State of the art death metal in the eyes of most enthusiasts of the genre. That is Eduardo Rivadavia writing about Disincarnate's Dreams of the Carrion Kind for AllMusic, four and a half stars out of five, an assessment nobody has seriously argued with since. The band that made it released nothing else. Not a second album, not an EP, not a live record.
There are dozens of these. A group forms, works for three years, gets a pressing, and then the file closes, and what survives is one object with a catalogue number on it and no context around it at all. The nineties produced more of them than any other period in metal, and the reason is not mysterious: the peak and the slump arrived so close together that a band could be signed in the boom and orphaned in the bust with one record in between.
What makes them worth a piece of their own is that they did not all stop for the same reason. Sort them by how they ended rather than by what they sounded like, and five distinct kinds of ending appear.
Ended by paperwork
Demilich is the cleanest case in the genre. Antti Boman and Mikko Virnes started the band in Kuopio in 1990, made four demo tapes across 1991 and 1992, and got Nespithe released in 1993: technical writing at odd angles, a vocal pitched so far down that first time listeners assume the tape is running slow, and not one riff borrowed from Tampa or Stockholm. Then the band came apart, and it came apart over the label arrangement and what the record earned rather than over anything musical.
That is the specific tragedy of the period. No argument, no burnout, no drug story, no lost singer. A contract that did not work and two young men who decided it was not worth continuing. Boman brought the band back in 2005 for live shows, played what was billed as a last concert in 2006, and has appeared irregularly ever since, and in the meantime the album has been reissued and compiled repeatedly by people who were children when it came out.
Ended before anybody saw them
Disembowelment did something no other band on this page managed. Formed in Melbourne in November 1989, they recorded Transcendence into the Peripheral and released it through Relapse in 1993, a record that runs at two speeds, crawling and collapsing, with the tempo dropped so far that individual notes become events. Then they split, in the same year, with the band never once having performed live. They had talked about doing a single show and calling it an event, and it never happened.
Think about what that means for the audience. Every person who has ever loved that record loves an object, because there is no performance to remember and no photograph of a stage. The band exists only as forty six minutes of tape and a sleeve, which is a purer thing to be and a considerably harder one to build a career on.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Ended because the man at the centre had somewhere else to be
Disincarnate belongs here. James Murphy had played lead on Death's Spiritual Healing and then on Obituary's Cause of Death, and the material he assembled for his own band on 23 March 1993 for Roadrunner had started life as riffs intended for the second Obituary record he never got to make. Bryan Cegon sang, Jason Carman played rhythm guitar, Tommy Viator drummed. One album, and then Murphy went back to being the most employable guitarist in the genre, which is a good living and the end of a band.
Molested are the Norwegian version. Blod-draum came out on Effigy Records on 13 May 1995, a death metal record with folk melody running through it and a mix that hid a fair amount of what the band had actually played, which is why a remix was issued in 2017 so people could finally hear it. By then the founder, Øystein Garnes Brun, had long since left to start Borknagar, a bigger band with a longer career and none of this record's peculiar violence in it.
Every person who has ever loved that record loves an object, because there is no performance to remember and no photograph of a stage.
Ended before the album existed
The hardest case is the band that never got as far as an album at all, and the standing example is Timeghoul. Formed in Missouri under the name Doom's Lyre and renamed in 1991, they put out two demo tapes, Tumultuous Travelings in 1992 and Panaramic Twilight in 1994, and stopped. Two tapes. Science fiction lyrics, choral vocal arrangements, riffs that move in long unrepeating sequences, and a distribution footprint of roughly nobody.
Then in 2012, eighteen years after the second tape, Dark Descent Records put both demos out together on vinyl, and the record became one of the most talked about releases of the revival despite consisting entirely of material recorded on domestic equipment by teenagers in the middle of the American continent. It is now pressed and repressed by several labels. The band it belongs to has never released an album and never will.
Ended by being ten years early
Winter made Into Darkness at S.O.S. Studios across April and May 1990 and it came out that May on Future Shock, seven tracks and forty six minutes, produced by Greg Marchak with the band, with Jon Altman on vocals and bass, Stephen Flam on guitar, Tony Pinnisi on keyboards and Frank Casey on drums. It is widely treated as the first proper death doom album, and it appeared in the exact year the rest of the genre was competing to play faster than anybody had played before.
Nobody wanted it. Nuclear Blast America reissued it on compact disc in 1992, an Eternal Frost EP followed in 1994, and Southern Lord put the album on vinyl in 2011, by which point an entire subgenre had grown out of the ground it had broken. Being right early is worth nothing at the time and everything afterwards, and this record is the proof of both halves.
What the pattern actually says
Line the five endings up and none of them is a story about a band running out of ideas. Paperwork, a split before the first show, a leader with better offers, a tape that never became a record, an album that arrived a decade before its audience. Every one of those is a failure of the machinery around the music rather than of the music itself, which is why all six of these records are in print now and were not in print then.
There is a sixth ending, and it belongs to a band that almost joined this list and did not. Atheist lost their bassist Roger Patterson in a road accident on 12 February 1991, before the second album was made, and carried on anyway, then split, then reassembled purely to deliver a contractual record and split again. Their debut is the one that decides whether all of that was worth it, and piece of time is where that argument is settled. Before that, the wider arc through the boom and the collapse sits in death metal in the 2000s, the decade that finally started putting these records back on shelves.
