Choosing Death

by Albert Mudrian

  “To be honest, I think that when I came in, it was an injection of excitement and hunger.” Tucker continues. “I’m not David and I’ve never been David. I think, in the beginning, I really shunned any idea or acknowledgement of David. But the fact is, I’ve always thought that he was a great singer, but I do this music because of me.”

  In direct contrast to its major label predecessor Domination, the exclusively Earache-distributed Formulas Fatal to the Flesh was a largely uncommercial death metal juggernaut.

  “I think Domination was lacking a little bit of what makes death metal death metal, says Azagthoth. “It was getting a little too smooth or too straight or too orderly. This album, though, is all about Morbid Angel death metal. It’s brutal. It’s unruly. It’s dark. It’s heavy.

  “Some people thought Morbid Angel couldn’t move ahead without Dave,” Azagthoth continues. “People always said in the past, ‘That Trey guy—he’s the guitar player and Dave is the main brain behind the band.’ [Vincent] was the brains behind the vocals and the singing, but he wasn’t the brains behind the music that I wrote. With Steve, he’s a really hard worker, but I felt bad for him with that album. I didn’t wanna write the lyrics like today’s lyrics. I wanted to write it like ancient writing, so it was really tough to sing.”

  “That’s bullshit,” says Tucker. “He didn’t feel bad for me. He may feel bad now, but at the time, he didn’t feel bad about it at all. He said, ‘Well, dude, you just gotta do it.’”

  “I wanted it to be just sick,” says Azagthoth. “With David, he only had a couple of songs that he sang really fast; he usually had it more spread out where he could say each word with power. It was just kinda tough for the lyrics on Formulas—they were just like a tongue twister.”

  Those lyrics clearly reflected a new spiritualism, which Azagthoth had embraced in the years between Morbid Angel albums. Discovering self-help authors such as Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra, Azagthoth interpreted their new age philosophies for his own “spiritual growth” and “personal power.”

  “The thing that has always really helped Morbid Angel beyond the music was the message,” Azagthoth explains. “Even in the darker days, like Altars of Madness ,where it seemed like we were just Satanists, it was always positive. It’s always about freedom. I mean, the band has grown. I don’t think the same way as I did back then. It has happened that someone says, ‘Oh, you guys have changed, and that’s so bad. You’re not Satanists anymore and you’re not talking about killing Christ.’ I try to show them the growth in how we really haven’t changed.

  “That said, I’m definitely not trying to smash everybody down with music anymore,” he continues. “I just wanna write music and just make it really special and do our own thing. But back then, I did wanna kill all of the other bands, not literally, but I did wanna just devastate everybody—that’s what drove me. I’m not gonna say that’s the right way or anything, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I really wanted to just corner the market and be the only real band.

  “I looked into the whole philosophy behind that. In other words, studying Tony Robbins, and it’s basically as simple as tearing down to build. A lot of the lyrics in Formulas are about others’ concepts that will limit you and the whole idea about what is reality and what’s real. Every new second is a new day, and it doesn’t have to be based on the past. We only carry the past into the present in our minds. And our basis of reality is all based on our interpretation and based on our experiences and previous interpretations that have happened. Things happen and we think we understand them and we have those as reference points. I always wanted people to go after it themselves, not to just listen to what I say, because my words are my interpretations. They might mean one thing to me but something else to someone else. If the idea is rebelling, the idea is breaking free from the chains of other people’s ideas—to be free, to be neutral, to be zero, to be just pure potential. Then once you’re free, there’s no reason to do that anymore. Now you want to build. It’s not just the paradigm shifting, it’s not just following the inner voice, it’s not just trying to make the music on Formulas have this special feeling, it’s also about this philosophy behind it.”

  More importantly for Earache, Formulas helped fuel the label’s metallic rebirth. Curiously, however, the label that helped trigger the extreme music explosion formed a sub-label to release extreme underground metal. In 1998, with longtime Earache publicist Dan Tobin serving as the label’s chief of A&R, Earache officially launched the Wicked World imprint.

