The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial
Underrated is a word writers throw at anything they happen to like, so here is a test with an edge on it. A record qualifies when three things are true at once: it went out of print and stayed out of print, somebody paid real money to reissue it fifteen or twenty years later, and an original pressing now costs more second hand than a new album by a band with a tour bus. Everything below passes all three.
The canon is a separate argument and it is more or less settled. The death metal albums nobody disputes have their own list. This is the shelf underneath that one, assembled between 1991 and 1996 by bands who got a pressing, got a distributor who went under, and got left in the ground for twenty years before anyone with a chequebook came back with a shovel.
The market conditions that buried them are the business of the chapter on 90s death metal bands and the decade they had. What follows is the wreckage that decade left behind, in order of pressing.
1991 and 1992: the records that arrived too early to be noticed
Convulse got there first and got nothing for it. World Without God came out through Thrash Records on 13 September 1991, a Finnish record with a guitar tone thicker and slower than anything Stockholm was producing that year, and it did what most Finnish records of the period did, which is disappear. Relapse reissued it in 2010 with the Resuscitation of Evilness demo bolted on. The band's own verdict on their catalogue is visible in what they do on stage now: they play this album, whole, and largely leave the rest alone.
Afflicted were the opposite case, a band ruined by being pushed too hard. Prodigal Sun was recorded at Sunlight Studio between 25 May and 12 July 1992 and released by Nuclear Blast that December, eleven tracks that put unexpected melody and open chord voicings into the buzzsaw without softening the tempo, and the label sold them as the next thing coming. The next thing did not come. The hype went off in their hands and the band spent the following thirty years being a name that people who were there remember and nobody else has heard.
Demigod made the best argument for Finland with Slumber of Sullen Eyes, out on Drowned Productions in 1992 and out of print for well over a decade afterwards. Xtreem Music reissued it worldwide in 2006 with the 1991 demo Unholy Domain attached and had to repress it in 2009 because even the reissue had gone. That is the shape of a buried record: two rounds of demand, both arriving long after the band could do anything with them.
The Dutch entry is the one that gets argued about. Gorefest released False on 15 October 1992 through Nuclear Blast, recorded at Ron Konings' studio in Vrouwenpolder with Colin Richardson producing, and it is the record where the band worked out that a slower riff hits harder when it is played by four people who agree exactly where it lands. Two years later they pulled the tempos back further, two years after that they were making rock records, and the audience for False has been apologising for the rest of their catalogue ever since.
1993: the year the door closed on them
Everything released in 1993 walked into a market that was already contracting, which is why the year is so rich in records that went nowhere.
Gorguts made The Erosion of Sanity for Roadrunner and were dropped for their trouble, which set Luc Lemay off on the five year road that ended in Obscura. The second album is the forgotten one, and it is the hinge: still recognisably a death metal record, already full of the rhythmic writing and the refusal to resolve that would make the next one unplayable on any radio in the world.
Necrophobic released The Nocturnal Silence on 26 July 1993 through Black Mark, recorded and mixed at Sunlight in March that year with Tomas Skogsberg and Lars Liden engineering, with Anders Strokirk singing, David Parland on guitar and Joakim Sterner on drums. It sat in a gap nobody was shopping in: too melodic and too Satanic for the death metal racks, too well recorded for the black metal ones. Nine songs, forty five minutes, and roughly fifteen years of being described as an oddity before anybody filed it correctly.
Brutality are the Tampa band nobody names when they list Tampa bands. Formed in 1986 and called Abomination until 1988, they got Screams of Anguish out through Nuclear Blast in 1993 with Scott Riegel singing, Jay Fernandez and Don Gates on guitars, Jeff Acres on bass and Jim Coker on drums. They were on the right label in the right city at the wrong moment, made two more albums, and split in 1997. When the original line-up reassembled decades later, it was that first record they came back for.
They were on the right label in the right city at exactly the wrong moment.
After the market went
What makes Psychostasia worth the search is that it does not sound like a band arriving late and copying the winners. The riffs run to odd phrase lengths and the syncopation is deliberately unhelpful, so the record keeps stepping sideways out from under the listener, and the whole of it is built on Egyptian and Mesopotamian material years before that was a marketing category. Eight songs, no filler, and an audience of approximately nobody in the year it appeared.
The Dutch oddity of the same period is Phlebotomized's Immense Intense Suspense from 1994, a death metal album with a violinist and a keyboard player in the working line-up, which in 1994 was either brave or unmarketable and turned out to be both. Benediction's Transcend the Rubicon, from the year before, is the English entry: a band who never made a bad record and never once got the credit for it.
The eight, and where they went
| Band | Album | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Convulse | World Without God | Thrash Records | 1991 |
| Afflicted | Prodigal Sun | Nuclear Blast | 1992 |
| Demigod | Slumber of Sullen Eyes | Drowned Productions | 1992 |
| Gorefest | False | Nuclear Blast | 1992 |
| Gorguts | The Erosion of Sanity | Roadrunner | 1993 |
| Brutality | Screams of Anguish | Nuclear Blast | 1993 |
| Necrophobic | The Nocturnal Silence | Black Mark | 1993 |
| Adramelech | Psychostasia | Repulse | 1996 |
Read the label column and the pattern is plain. Four of the eight came out on companies that were solvent, well run and perfectly capable of selling a record, which kills the comfortable theory that these albums failed because the labels were amateurs. They failed because between 1992 and 1996 there were more good death metal albums in circulation than there were people prepared to buy them, and the ones that lost were not the worst ones. They were the ones with nobody arguing for them in print.
All eight are back in print now, most of them more than once, several of them on vinyl for the first time. That is not sentiment on the part of the reissue labels, it is arithmetic: a record with thirty years of quiet reputation behind it sells more reliably than a new one with none. Which is also the story of the following decade, when the genre stopped shrinking and started rebuilding on exactly this material, and that is death metal in the 2000s.
