Four men from Tampa walked into Morrisound for the fourth time, sat Scott Burns behind the desk, and came out with Serpents of the Light, released by Roadrunner on 20 October 1997: ten songs, barely thirty minutes, nothing much longer than three and a half, and the catchiest record the band ever made, built to bulldoze a club floor and leave you humming on the way out. Short. Mean. Done.
The line-up is the classic one, the one people still mean when they say Deicide. Glen Benton sings and plays bass. Eric and Brian Hoffman play guitar, both credited with leads. Steve Asheim drums. Burns produced, engineered and mixed it with the band, and it came two years after Once Upon the Cross, before the live When Satan Lives and Insineratehymn.
You know this band for speed and blasphemy. Here is the surprise: this is their most accessible album. The riffs are simpler, picking up where Once Upon the Cross left off, the songs have choruses you can actually find, and there is a thrash feel running underneath that makes the whole thing move like a pickup truck with no brakes on a downhill road.
Benton's voice is stacked on itself all over the record, a growl laid against a higher scream so the vocals sound like two men arguing in the same throat. It is the signature of the album and it works every time.
The title track opens with exactly that, Benton growling against himself before the riff hits, the one that gets the room moving in the first ten seconds. "Blame It on God" has an intro melody you will remember and a chorus you will hum, which is not a sentence you get to write about many death metal records. "I Am No One" slows the tempo and lets the groove and the technical riffing breathe. It is the closest the album comes to a mid-tempo crusher, the riff turning over like a cement mixer full of gravel, and it gives the faster songs on either side room to hit harder when they come back. Asheim earns his place here, steering the groove without ever letting it slow to a crawl.
Scott Burns had spent the better part of a decade turning Morrisound into the factory that stamped out the sound of Florida death metal, and by 1997 that sound was everywhere. What sets this record apart is not the sound, which you have heard before, but the songwriting inside it. The band trimmed the fat, cut every song down to the bone and kept the hooks, and the result hits like a nail gun on a fence post: one, two, three, done, next.
It also catches four men who still know exactly how to play together, the same line-up that held for two more studio albums before the Hoffman brothers left in 2004.
Two men arguing in the same throat.
"Slave to the Cross" is the standout: a catchy chorus, layered screams, sweeping leads and a melodic intro, everything the album does well packed into one song and swung like a sledgehammer through a pulpit. "Creatures of Habit" is the odd one out, the only song not aimed at religion, with lyrics that read almost like advice. I used to put this record on in the van between shows when everybody needed waking up.
The production is lighter and buzzier than the band's earlier wall of sound, raw in a way that suits the speed; the drums are the weak spot, buried in places and clicky in others, and Asheim deserved better. The back half also repeats itself, and by "Father Baker's" you have heard most of the tricks twice. The riffs start to rhyme with each other, and the chorus trick that made the first side sing loses its surprise.
Thirty minutes helps there. The record is over before the repetition can really hurt, which is either its biggest flaw or its smartest move, depending on how much Deicide you want in one sitting.
Play "Serpents of the Light" and "Slave to the Cross" to anyone who swears death metal cannot have hooks, or to the friend who is still not sure about this band. If those two do nothing, the rest will not either. If they land, that friend just found Deicide's most fun half hour.