Symbolic is the finest record Death ever made, and the only serious argument against it is Human, which you are welcome to bring. Released by Roadrunner on 21 March 1995, tracked at Morrisound Recording in Tampa in late 1994 with Jim Morris producing alongside Chuck Schuldiner himself, the sixth Death album took the Florida death metal that same studio had been pressing out by the tonne and cracked it open like a geode under a mason's hammer, and what spilled out of the grey rind was not gore but crystal, grown in the dark for eight years and sharp enough to slice the hand that picked it up. Nine songs. Just over fifty minutes. Not one dull facet.
The Florida guitarist who had helped write the grammar of the whole genre back in 1987 was long done singing about corpses. He was writing about people now, and about himself. The lyrics turn inward, and the music turns with them: melodic, built as songs with a front door and a back door, every riff set in its place like a stone locked into a claw mount. Death metal had never sounded this deliberate. You hear the difference in the first minute.
Four men over a fault line
Behind it stood Individual Thought Patterns, the 1993 record so packed with notes it could bruise you, and ahead of it, in 1998, waited The Sound of Perseverance, the last Death album. Between the two sits this one, cut by a line-up that existed for exactly one record: Schuldiner and Bobby Koelble on guitars, Kelly Conlon on bass, and the drummer the whole scene calls the Atomic Clock, Gene Hoglan, on his second and last Death album. One pressure, one temperature, one crystal. Then the rock closed again.
Every facet cut clean
The title track opens the door and sets the terms. "Symbolic" runs past six and a half minutes and never once reaches back for the old slaughterhouse; the riffs arrive in sequence, each one ground and polished before the next is set beside it, while the drums split the song along its grain with the calm of a clock that has never lost a second. That is the whole record in one song. Hear it here, or you never will.
"Zero Tolerance" does the dirty work. Placed second, under five minutes, carrying a title like a slogan sprayed across a prison wall, it is the song that tells the old guard melody was never a surrender, that the chainsaw is still in the arsenal and still fuelled. Blunt. Necessary. Exactly where it should be.
Then comes the middle of the record, the stretch where plenty of death metal albums sag at the core. This one holds. From "Empty Words" and "Sacred Serenity" through "1,000 Eyes" and "Without Judgement" to "Misanthrope", the run keeps the same edge as the songs that frame it, and the guitar sound, clear as quartz and cold as a diamond saw, shears every note loose from the one beside it so that nothing smears, nothing clots, nothing hides. That clarity is the production's great gift. It also runs up the one bill this record has to pay.
"Crystal Mountain" is the diamond, and the one that breaks the record's own mould. Its guitar melodies owe more to European melodic metal than to anything in the Tampa water supply, and they run through the riff like a vein of quartz through granite, catching light the old Florida records rarely bothered to let in. If you have one Death song to play to somebody who swears the genre is only noise, it is this one.
"Perennial Quest" closes the album and is its longest song by well over a minute, eight minutes and nineteen seconds of it. It is the long goodbye, the place where the record stops chipping and lets its own lattice grow to full size, facet on facet, before the lid comes down. It also points straight at the door Schuldiner walked through three years later.
The price of a perfect cut
Every cut costs stone. This mix is built for the guitars, a sound as clean as anything Morrisound ever put on tape, and the bass is what it spends: on a record this bright, Conlon's playing is the one facet you have to go looking for, felt under the floor more than followed. It is a small flaw. It does not move the number far. It is still there, and on an album that otherwise hides nothing, you notice it.
Chuck Schuldiner made one more Death album after this. He was diagnosed with brain cancer in 1999 and died on 13 December 2001, aged 34.
Death metal had been a hammer. On this record it became a cutting wheel.
So who is this for? Anyone who believes death metal ends at brutality, and anyone who knows better and wants the proof on a single disc. The abattoir records of the early decade taught the genre how to hit; Symbolic taught it how to shine without going soft, and a great deal of the melodic, technical death metal made since is still standing on ground this album broke open. Set it beside the other death metal records that defined the 1990s and it still throws the brightest light in the case. Ignore it and you have studied the genre's bones without ever seeing the jewel inside them.