The charge is betrayal, and it has stood on file since 18 October 1993. The four pathologists from Liverpool who had spent their first two records at the mortuary slab, Carcass, the men who catalogued decay on Reek of Putrefaction in 1988 and Symphonies of Sickness in 1989 in a vocabulary lifted whole from the medical textbooks, walked out of the dissecting room with Heartwork, ripped the gore glossary out of their own lyric sheet, scrubbed the formalin off their forearms and went upstairs to the operating theatre, where the tissue on the table is still alive and every cut has to close again. A part of the old congregation has called that desertion ever since. The accusation is accurate. It is also the highest praise the record has ever received.
Recorded and mixed at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool between 18 May and 21 June 1993 under the hand of producer Colin Richardson, issued by Earache in Britain and, from January 1994, by Columbia in America, the fourth full-length arrived two years after Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious and one year after the Tools of the Trade EP had already sharpened the blades in public. The line-up was the one that had cut Necroticism: Jeff Walker on bass and voice, Bill Steer and Michael Amott on guitars, Ken Owen on drums. One change decided everything. Steer stepped away from the microphone entirely, the first Carcass studio album on which he does not sing, and Walker put it plainly to Metal Hammer on 19 December 2007: "Bill made the decision himself. He just wanted to concentrate on his guitar playing." The same interview gives the method in one line, "going for shorter songs", and the record obeys it.
Steel on the tray
Ten tracks, forty-one minutes and fifty-five seconds, and only "Embodiment" past the five-minute mark: the long, wandering surgery of Necroticism has been replaced by a theatre that runs to schedule. "Buried Dreams" opens the list and slices through the skin with a hook, a chorus built to be remembered on first contact, and the hook is the whole scandal in one song, since a Carcass record now asks to be sung back to it. It is the correct way in. Nothing is hidden behind a gurgle any more.
"Carnal Forge" follows as the bridge between the two rooms, the only title in the opening run still carrying the old anatomical furniture, flesh and furnace in two words, set to the same compressed frame of just under four minutes. Then "No Love Lost", the shortest song on the record at three minutes and twenty-three seconds, one of the songs the band put on film, and the purest demonstration of the new procedure, the whole operation opened, performed and closed in less time than the old records spent on the first cut, no stray blade left inside the cavity. Walker's line about shorter songs is not a slogan here. It is the operating schedule.
The title track is the archetype. "Heartwork" lays the harmonised twin-guitar line of Steer and Amott across the riff like a row of sutures drawn tight across a wound, two threads pulled through the same flesh at the same instant, each stitch placed against the next with a precision that owes more to Iron Maiden than to anything the goregrind cellar ever produced, and the song that results is the one every melodic death metal band of the following decade would study as the veritable anatomical chart of the new craft. The solos trade between the two guitarists in the same way. They never collide.
The mortuary was abandoned for the operating theatre, and not one stitch has opened since.
What the lamps expose
Richardson's production is the arsenal laid out on the steel tray: cold, massive and clean, every instrument set down separately and polished until it throws back the light of the lamps. Nothing on it is blunt. "This Mortal Coil", under four minutes, opens on a riff that announces itself at once, and it is the track on which the surgical tempo sounds least like restraint and most like authority. "Embodiment", the long exception at five minutes and thirty-six seconds, is the one operation allowed to run over the schedule, the single patient kept on the table past the hour. The lyric sheet has changed with the tools. The pathology glossary is gone, replaced by Walker's dry, accessible wordplay, which cuts sideways instead of dismembering, and "Arbeit macht Fleisch" shows the new pen at its sharpest and least comfortable.
The limit is a voice. With Steer off the microphone, the record has one throat where Necroticism had two, and the lower counterweight that used to answer Walker's rasp from the other side of the table is simply missing. Walker carries the load alone. The range is narrower, all the same, and across forty-two minutes the single register flattens the contrast that made the older records feel like an argument between two surgeons. Walker himself told Metal Hammer in that same 2007 interview that he did not rate it the band's finest hour: "I much prefer the Reek Of Putrefaction and Symphonies Of Sickness era." A composer is entitled to his preference. The record has outlived it.
The verdict
Amott left as soon as the tapes were finished, to found Spiritual Beggars, and the line-up that cut this record never cut another. Twenty years later the band would call a comeback album Surgical Steel, which is the most accurate description Heartwork ever received. This is the spearhead and founding document of melodic death metal, written by a band that had helped invent goregrind and then chose to leave it on the slab, and it is required for anyone who wants to understand where the harmonised riff of the following thirty years came from. The purist who still files the betrayal charge loses nothing by keeping his grievance. He loses the record that proved precision can be heavier than rot.