May 1991, a control room in Tampa, four musicians and a producer. Three of the four had been in the band for a matter of months. The fourth had spent the previous year going to law over the use of his own group's name after his rhythm section toured Europe without him. Relativity was paying for the studio time. What came out of those sessions is the most consequential record made in Florida after 1989, and it is not a scene record at all. It is a hiring decision.
Everything about Human follows from who is playing on it. Death had been a band with members; from this album on it was a name attached to whoever Chuck Schuldiner thought could execute the material, and the first people he called could all play something other than death metal.
What happened before it
Spiritual Healing was cut at Morrisound in 1989, with the band living for six weeks in a motel near Busch Gardens, released by Combat on 16 February 1990, and the group fell apart around it. Schuldiner refused to go on the European tour, saying the organisation was inadequate, so drummer Bill Andrews and bassist Terry Butler went and played the dates without him under the band's name. Legal action followed. Schuldiner then told the press that the album he was about to make was more than a record, that it was a statement and that it was revenge, which is the sort of thing musicians say and which in this case turned out to be an accurate description of the method.
The response of most guitarists in that position is to find four people who will do as they are told. He did the opposite and hired better players than himself.
The people he called
Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert came from Cynic, a Miami band that had spent four years playing jazz influenced instrumental music to almost nobody and would not release its own album for another two years. Steve Di Giorgio came from Sadus and played fretless bass, an instrument nobody in this genre used because nobody in this genre could hear the bass anyway. Scott Burns and Schuldiner produced. The record was cut in May 1991 and Relativity released it on 22 October.
| Musician | Role | Day job |
|---|---|---|
| Chuck Schuldiner | Guitar, vocals, all writing | Death, since 1983 |
| Paul Masvidal | Guitar | Cynic, unsigned at the time |
| Sean Reinert | Drums | Cynic, unsigned at the time |
| Steve Di Giorgio | Fretless bass | Sadus |
| Scott Burns | Production, with Schuldiner | Morrisound Recording |
Read that table as an argument about labour. Every other important Florida album was made by a group of friends from the same few suburbs who had learned together in a shed. This one was assembled from three separate bands by a man who wanted specific capabilities, which is how records are made in every other genre and which death metal had never done.
What the hires bought
Reinert's drumming is the most obvious change. Blast beats are used sparingly and as punctuation rather than as a default, the kit is played across the bar rather than under it, and the fills are constructed. Masvidal's second guitar makes counterpoint possible for the first time on a Death record, so the arrangements can carry two independent lines rather than one riff doubled. Di Giorgio's fretless bass slides between notes and is audible as a voice rather than as a floor, which no death metal album before this one had attempted.
He did not find four people who would do as they were told. He hired better players than himself and wrote to their strengths.
The songs change to fit. "Flattening of Emotions" opens the album with an arrangement that changes shape three times before the first vocal. "Lack of Comprehension" is the closest thing to a single, and it got a video and television play, which was unheard of for this music. "Cosmic Sea" is an instrumental, and its presence on a death metal album in 1991 is a statement in itself: there is a track here with no violence in it at all.
The lyrics turned inward, which mattered as much
The other break is easy to miss because everybody talks about the musicianship. The words on the first two Death albums are about corpses and dismemberment. The words here are about emotional numbness, suicide, the failure to understand other people and the experience of being misread. That was the first time an important death metal record looked inward rather than at a mortuary table, and every band since that has written about anything other than gore is working in a space this album opened.
The flaw, and it is a real one
The bass everybody praises is hard to hear on the original pressing. Di Giorgio left immediately after recording, Scott Carino took the touring job and ended up putting an additional bass overdub on "Cosmic Sea" after problems in the mix, and the complaints about the audibility of the bass have followed the album for its entire life. That is not a small matter on a record whose main innovation is a bass player.
The second criticism is colder and harder to answer. Human is the point at which this music starts to reward being admired rather than played loud, and a listener who came for the impact of slowly we rot will find this fussy. Both records were made in the same building by the same engineer within thirty months of each other, and they are arguments with each other.
What the hired hands did next
The session had consequences for everybody in it. Masvidal and Reinert went back to Cynic with a profile they had not had before and released Focus on Roadrunner in 1993, a record that would have been unsellable without the credit they earned here. Di Giorgio, who had left as soon as the tapes were done, returned to the fold for Individual Thought Patterns in 1993, by which point Schuldiner had also hired Gene Hoglan on drums and Andy LaRocque from a Danish singer's band on lead guitar.
That is the pattern the rest of the catalogue follows: a new set of specialists on every album, chosen for what the writing needed, and a guitarist at the centre who never again played with the same rhythm section twice in a row. It cost him a band. It bought him four records that nobody else could have made.
The verdict, and what it spawned
It sold about ninety four thousand copies in the United States according to Soundscan, which made it the best selling album Death ever put out, and it remains the one the rest of the catalogue is measured against. AllMusic gave it four and a half stars, Kerrang! four out of five, and Rolling Stone put it at number seventy in its 2017 ranking of the greatest metal albums, which is an unusual place for a Tampa death metal record to end up.
The honest verdict has two halves. It proved that the genre could carry technique without losing weight, which is the single most useful thing anybody established in the years covered by the boom years in Florida. It also gave a generation of technically gifted players permission to write songs that go nowhere impressively, and the tedious wing of technical death metal is descended directly from this record without having understood it. The difference is that Schuldiner used the players to serve the writing. What he did with the four years he had left is in symbolic and the last years of Death.
