Eighteen months. That is how long American record shops waited for the album that rebuilt American death metal, because Earache put it out in Britain on 12 May 1989 and Combat did not license it stateside until 7 December 1990. Think about that gap. The genre's founding document was an import for a year and a half in the country that made it.
The four who booked Morrisound in December 1988 came out of that studio with nine songs, and a tenth, "Lord of All Fevers and Plague", that compact disc buyers got and the vinyl and cassette did not: David Vincent on bass and vocals, Trey Azagthoth and Richard Brunelle on guitars, Pete Sandoval on the drums, Tom Morris at the desk, Digby Pearson's money behind the whole thing, and a set of tempos that nobody at the time had the wrists to copy. It is a short record. It does not need to be longer.
Start where every listener starts, because you cannot avoid it. Sandoval. AllMusic, Sputnikmusic, Metal Storm and Anthony Fantano do not agree on much about this album and they agree on him: the drumming is the event. Blast beats existed before December 1988. Blast beats played that fast for that long, with the snare still landing where it should, did not. He does not accelerate into a blast and collapse out of it. He sits in it, at cruising speed, like a man who could keep going after the tape ran out.
Nobody had heard a human being play like that, and everybody in this genre has been chasing it since.
Now the guitars, which is where the arguing starts. Metal Storm's reviewer counted somewhere near forty solos across the record and put the Azagthoth and Brunelle partnership next to Hanneman and King, which gets at the density even if it misses the intent. Sputnikmusic's man calls the same solos unmemorable, speed with no melody in it. Both of them are describing what is actually there. These are not solos in the heavy metal sense, built to be hummed. They are seizures. They arrive, they void the key signature, they leave a hole in the song, and the riff walks back through the hole.
"Immortal Rites" opens with the trick that the next decade would run into the ground, the slow ceremonial intro that snaps into the fastest thing you have heard. "Chapel of Ghouls" is the one that does the dirty work, five minutes with a chanted section in the middle that a hundred bands have tried to rewrite. "Bleed for the Devil" is two minutes and twenty three seconds long and wastes none of it. And "Blasphemy" is the mould-breaker, the track where the rhythm section stops keeping time and starts dismantling it.
The production divides people to this day and you should know which side you are buying. It is dry, cheap and close, guitars scraped rather than polished, drums recorded like a kit in a room instead of a kit in a computer. AllMusic gave the record three stars out of five and said flatly that later Morbid Angel albums made this one sound amateur. One Metal Archives reviewer says it has aged poorly and been overtaken. They are hearing the thinness. Here is the thing they are missing: the thinness is the reason you can hear what Sandoval is doing. Bury this band under a modern mix and the whole record turns into one grey noise with a kick drum in it. Blessed Are the Sick came two years later and sounds better. It does not hit harder.
Keep one more fact in your head while you listen. This is the debut only on paper. Morbid Angel had already recorded Abominations of Desolation in 1986 and shelved it, and it stayed in a box until 1991. So the record that sounds like a band inventing something in real time is actually a band on its second attempt, with three years to think about what went wrong the first time. That is not luck. That is a group of musicians who knew exactly what they were building.
Buy it, put it on loud, and give the drums your full attention for one complete pass before you listen to anything else. Thirty eight minutes and nothing on it is filler. The genre has made better produced records, longer records, more technical records. It has not made a more important one.