The record that defined Florida death metal was made in Los Angeles, and the record that defined the Florida sound was made by a band who spent the next thirty years insisting they did not want to sound like anybody in Tampa. Both of those are true, and a canon that cannot accommodate them is a list somebody copied off a forum.
So here is the argument this piece makes. The Florida albums are not one sound with fourteen examples. They are one studio, one engineer and roughly six years, inside which four completely different ideas about what heavy means were worked out at the same time by bands who saw each other every week. The industrial half of that story, Tampa and Morrisound, is told elsewhere. This is what came out of it.
1987 to 1989: the terms get set
Scream Bloody Gore, out on Combat on 25 May 1987, is the first entry and the odd one out, because Chuck Schuldiner recorded it at the Music Grinder in Los Angeles with Randy Burns, playing every guitar and bass part himself with Chris Reifert on drums. Nothing on it sounds like Florida. It sounds like one man deciding what the genre would do, and everything that followed in the state is a response to it.
Leprosy arrives fifteen months later, on Combat on 12 August 1988, cut at Morrisound with Scott Burns behind the desk, and the difference is not the writing, it is the floor. The kick strokes separate. The guitars sit wide and flat. From this record onward a Florida band could be as fast as it liked without turning into a rumble, and the whole boom depends on that one technical fix.
Then two answers to the same room in the same twelve months. Morbid Angel cut Altars of Madness at Morrisound in December 1988 with Tom Morris engineering, and Earache released it on 12 May 1989: exacting, chromatic, played by a drummer whose double kick made two hundred bands go and buy pedals. Obituary finished Slowly We Rot in March 1989 with Burns, and it goes the other way entirely, slow and filthy and closer to Celtic Frost than to anything down the road. Same building, same year, opposite verdicts about what heavy means.
1990 and 1991: the peak, and it is crowded
Cause of Death, released on 19 September 1990, is the better Obituary record and the less copied one. James Murphy plays the leads, Frank Watkins arrives on bass, and the band cover Celtic Frost's "Circle of the Tyrants" without embarrassment. The sleeve is its own story: Michael Whelan painted it for Sepultura's Beneath the Remains and Roadrunner moved it to Obituary, which annoyed Igor Cavalera enough that he had part of it tattooed on himself.
Nineteen ninety also gives you Deicide, thirty three minutes released on 26 June with no padding and no second gear, and Nocturnus, whose The Key put a keyboard player in a death metal band in 1990 and was mocked for it by people who would spend the next decade doing the same thing. Mike Browning had been thrown out of Morbid Angel in 1986 and built the strangest record of the era out of it.
Nineteen ninety one is where the traffic gets heavy. Blessed Are the Sick, Human, Unquestionable Presence and Malevolent Creation's The Ten Commandments all appear inside eight months, all cut in the same suburb, and no two of them agree about anything. If you want the wider frame, the pieces on the general canon of death metal albums put those records against Sweden and New York.
The technical wing, which is the state's real bequest
Recorded at Morrisound in 1991 with Scott Burns and released on 30 August, Unquestionable Presence is the record where Florida stops being about force. Odd time signatures, audible slap bass, melody used sparingly and on purpose. The circumstances are grim and should be stated plainly: Roger Patterson wrote the bass lines and then died in a van accident on tour before the session, and Tony Choy learned and played the parts as written. Decibel put the album into its Hall of Fame in 2005.
Same building, same year, opposite verdicts about what heavy means.
Two years later Cynic released Focus on Roadrunner, with Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert back from playing on Human, and it is a death metal record with the abattoir removed and the anatomy left in place: fretless bass, vocoder, jazz phrasing over blast beats. It sold badly, the band dissolved within a year, and every technical death metal band since has been working from it. That is Florida's actual export, and it is not the growl.
1992 and 1993: the money arrives and then leaves
Obituary's The End Complete came out on 21 April 1992, recorded at Morrisound the previous October and November with Burns, and it sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the United States and over two hundred and fifty thousand worldwide, reaching number 16 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. Deicide's Legion followed the same year, twenty nine minutes of it, faster and more compressed than the debut and harder to listen to on purpose.
Then the peak. Covenant was recorded at Morrisound, mixed by Flemming Rasmussen at Sweet Silence in Copenhagen, and released on 1 June 1993 in Britain by Earache and on 22 June in America by Giant, a Warner subsidiary. It sold over a hundred and fifty thousand copies in the United States and was, by Soundscan's count, still the best selling death metal album ten years later. A song from it went out on Headbangers Ball, the MTV programme that was the only television this music ever got.
The ten, in order of what they settled
- Scream Bloody Gore, Death (Combat, 1987). The method, made outside the state that claimed it.
- Altars of Madness, Morbid Angel (Earache, 1989). The record that put Florida on European booking sheets.
- Leprosy, Death (Combat, 1988). Speed made legible on tape for the first time.
- Human, Death (Relativity, 1991). Proof the genre could carry technique without losing weight.
- Slowly We Rot, Obituary (R/C, 1989). The argument for slowness, and the least polished thing Burns ever signed off.
- Unquestionable Presence, Atheist (Active, 1991). The benchmark the technical wing still measures against.
- Cause of Death, Obituary (Roadrunner, 1990). The best written Obituary record, with the wrong sleeve.
- Covenant, Morbid Angel (Giant, 1993). The commercial ceiling, and the end of the window.
- Focus, Cynic (Roadrunner, 1993). Ignored on release, copied ever since.
- Deicide, Deicide (R/C, 1990). Thirty three minutes with nothing in it that is not an attack.
Where the received list is wrong
The End Complete outsold everything and is the third best Obituary album. Sales measure the size of the window, not the quality of what went through it, and 1992 is simply when the most people were looking. Conversely Focus and Unquestionable Presence both failed commercially and both did more to shape what came after than any Florida record except the first two.
The other habitual mistake is counting Cannibal Corpse as a Florida band on the strength of the address. They formed in Buffalo in 1988, recorded in Tampa because that is where the engineer was, and only moved south after touring The Bleeding in 1994. Their best records are Florida productions made by a New York band, which is a distinction worth keeping, because the Florida canon is a set of arguments between neighbours and an out of town booking is not one of them.
Start at the top of that list, though, and the first entry is the one that needs its own hearing: two men, one Los Angeles room in November 1986, a record the British press dismissed and then reversed itself on twenty four years later. That is scream Bloody Gore.