  “What I did really resist, to my slight shame, was Earache’s whole techno thing,” says Tobin, whose only Earache signing prior to the Wicked World label was At the Gates in 1995. “I got the extremity, but I just didn’t see the point of it. I didn’t see any musicality in it. I didn’t see anything challenging in it. So I was continually bitching, as Dig would say, and one day he just turned around to me and said, ‘If you think you’re so fucking great at this, then you do a label.’ But it worried me that if I was gonna sign metal bands to Wicked World, then what did that mean for Earache? Did that mean no metal bands would go on Earache, and Earache would totally go in a techno direction?

  “And that’s a question I always got immediately asked,” Tobin continues. “To me, I just wanted to get some more metal on Earache. And although the name Wicked World was there and the logo was there, as I told all the bands, it was all the same people working it—it was all the same money and distribution. But to be honest, I think Dig saw the Earache label going in a slightly different way at the time, with the techno and the rock like Dub War, which he was committed to breaking. And we already had the biggest death metal bands in the world—Napalm Death, we had Morbid Angel and Carcass and Entombed, and this was a way of admitting that he didn’t quite appreciate what was going on in the metal scene at the time. It was myself complaining and Dig admitting that he didn’t have perhaps the full grasp on what was coming through, and he just got sick of me moaning.”

  “Dan must take a lot of credit for the rejuvenation of Earache’s A&R,” says Pearson. “There was no other A&R until Dan, and that was a big fault, partly through my own pride. I thought, ‘I discovered all of these bands, so I’m gonna discover the next wave.’

  “What brought it home to me was when we were talking recently, Dan said early on he brought bands like Dissection to me and I was like, ‘It’s not as good as Morbid Angel.’ He said, ‘You should have listened to me, we could have signed this band.’ I’d become immune to new bands somehow. They just didn’t have much of an impact on me, because I had already been working with some of the best, and it’s actually not the best way to do A&R—jaded, I think you’d call it. I was jaded, but I’ve now taken steps to get people who weren’t so jaded with extreme metal to do my signings for me. That’s basically what has happened. It takes me back to how I used to feel, just getting excited about new bands and the possibilities.”

  Tobin didn’t need to look far for one of his earliest signings. In 1998, he met Morbid Angel guitarist Erik Rutan backstage at a Morbid Angel show in Sheffield, where Rutan, who officially joined Morbid as a second guitarist in 1995, slipped Tobin a copy of a demo from his other band, a blindingly fast death metal outfit dubbed Hate Eternal.

  “Morbid Angel being Trey’s band, after the Domination tour, I realized that I really had so much more that I wanted to express than I could fully express in Morbid Angel,” say Rutan, whose original Hate Eternal lineup also included Cannibal Corpse bassist Alex Webster and Suffocation guitarist Dough Cerrito. “I always wanted to front a band. It was always this underlying feeling for my whole career.”

  The rest of Florida’s death metal scene still struggled to regain its footing. Although Obituary and Death each returned from a self-imposed three-year hiatus delivering new records, for both acts it would be their final bow.

  “We wrote it during ‘96 and ’97,” says Obituary guitarist Trevor Peres of the band’s Back from the Dead LP, “and according to th
e music industry’s standards, we were getting old at this point. So we were like, ‘We had better come up with the heaviest, most brutal thing we can think of.’ I mean, it probably could have sold more, but this whole scene, at that point, I didn’t realize how small it had gotten for death metal. You could only sell so many copies, and that’s all you can sell.”

  “We never got huge, where we were playing arenas or anything, but you hate when you get to the spot where you’re playing to a couple thousand people one night, and then you go out again and you’re back down and the scene is just not there,” offers Obituary vocalist John Tardy. “It was hard to maintain even doing a tour unless we wanted to go straight back to driving around in a van, which, as we were starting to get a little bit older, wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore.”

