Every fortnight, we check in with all things heavy on RTRFM’s Critical Mass show.
In 1991, grunge had taken a firm grip on Seattle and the world in general. While we were Neverminding with a Facelift and a Badmotorfinger, Brandon Florida’s Death were busy carving their own screaming, bloody, gory niche of their own with Human. This album almost saw the end of the band, when Terry Butler and Bill Andrews defied Chuck Schuldiner’s rejection of a European tour for Spiritual Healing a year earlier. Terry and Bill did the tour with “stand-in” members and were swiftly fired shortly after.
This is where Paul Masvidal, Steve DiGiorgio and Sean Reinert joined, and a new, more philosophical, introspective, experimental approach to their bread and butter death metal begun to take shape.
Human was not as raw as its predecessors for early 90s recording standards, and was a huge notch on the belt for Jim Morris’ Morrisound studio in Tampa, which had some unholy alliances of its own with Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Morbid Angel and Obituary all churning out some ground breaking USDM.
Human has eight tracks of death metal wizardry including an instrumental track “Cosmic Sea” and the Japanese version had a cover of Kiss’s “God Of Thunder”. Buy this album if you want your own piece of DM history, or drag it out of the back of the CD rack at home to re-live its power and glory.
RIP Chuck Schuldiner.
Critical Mass airs every Wednesday from 9PM (GMT+8) on RTR FM 92.1 in Perth, Australia.
