefer has said since that Choy was really the only other capable person they knew who could physically play the material. Active Records released it on 30 August 1991, two years to the day after the debut, and in 2005 it became the ninth album inducted into the Decibel Hall of Fame. It is the record the band is best known for and it exists because a dead man's writing was still on the page.
Nothing after that went smoothly either. Atheist broke up in 1992, reassembled purely to deliver Elements in 1993 and discharge a contract, and disbanded again early in 1994. They came back in 2006, at which point Shaefer no longer played guitar on stage, having dealt with tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome for years, and Jupiter followed through Season of Mist in 2010. There has been no album since. Four records in forty two years, from a band that arrived early enough to be ignored twice, which is the shape of the decade set out in the peak and the slump.
The other record that suffered the same fate for the opposite reason came out of Montreal seven years later, written in 1993 and released in 1998 because nobody would touch it, and it is obscura. Between the two of them they describe the whole problem with this music in that decade, which was never a shortage of ideas and always a shortage of anybody willing to put them in a shop.