  “Basically John was just getting frustrated with touring, and that’s why we really took a hiatus after [1994] World Demise,” Peres continues. “We felt that that was hurting us, because the scene was so difficult at that point—you’ve gotta tour your ass off to even survive. So it was either we have to get a new singer or stop jamming. And we weren’t gonna get a new singer, so we just said fuck it. Maybe we’ll do another record in five years or something just for fun, just because we like to play and make a few people happy that like our music, but to me it just became more of a pain in the ass.”

  For Chuck Schuldiner’s Death, however, a new album meant yet another new lineup of session musicians and a new label, this time Nuclear Blast. 1998’s The Sound of Perseverance incorporated the most of Schuldiner’s progressive rock influences on any Death album thus far.

  “It’s an album on which melody and aggression are fused,” he told Italy’s Metal Hammer that same year. “Of course, there are some extreme metal elements typical of Death, yet there are some parts that are the living proof that Death is a band with heavy metal roots, but always wanting to show, in the end, something new and fresh.”

  After the touring cycle for Perseverance ended in 1999, Schuldiner shifted focus onto his other band, Control Denied, a progressive power metal outfit he initially formed in 1995. Just after the recording of the Control Denied debut was complete in May of 1999, Schuldiner began experiencing pain in his upper neck, which he initially attributed to a strained muscle or pinched nerve. Doctors recommended an MRI, which eventually reveled a cancerous tumor on Schuldiner’s brain stem.

  While he began aggressive radiation therapy, Control Denied’s The Fragile Art of Existence was released and greeted with an overwhelmingly positive reception. Throughout much of his treatment, Schuldiner concentrated more on writing material for Control Denied’s sophomore LP.

  “It’s on hold indefinitely,” he said of Death in a February 2000 interview with Metal Edge. “I don’t want to do two bands at one time. Whatever I’m into, I concentrate one thousand percent on. I’ve seen people try to juggle two bands at one time, and I don’t think it’s very sincere.”

  Sadly, Schuldiner never got the chance to relaunch Death or finish another Control Denied album. As his health continued to decline throughout 2001, cancer claimed Schuldiner’s life in December of that year. He was 34 years old.

  “One thing I do remember about Chuck,” says Kam Lee, Schuldiner’s former founding bandmate in both Mantas and Death, “is that even though we became rivals and everything else, I cherish those days when we were forming [Mantas and Death], because those were the purest times for me and I’m sure it was for him as well. I do remember those times as being the best.”

  “I remember interviewing Chuck for the Control Denied record at the end of 1999, when he had already been diagnosed with the tumor,” recalls former Terrorizer editor Nick Terry. “I was struck by how calm and mellow he was, which was quite a contrast to the Evil Chuck of old, who always seemed to be complaining and bitching in interviews about problems with the Death lineup or his management or whatever. He didn’t seem to have been an easy person to work with in the Death heyday, but that had obviously changed. So it was just an appalling tragedy to hear 18 months later that he’d lost his battle with cancer, when this meant the end of not just one, but two bands. It’s all the more tragic because it was history repeating itself: Roger Patterson of the Florida band Atheist had also succumbed to cancer back in the early ‘90s after they’d made just one record. I suppose because the very first death metal record I’d bought was Leprosy by Death, it hit hard, because here was someone dying not from rock ‘n’ roll stupidities, but from one of those fates that can affect anyone’s family.”

  Before Schuldiner’s untimely death, however, other death metal artists were clearly rebounding. Cannibal Corpse replaced the departed Chris Barnes with former Monstrosity frontman George “Corpsegrinder” Fischer. The group’s 1996 “comeback” album Vile proved to be their most successful out of the gate, actually debuting at the 122nd position on the Billboard album charts—the first death metal band to infiltrate such territory. Meanwhile, Six Feet Under, Barnes’ death metal side project with Obituary guitarist Allen West and former Death and Massacre members Terry Butler and Bill Andrews, soon became a successful full-time shtick for all participants.

