Choosing Death

by Albert Mudrian

  Although record sales were rapidly rising, death metal and grindcore coverage in the mainstream press was still sparse. However, the communities had an invaluable friend in the influential CMJ Music Monthly magazine, whose extreme music coverage was spearheaded by Atlanta native and New York City transplant Kevin Sharp.

  “Being in a situation where I came from—a really hip radio station called WREK in Atlanta—they were willing to let me do what I wanted to do,” says Sharp of his CMJ editors. “I did a lot of really cool, weird shit, that when I look back on it now, I’m like, ‘How did I manage to sell that after pitching it?’ Like, we got an Extreme Noise Terror track right next to a Mr. Big track on a radio sampler CD. I don’t know if that could be done now.

  “But Sepultura and Obituary were an even easier sell,” he continues. “The reason Slowly We Rot and Beneath the Remains were a hit was because everyone was sick of hearing low-grade [San Francisco] Bay [area] thrash. It lost its fucking edge, and they were looking for something more [extreme], and here’s this kid who’s not even singing words, just puking into a mic. That was the end-all extreme.”

  “It was something new to many people, but it’s not like those were the first death metal bands ever,” says Conner. “Even at the time the Sepultura and Obituary records came out [in the US], it wasn’t like they were groundbreaking bands. Sepultura were influenced by Slayer, and Obituary were influenced by Celtic Frost. So it wasn’t like we were inventing it, but these new bands were definitely taking things to a new level. And I don’t think all of those early bands, like Possessed and Death, really got a large amount of recognition. And it’s at the same time that we started doing Obituary and Sepultura that Digby really had his thing kicking up with Napalm Death.”

  Pearson, however, was about to get in on the growing stateside action with Earache’s first American signing, Florida death metal goliaths Morbid Angel. The band may have already been regarded as a minor legend among underground tape-trading aficionados on the strength of bootlegs of the Abominations of Desolation LP and the recently recorded Thy Kingdom Come demo, but it was a fervent endorsement from Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris that helped seal Morbid Angel’s deal with Earache.

  “I made a two-week trip to Tampa in August of ‘89,” recalls Harris. “It was a part special trip and part me treating my girlfriend to a nice holiday. She’d probably say now, ‘Oh, yeah, that was Mick’s death metal holiday.’ It was already decided that we were gonna go on holiday, but I did end up visiting a lot of these bands, and for sure it was good fun. I was just purely out there to meet people for the love of the music. A holiday was not really in the cards. I mean, what the hell was I really going to Tampa, Florida for?”

  “[Harris] came down to the Tampa area and met with different bands, and he met with us and saw us practice, and he was really into it,” says Morbid Angel guitarist Trey Azagthoth. “We gave him some tapes and he hooked them up with Dig from Earache, so definitely, he was the one.”

  “There were a lot of labels that we were talking to at the time,” says former Morbid Angel frontman David Vincent. “One day I just said, ‘I’m getting on the phone today.’ So I start making calls [to labels], like, ‘What do you think about this?’ And I heard, “Well, you know, you need to slow it down a little bit and make the vocals a little more melodic.’ And immediately it was like, ‘Fuck you,’ and the phone got hung up. Then the next person got called: ‘Well, we kinda like the stuff, but there are a lot of other Angels out there. There’s Death Angel and there’s that band Angel Witch, so you might need to change your name.’ ‘Alright, fuck you,’ and there was a hang-up again. So after Mick had spoken in Digby’s ear about us, it ended up working out. Dig took a chance on it and we made it happen.”

  Pearson also turned his attention to the developing scene in Sweden, which by 1989 was clearly led by Stockholm death metallers Entombed.

  “I first saw Entombed back when they were supporting Napalm Death,” says Pearson. “They were playing in Stockholm and they were called Nihilist at the time. They were just a young band, but they were killer live.”

