Onto the next subgenre! After dipping my toes into black metal I am actually going back a bit in time to explore the beginnings of yet another subgenre of heavy metal: Death metal. Death metal is characterised by downtuned, heavily distorted guitars, fast drumming, growling vocals, time changes and uncontolled guitar solos. It emerged in the mid 1980s as a direct descendant from thrash metal.
To this day it is heavily disputed by fans which band and which album started death metal. Some say it was Death with their debut album Scream Bloody Gore in 1987. Others say it was Possessed with their debut album Seven Churches in 1985. It is a heated discussion similar to the question who invented black metal. Was it Venom? Was it Bathory? Was it someone else entirely? For my purpose it is not important to establish if Seven Churches was the first death metal album or not. Fact is - it was released in 1985, two years before Scream Bloody Gore and I found it very interestng to listen to, so I picked this album as my starting point into the next extreme metal subgenre that will probably be a bit more difficult for me.
Possessed was formed in 1983 by drummer Mike Sus and rhythm guitarist Mike Torrao. Jeff Becerra came in as vocalist and bassist soon after. For their first studio album Seven Churches they brought in Larry LaLonde in 1984 as lead guitarist. LaLonde had been playing with Jeff Becerra in a band called Blizzard before Beccara joined Possessed. Possessed disbanded in 1987 after releasing two studio albums and one EP. In 2007 the band was reformed by Jeff Becerra and released their third studio album Revelations of Oblivion in 2019 after 33 years. So the discography of Possessed is not very comprehensive. Yet - they are one of the bands that are compulsory for any fan of thrash metal, death metal or first-wave black metal. Why? Let's take a closer look at Seven Churches and what is happening here.
The album Seven Churches features 10 songs and lasts for 39:21 minutes. Thematically all songs deal with Satan, hell, demons and death. Apart from the intro in The Exorcist and Fallen Angel there is no time wasted for ballads or mid-tempo. The songs are all fast, aggressive and to the point.
The Exorcist features Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells from The Exorcist movie soundtrack and starts off the song with this super creepy atmosphere. People who know me also know that this movie scared the hell out of me...
What follows is at first absolute chaos. The sound is very raw, the vocals harsh, the song structure seems chaotic and the drumming almost frenetic. There is so much happening there it difficult to grasp at first.
When I first listened to this song my initial thought was - This is supposed to be death metal? It sounds like black metal. I was hearing a lot of Venom and Welcome to Hell in here. The messy production style and the satanic themed album created a similar atmosphere for me. But not only Venom was audible in Becerra's style. I was also reminded of Mille Petrozza from Kreator in Endless Pain (also released in 1985) and I also heard a bit of Sodom in the guitar shredding in some songs. Band members from Possessed have cited Venom and Exodus as their prime influences. They had toured with Metallica and Exodus in 1984 and after Seven Churches was released they toured the album together with Celtic Frost, Venom and Slayer. I am not yet very familiar with Slayer and Exodus, but I do know Venom and Celtic Frost and also Kreator and Sodom and it is fascinating to hear that Possessed took thrash metal elements and first-wave black metal elements and combined them to make something new at that time. It was not yet death metal, it was still thrash but pushing the boundaries to the very extreme, incorporating elements people did not know where to put them, setting the bar for extreme music higher and giving later bands a mark to aim at.
Jeff Becerra himself said their goal was to "create the fucking heaviest, most satanic, fastest, most evil band on the planet". Their goal was to push the limits of what was expected and accepted of metal back in 1985. Keeping in mind that glam metal bands like Poison were still considered metal back then, their approach was rather extreme. They intentionally wanted to create a different style of music that had not been heard before. Just like Venom had coined Black Metal they wanted to coin their own kind of metal that would separate them from the rest. So Becerra wrote Death Metal.
Death Metal is the last song of the album and funnily enough it is one of the most thrashy songs. [See how Possessed had a song called Death Metal and Venom had a song called Black Metal?]. Just listen to Death Metal with me and can I just say how insane that drumming is? It will never cease to amaze me, I am the biggest fan of metal drummers <3. Death Metal features thrashy riffs and perfect guitar shredding combined with hard and relentless drumming and just rounds up the whole album.
Seven Churches was one of those albums that was just a bit ahead of its time. It featured something new and it already had everything that later death metal bands would hone to perfection. While Becerra's vocals were not as gruff as later death metal growls, they were still different to vocalists of classic thrash bands like Metallica or Anthrax. Possessed also moved away from political criticism (very common in thrash) on to more darker subjects in this album, opening the horizon for other bands. The songs also featured the uncontrollable feeling of chaos and time changes which is very distinct in death metal. The way Becerra tells the story he was in a friendly relationship with Chuck Schuldiner from Death and he was acutally really pleased that death metal continued to live on through Death after himself being shot in 1989 and not being able to play music until years later.
Apart from The Exorcist my favourite tracks on this album are Pentagram (best intro) and Twisted Minds (because I totally love the slow mid-section starting at 2:35).
I am actually looking forward to listening to the 2019 release Revelations of Oblivion. It surely is very special that such an iconic 80s band credited with naming an whole subgenre cho0ses to come back and not an easy task to continue the legacy.
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