The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.John Milton, Paradise Lost
By the end of 1994 the band Chuck Schuldiner had started as a teenager in 1983 had been running for eleven years, had cycled through a long queue of hired musicians, and had made four albums that each argued with the one before it. Symbolic, the fifth Death album, is the one where the arguing stops. Six weeks at Morrisound Recording in Tampa, a new label, three hired players and a producer who had never made a Death record. What came out on 21 March 1995 is the best written thing the genre had produced to that point, and it is also the last record Chuck Schuldiner made while the machine around him was still working.
The state it was made in
Death had no stable line-up and had not had one since 1987. Individual Thought Patterns, out in June 1993, had Andy LaRocque on lead guitar, Steve Di Giorgio on fretless bass and Gene Hoglan on drums, and every one of those men was a hired specialist rather than a member. The band was by then a name, a catalogue and one guitarist, and Schuldiner had stopped pretending otherwise.
The commercial position was awkward too. The Tampa window described in chapter two was closing: the major labels that had bought into extreme metal in 1992 were leaving, the touring economy had thinned, and a Florida production had stopped being a selling point. Death moved to Roadrunner for one album, which is exactly the kind of deal a label offers when it wants the catalogue value and is not certain about the market.
Six weeks, and a different desk
The session ran late in 1994 at Morrisound, roughly six weeks of it, with Jim Morris producing rather than Scott Burns. That matters. Morris was one of the brothers who had built the studio, he came out of engineering rather than out of the death metal boom, and the record has a clarity that the 1991 and 1992 Tampa albums do not: the guitars are separated, the bass is audible without being pushed, and nothing is triggered into a rivet gun.
The line-up was Schuldiner on guitar and vocals, Bobby Koelble on lead guitar, Kelly Conlon on bass and Gene Hoglan on drums. Koelble and Conlon appear on this album and no other Death record. Hoglan, who had come out of Dark Angel and played on the previous album, made this his last Death session, and his playing is the second story of the record: he sits marginally behind the beat, uses the whole kit rather than the kick and the snare, and turns passages that would have been blasts in 1991 into something with shape.
The verdict
Here it is plainly. Symbolic is the record where Death stops sounding like a band operating inside a genre and starts sounding like a band with its own catalogue to answer to. The riffs resolve. The songs return to things. "Crystal Mountain" has a chorus, an actual one, and does not apologise for it. The title track and "Empty Words" both run past six minutes without a section that is only there to get to the next section, which almost nothing in Florida had managed.
The riffs resolve. The songs return to things. That had not been the point of this music before.
The words moved as far as the music did. Where the first album had been horror films and the second had been disease, this one is about memory, regret and the cost of choices already made. "Crystal Mountain" takes organised religion apart without a single blasphemy in it. "Perennial Quest" closes the record on a long instrumental passage that has nothing to do with the abattoir whatsoever. Schuldiner had been writing that way since Human in 1991, and this is where it stops being a departure and becomes the subject.
The press caught up with it slowly and then completely. AllMusic rates it highly while noting that a few of the riffs sound tired next to the surrounding material, which is fair; Pitchfork later gave it 9.1 out of 10 and called it the most refined and melodic thing the band did; Record Collector put it about as close to flawless as the form gets. Three readings from three unrelated places, converging. It reached number 30 on the British rock and metal albums chart and number 68 in the Netherlands, which is respectable and nowhere near what Morbid Angel had done on a Warner subsidiary two years earlier.
What Schuldiner did next
He dissolved the band. In 1996 Schuldiner announced that Death was finished and that he was building Control Denied, a metal band with a conventional singer, because the material he was writing no longer suited a growl. Nuclear Blast signed him in 1997 and attached a condition: one more Death album first. That is how The Sound of Perseverance exists, recorded with Shannon Hamm on guitar, Scott Clendenin on bass and Richard Christy on drums, and released on 31 August 1998.
It is the furthest thing from Scream Bloody Gore in the catalogue: high clean shrieks instead of the growl, longer songs, a Judas Priest cover at the end, and playing that occasionally goes past the point where anybody is enjoying it. Control Denied's The Fragile Art of Existence followed in 1999 with Tim Aymar singing, and it is the record Schuldiner had wanted to make since about 1993.
The last two years
These are facts and they are given as facts. In May 1999, on his thirty second birthday, Schuldiner was diagnosed with a pontine glioma, a brain tumour. He had surgery in New York in January 2000 which removed part of it. The cancer returned in May 2001. He was reported to have had serious difficulty meeting the cost of treatment, and musicians and labels ran benefit auctions on his behalf. He continued writing during the illness. He died on 13 December 2001, aged 34.
Control Denied's second album was unfinished and stayed unfinished. Death's catalogue passed to an estate, and from 2011 Relapse Records ran a reissue programme that put the demos, the rehearsal tapes and the live recordings into print properly for the first time, which is more than most bands of that era received.
Where the record sits now
Thirty years on, Symbolic is the Death album people who do not otherwise listen to death metal own. That is usually said as a criticism and it is not one. The record demonstrated that the form could carry composition, dynamics and a chorus without giving up any weight, and every technical and progressive band that came afterwards worked from that demonstration whether they admit it or not. The genre spent the eighties proving it could be extreme. This is the record that proved it could be written.
What it did not do was save the scene it came out of. By 1995 Florida had stopped being the centre of anything, the labels had moved on, and the interesting work had scattered to other states with no studio, no engineer and no industry attached. One of those states had been quietly producing some of the ugliest music in America since 1986, and that is texas Death Metal.