  “Napalm Death was coming to town and we were bugging the people who booked it for so long,” says former Entombed drummer Nicke Andersson. “We just told them, ‘We have to open. You don’t realize this. We’ve got some credibility in the underground scene, which nobody else would give a fuck about. They know who we are, probably, because they trade tapes too.’ So eventually we got that gig, and that’s when we gave Dig the tapes. That’s the first time we met Dig—he was on tour with them.”

  The Earache owner kept in touch with the young Swedes, eventually offering them a recording contract in mid-‘89.

  “I remember I still lived at my dad’s house,” says Andersson, recalling the day Entombed signed with Earache. “I was about 18, I guess. Our guitarist Alex [Hellid] was 17. I remember, because he was so young he had to have his mom’s signature to sign the contract.”

  New death metal bands like Morbid Angel and Entombed required a change from the punk-themed homemade cover art that adorned each Earache release to date. Pearson turned to 18-year-old Nottingham native Dan Seagrave, who a year earlier provided the artwork pro bono for the split album from comedic thrash collectives Lawnmower Deth and Metal Duck.

  “Dig saw it in a magazine and he got the word out to me that he wouldn’t mind me doing an album cover for Morbid Angel,” says Seagrave. “But based on the look of the Lawnmower Deth cover, I don’t know why, actually. I think he saw the album and he saw that it was a really indie release, and he’d only done a few records at that point, and because I was local, it got his attention. So I just took some artwork in and I took [what would become] the Morbid Angel cover. I was actually painting it at the time as something for myself. And one of the band members was there, David Vincent. He saw it and he liked it.”

  Soon Pearson commissioned Seagrave to provide the cover art for other death metal releases from Earache.

  “I wasn’t really expensive at that point, so they just naturally handed it over to me,” Seagrave explains. “I don’t think they had any other artists on the books at that point. All the covers were traditionally very cheap and bad. I was certainly not a professional artist at that point. I look back at a lot of work and see it for what it is—it’s not that great, but it kinda worked at the time.”

  Earache wasn’t redesigning the look for all of the label’s releases, however. Carcass’ hideous autopsy collages remained unencumbered by professional artists for at least one more record, Symphonies of Sickness. Carcass’ music, however, was becoming slightly more refined. Shortly after his exit from Napalm Death in the summer of ‘89, Carcass guitarist Bill Steer returned to the Slaughterhouse studio with producer Colin Richardson, who had the unenviable task of making sense of Carcass’ frenzied sound—a challenge no other producer or engineer had previously met.

  “Before we did Symphonies I remember Carcass did a track in this good studio in Liverpool called Amazon, and Dig gave us a decent budget to do one track for a compilation, so it was a real luxury,” Steer explains. “We were in the studio for a day and we recorded one song. It was a new experience for us. But when we were doing the mix, I remember Jeff turned to the engineer and said, ‘Have you got any suggestions?’ And the guy just threw his hands up in the air and said, ‘What can I do with this?’”

  “We walked in feeling that it was probably gonna turn out like Reek again, but Colin really enabled us to iron out all the problems with our playing,” recalls Carcass frontman Jeff Walker. “We weren’t the tightest band and we didn’t rehearse that much, so he just put us under the microscope. He wasn’t hired in specifically to do it. He really made sure the second record didn’t turn out to be a disaster like the first one.”

  As a result of his triumphant taming of both Napalm Death and Carcass, Richardson became Earache’s unofficial go-to producer for much of the label’s British roster.

  “It was really kinda modest at the begin
ning, because I had done a few records for Earache, and I remember this band Gorefest from Holland contacted me, and it was like, ‘Wow, people from other countries!’” says Richardson. “I think I got a lot of work from people seeing my name on the back of the sleeves. And I think Roadrunner just heard some stuff—obviously they heard the Earache stuff—and thought, ‘That’s pretty good,’ because there weren’t too many people doing it, there wasn’t a whole bunch of choices, really.”

  The strength of Richardson’s recording actually helped Carcass land the second guitarist they had previously coveted. After initially declining the invitation in 1988, Carnage guitarist Michael Amott was now ready to accept the position based on Carcass’ obvious improvements.

