"All of the reviews for Death were horrible, across the board." That is Eric Greif, who managed the band, talking to Albert Mudrian of Decibel in May 2016 about the reception of a record now treated as scripture. He went further: anybody who claims to have liked it when it came out is not telling the truth, and the man at the label who signed the band thought it was a joke. Kerrang! gave it one star out of five in 1987 and five out of five in 2011, which is the same magazine reviewing the same forty minutes of music twice and arriving at opposite ends of its own scale.
So the first thing to establish about Scream Bloody Gore is that its status was awarded retrospectively, by people who needed a starting point, and the second is that the record does not sit where the story puts it. It is filed under Florida. It was made in California by two people, and the scene it supposedly founded did not yet exist when the tape was cut.
The album was made twice
Combat Records signed Death off demo tapes in 1986 and then, in Chris Reifert's account, trusted the band to find a studio and get on with it, which he has described as a terrible idea. They booked American Recording Studios in Florida in the summer of 1986. The engineers had no idea what the band was trying to do, Reifert remembers them looking back blankly, and after about two days the session had produced drums and a single guitar track and nothing else. Combat heard it and stopped it, and Reifert's summary of the label's verdict is that they wisely said it sounded terrible.
| First attempt | The record | |
|---|---|---|
| When | Summer 1986 | November 1986 |
| Where | American Recording Studios, Florida | Music Grinder, Los Angeles |
| Desk | Engineers with no metal experience | Randy Burns |
| Result | Drums and one guitar track, scrapped | Released 25 May 1987 by Combat |
What the label did next is the part that decided the album. Rather than write off the advance, Combat flew the band to Los Angeles and put them in the Music Grinder with Randy Burns, who had produced Possessed's Seven Churches in 1985. Reifert has said the place felt like an aircraft hangar. Greif has said the instruction from the label was to refine it and make it as mainstream as they could manage.
The instruction from the label was to make it as mainstream as they could manage. What came back was the least mainstream record on the shelf that year.
Two people, one of them credited who was not there
Chuck Schuldiner wrote everything, played the guitars, played the bass and sang. Chris Reifert, still a teenager, played the drums. That is the entire band. John Hand is credited on the sleeve as rhythm guitarist and never played a note on it, having been in the group only briefly, which means the most quoted line-up in this music contains a person who is not on the record.
Two musicians is not a limitation here, it is the reason the thing has a single voice. There was nobody to compromise with, no second writer arguing for a chorus, no bassist wanting a feature and no producer with a house sound to impose beyond getting the machine to work. The result has the coherence of a solo record and the violence of a band, which is a combination almost nothing else in 1987 managed.
What is actually on it
Strip away the reverence and this is a record of ten songs about horror films, most of them built at a mid pace, played with a guitar tone that is dry rather than heavy and a voice that is not a singing voice and does not pretend to be one. "Zombie Ritual" opens on a slow figure that no thrash band would have written. "Evil Dead" takes its title and half its lyric from a film. "Infernal Death" and "Denial of Life" hammer along on riffs built from short cells rather than long sequences.
The critical readings converge on the same point from different directions. Steve Huey at AllMusic gave it the full five stars and put it plainly: it trades polish for savage force and speed. Decibel scored it nine out of ten. Jonathan Horsley at MusicRadar called it one of the foundational texts of the music. Martin Popoff, marking it four out of ten in his collector's guide, still credited Schuldiner with introducing a level of convolution that marks the beginning of the next stage in extreme metal, which is a hostile reviewer conceding the historical case while refusing the record. All four are describing the same quality, which is that the album has no manners.
What both of them did next
The partnership did not survive the record. Reifert went back to California and put together Autopsy in 1987, a band that took the ugliness of this album and slowed it down until it congealed, and whose Severed Survival in 1989 is the clearest evidence that a second person had been shaping these songs all along. Schuldiner went home to Florida and did the opposite. He assembled an actual band, Rick Rozz on lead guitar and Bill Andrews on drums, took it into a Tampa studio in April 1988 and made Leprosy, which is better organised, better recorded and less strange in every respect.
That is the pattern worth noticing. Neither man ever worked in the two person format again, and the sound they made together in a hired Los Angeles room in November 1986 was never repeated by either of them or by anybody else, because within eighteen months the whole genre had a studio method and a professional floor to clear. This album is the last one made before there were rules.
It is not a Florida record
This matters more than it sounds. The Tampa apparatus, the engineer, the triggered drums and the block bookings that make up the story of the Florida scene arrived a year after this album and had nothing to do with it. Scream Bloody Gore was written in a suburb near Orlando, attempted in a Florida studio that could not cope, rescued by a New York label, cut in Los Angeles by a producer whose previous extreme credit was a San Francisco band, and drummed by a Californian who would go home and form Autopsy.
What that geography tells you is that the record is a demo tape network artefact rather than a scene artefact. It is what happened when the most obsessive correspondent in the international mail circuit finally got a proper studio and forty minutes of tape. The scene came to the sound, not the other way round, which is also why the album has no local accent whatsoever. Put it beside the rest of the canon in death metal albums and it is the only one that could have been made anywhere.
The verdict, and the first record argument
Whether it is the first death metal album is a question that has eaten more column inches than it deserves. Possessed got there in 1985 with Seven Churches, whose track list carries a song called "Death Metal" and whose producer was the same man. Others push it back to a Slayer record or forward to Leprosy. The honest position is narrower and more useful: this is the first album on which the genre's entire toolkit appears together with nothing else attached, no thrash chorus, no clean vocal, no melodic guitar break offered as a truce. Everything after it inherits the vocabulary even when it rejects the record.
And the flaws are real, because a verdict that only praises is worthless. The songs are simpler than their reputation, several of them are the same idea at two tempos, the bass is a rumour, and the album gets by on force where Leprosy a year later would get by on writing. It is the sound of a man inventing something and not yet knowing how to build with it. The full ranking of what this state produced is in the Albums That Defined Florida Death Metal, and the next record to change the terms is the one that came out of Tampa in 1989, altars of madness.