  “We purposely set out from day one to be a different type of death metal band,” says Butler of Six Feet’s initial intentions. “We wanted to be a groovy, back-to-the-roots type of death metal band instead of trying to be a technical blast band. There were just so many bands doing that at the time, and we wanted to go the opposite way. And so, when the first record came out, people were thinking, ‘Oh, this is a big death metal supergroup’, with Chris, Allen and me in the band, pulling influences from all these other bands. But when they first heard it, it was like, ‘All right—this isn’t what we thought it would be, but it’s still cool.’”

  Indeed, many other extreme music fans agreed. Six Feet Under’s third full-length LP Maximum Violence, released in 1999, sold over 100,000 copies worldwide, reaching a barrier that hadn’t been crossed since Morbid Angel, Deicide and Obituary accomplished it nearly a half-decade prior.

  Other genre progenitors, however, weren’t quite as successful. For the members of Napalm Death, it was clear their shotgun marriage with former Extreme Noise Terror vocalist Phil Vane wasn’t working out. Without hesitation, they called on Mark “Barney” Greenway, the longtime vocalist whom they’d expelled from the band just four months earlier.

  “Out of the blue one day, I just got a phone call from Mark Walmesley, our manager at the time,” says Greenway. “And he was sort of making rounded, backwards comments about, ‘Just giving a call to see how you are, and Shane had been mentioning your name, and they’d like you to go down to the studio and perhaps, could you do a few vocals on the new album?’ And I was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ And he was like, ‘You know, the new Napalm album?’ I was like, ‘Hang on a second, are you forgetting something? I was kicked out of this band. Are you asking me to rejoin?’ And he was like, ‘In a nutshell, yeah.’

  “It turned out that they’d done all these rehearsals and made their merry way into the studio,” Greenway continues. “It just seemed that Phil just couldn’t cut it in the studio. I mean, Phil was a great vocalist in ENT. I absolutely loved ENT back in the day, but he just wasn’t cutting it in the studio. So I rejoined Napalm, and the album was already written, so I just got past it, but I was happy enough. There were certain things on the album that might have raised my eyebrows a little, but I was happy to go with it, to be honest, because I was relieved to be back in the fold.”

  Reunited with Greenway, 1997’s Inside the Torn Apart and 1998’s Words From the Exit Wound albums followed the similarly spirited experimental path of Napalm’s other mid-‘90s releases. But the often angular recordings failed to ignite fan interest, especially in the United States, where both albums failed to eclipse the 15,000 sales mark.

  “We were on the verge of splitting,” Greenway explains, “because we couldn’t afford to physically go on.”

  “Some bands reach a poin
t in their career where they have to do a turning point, so we reached ours,” adds Napalm bassist Shane Embury. “Once we managed to get through the personal stuff, it came to our attention that people who were supposed to be looking after us weren’t really doing a great job.”

  Napalm took out their frustration on Earache and label owner Digby Pearson, fueling a very public war of words between the parties that ultimately led to the label dropping Napalm Death in the spring of 1999.

  “We were kinda dropped by Earache, but we weren’t, really,” says Greenway. “They just chose not to take up an option, and the option was almost perfect for us, because it meant that, yes, the advance was quite high, but it certainly wasn’t into a six-figure sum, as [Pearson] suggests, and not anywhere near it. Can you imagine Earache paying that six-figure sum? I mean, if they say they dropped us, fine, they technically did, but it wasn’t like they turned around and said, ‘Right, you’re dropped.’ One of the reasons we were still even under contract with them was because after the Harmony Corruption album we signed a seven-album deal with Earache. Dig saw that we were desperate for cash. Each one of us in that band was desperate for cash—we were totally fucking broke. And Dig knew he could get his fucking claws into us if he slapped a fucking elongated deal on the table; he knew that we would sign it, because we had no other option. At the time, most labels wouldn’t go anywhere near Napalm, they were too afraid of the extremity of the band, but Digby would, of course. We did re-sign for another two-album option, but that was on the advice of our manager who has since been fired.