  “When I heard the Symphonies of Sickness album, I was just like, ‘Oh, no, what have I done?’” Amott says. “So I learned from my mistake, and when I got asked a second time I was just like, ‘Okay, I’m leaving Carnage and I’m gonna go and do this.’ This was in January of 1990, and I went over to England in April.”

  Amott’s decision effectively ended Carnage, but it allowed Carnage drummer Fred Estby to resurrect his previous band, Dismember, which featured the majority of Carnage’s final lineup.

  While other death metal bands continued to restructure, Mick Harris was busy searching for his own death metal talent to augment his once again depleted Napalm Death lineup. First, he replaced departed vocalist Lee Dorrian with Mark “Barney” Greenway, who had often served as a Napalm Death roadie—or “humped”—for the band’s various UK shows.

  “I say humping, but it was basically a case of pretending to carry some cabinets around and getting drunk and just fucking falling around, because I was pretty much a drunken crusty back then,” admits Greenway, who was bestowed the Barney nickname for his drunken antics, during which he bore resemblance to the prehistoric “Flintstones” cartoon character. “I was sort of a semi-dirty kind of character.”

  Like Harris, Greenway’s roots were in the country’s anarcho punk movement. Despite his heritage, the vocalist was fronting Benediction, a Birmingham-based death metal act, when the drummer asked Greenway to enlist with Napalm in September of 1989.

  “Benediction was a time, to be really brutally frank, when I’d actually lost a bit of my passion for hardcore,” Greenway says. “I just wanted to do pure death metal at the time, because the whole hardcore/grindcore scene was going through a real weird time, and there were a lot of people stabbing other people in the back because a couple of bands had got a bit of exposure, and it was like there was the sellout fingers a-pointing about Napalm. And I was just really disgusted that people could be like that, people that were friends of the bands and knew them really well and just knew that that was not the case at all. And I was just really fucking disenchanted with the whole thing. I was like, ‘Fuck this shit, I’ll just do death metal, and fuck this hardcore shit if people are gonna be assholes.’”

  Despite his distaste for what he felt the scene surrounding Napalm had become, Greenway couldn’t resist the opportunity to join one of his favorite bands.

  “I called up Micky one day, and Micky said, ‘Bill and Lee left,’” recalls Greenway. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah?’ And he said, ‘Do you wanna join?’ I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ I mean, I learned 28 songs in a day and a half, so I was up for it. I was riding my BMX at the time because I didn’t have nothing. I was working some shitty fucking job, getting paid fucking nothing, and I was riding on a BMX to get around, and I was so excited, I crashed my BMX into a post box.”

  Harris and Embury also had their sights set on a pair of American guitarists they were corresponding with in recent years: Mitch Harris, guitarist of Las Vegas death metallers Righteous Pigs, and L.A. native and former Terrorizer guitarist, Jesse Pintado.

  “I used to write to Mick and Shane, just trading tapes and stuff,” says Pintado. “They just invited me over and it was cool. I mean, Napalm’s my favorite band, and I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never been to Europe.’ And they had a tour lined up, so it was like, ‘Let’s do it.’”

  “At this point, me and Mitch had also been communicating for some time,” says Mick Harris. “He was also heavily into Napalm. He turned me onto his outfit, Righteous Pigs. And both Shane and I fucking loved Terrorizer. This is the philosophy in Napalm—it had to be someone that understood, someone that shared the feeling.”

  Pintado was first to depart for England, arriving just a few weeks before Napalm Death were to embark on a brief UK tour as part of the Grindcrusher package, featuring fellow Earache artists Carcass, Bolt Thrower and Morbid Angel.

  “It was four or five dates in England, Scotland, and then straight up to Europe, which was just Napalm and Morbid Angel,” recalls the drummer, Harris. “Mitch came around for the English dates, so at this point I wanted Mitch in the band. I still couldn’t ask. I just didn’t have the confidence. Mitch didn’t come to Europe. He left us alone. He stayed in England, and when we came back I think I just hit them on it. ‘Look, let’s get him in, it will sound fucking killer with two guitarists.’”

