Massacre

One of the original Florida death metal monsters, Massacre have softened into gothic pop-death rock in recent years.

From Beyond
Earache
1991

Production: Florida-trademarik production by both Colin Richardson and Scott Burns stamp this forever with the mold of the atmospheric, almost humid, and rock-tone distinctive production of Morrisound Studios.
Review: Both thunderous in its sagging, palm-muted throb and fast in its Slayer-inspired running-phrase riffing is Massacre from Florida, a band placed so solidly in the genre of death metal as to be definitive. Riffs avoid musical motion in the conventional sense and instead favor recursive, chromatic, nihilistic themes and rhythmic communication of urgency and violence. Where this dominates, as does most extreme death metal, is in the shaping of melody and rhythm however brief to convey motion without harmonic dependence. In these simply structured songs are recombined several platforms of custom adaptation for guitar solos and other depositions of logical encoding.
The band of allstars: Rick Rozz, the whammy-bar screamer from Death's Leprosy, composes the power chord symphonies of each song; Bill Andrews, also of Death fame, plays drums in a Lombardo-inspired power groove of intense adaptivity and expression; Kam Lee throats subsonic gutteral decompositions with depth and incoherence; Terry Butler (see Death notes, above) handles bass, a man born to follow the root note to its death, doubling the muted strumming Massacre synchronize to their drumbeats for hammering effective percussion.

Tracklist:

1. Dawn of Eternity (5:12)
2. Cryptic Realms (4:52)
3. Biohazard (4:42)
4. Chamber of Ages (4:51)
5. From Beyond (4:28)
6. Defeat Remains (4.17)
7. Succubus (3:03)
8. Symbolic Immortality (3:39)
9. Corpsegrinder (3:20)
Length: 38:26

Copyright © 1991 Earache

Songs vary in essential style, some more approaching the music of Kiss and other such hardrockers but more songs expressing the fundamental nihilistic breakdown of bands like Death who reduced riffs to rhythmic motion between a mathematical division of a scale, either fast double-bass rolling masterpieces of freedom expressed in conflict rhythms or tempo reduced galley-oars masterpieces of agonizingly slow and pummeling death metal. In about half of them the silvery shivers of Rozz's magic fingers guitar noise leave discontiguous, apathetic, and fatalistic curls in the entrails of scalar order.
From simple origins life arose, and here from the recombinant bits of scale in power chords and the trenchant drumming of master tempo adjuster Andrews comes a strikingly lucid, evocative composition of simple motions and their counteractions. Its urgency and B-movie alarm only bely the calm sensitivity of this music to the destructive forces at work beneath our everyday existence.

	Inhuman Condition This EP of four songs attempts a return to the roots of Massacre, featuring the vocal work of Cronos on the cover of a song by his band Venom, and a more heavy metal feel to the extra material, outtakes and other chaos channeled into a handful of coherent units. Now included on the Earache re-release of this album.

From Beyond
Earache has re-released this classic album with newly distorted cover art, a lack of the flamboyant dayglo green CD inserts that originally made this album also a visually unique shelf item, but with the same reasonable sound and the Inhuman Condition EP included. Thankfully nothing from "Promise" era Massacre taints this re-release, only the slightly dubious judgment of labels and artists from bands rocked by internal conflict.

Promise
Gone is the simplistic tearing speed riff old-style rhythm murder chant death metal with ludicrous whammy-bars-of-fire solos. 1996 Massacre is a rock n roll creature with slowed and simplistic rock/metal chord progressions to accompany its predictable dirge of maudlin neo-"gothic" deluge. Where previously abstraction reigned in structures of collision and violence, now only the emotivism of the bereft and fatalistic accompanies these rock clichés.