  With Mitch Harris still a spectator, in December of ‘89, the reconfigured Napalm Death were ready for the first US performance, a show at the legendary New York City rock club CBGB’s with Prong and Blind Idiot God. Pearson and Martin Nesbitt accompanied the band to New York in hopes of finalizing a stateside distribution deal with Relativity Distribution and Records subsidiary Combat Records. In the weeks prior, Pearson received a call from Combat sales director Alan Becker at the prompting of new Combat tour promotion director and international licensing assistant Jim Welch.

  “I wanted to sign a distribution deal with Earache just because I was always buying their records on import,” says Welch. “I was totally into all that stuff, and really, when the first Napalm record came out and started doing well, I was like, ‘I gotta call this guy up.’”

  “Alan Becker was the first guy to contact me in the States about a distribution deal,” says Pearson. “He just said, ‘We wanna put out some of your records—Napalm Death is blowing up here.’”

  One of the people singing Napalm Death’s and Earache’s praises in New York was Danny Lilker. The lanky bassist was already quasi-famous in thrash metal circles thanks to his work with Anthrax, S.O.D. and Nuclear Assault, the latter of which were the subject of a protracted label dispute between IRS Records and Combat in 1990. With Nuclear Assault’s future uncertain and his interest in extreme music mounting, Lilker formed the blasting grindcore outfit Brutal Truth with CMJ music journalist Kevin Sharp.

  “I was friends with a lot of the bands, like Carcass and Napalm, and they’d give me shirts and I’d wear them,” Lilker says. “Sometimes I’d wear them and there would be a photo session for Nuclear Assault, and the next thing you know, it’s on an album cover.”

  “He was like a walking billboard for Earache at the time,” says Pearson. “He certainly helped. So Combat started off buying some records to distribute and they sold quite well, so then they suggested a license deal for the whole label, which was great for me. I had never done any licensing before—I didn’t even know what it was. I had to get to a lawyer and find out what it actually meant.”

  Fortunately for Earache, Combat were no strangers to death metal. By the time the label signed a three-year licensing deal with Earache in 1990, Combat had already experienced success with a pair of records from both Possessed and Death in the late ‘80s. Moreover, when Death released their third record, Spiritual Healing, in February of 1990, the album swiftly sold over 50,000 units in the US alone.

  “It was great, because we were part of some pretty big, groundbreaking type of stuff,” recalls former Death bassist Terry Butler. “We were playing death metal, but it had some melody to it, so it was acceptable.”

  The Earache label, with their faster, more atonal acts, represented a greater commercial challenge for Combat.

  “For Earache, the Combat deal gave us a kind of head start on the other labels in hitting America
, because Combat put a lot of time and effort into promoting the bands and touring them, which is very expensive stuff to do, and they set up the label really well in America,” says Pearson. “They did exactly what they were supposed to do.”

  The deal also afforded Pearson the freedom to concentrate more on A&R. But while he added several new acts to the Earache roster in the months prior, such as Birmingham grinders Bolt Thrower, the Mike Browning-led, keyboard-infused death metal act Nocturnus, and the Justin Broadrick-fronted, electronic drum-machine metal juggernaut Godflesh, Pearson practiced what he called “strict quality control” regarding artists he felt were worthy of displaying that spiky Earache logo on the backs of their record sleeves.

  “Well, we thought we had the best bands,” Pearson says plainly. “We didn’t do the normal industry things, because the business wasn’t formed in that way—it’s kinda out of fandom. In hindsight, now that I’m a bit more experienced in business, it’s obvious that we owned that scene for a little while. I mean, we rejected Sepultura’s demo for the Schizophrenia album. Fear Factory was another band that was turned down. I think we sent them a letter back that said they sounded too much like Godflesh and Napalm Death. We were kinda high-minded really. But, if I had advisers at the time, what we should have said is, ‘Let’s just sign the whole lot!’ Then there would have been no Roadrunner.”