The two authors of Glorious Times, a book dedicated to the early speed metal/death metal years of the metal underground, were once writers for far underground zines. But they were also fans, and as most fans do, over the year they accumulated experiences and artifacts.
On their blog the old schoolers have written about the A Day of Death festival from 1990, which was an early death metal festival in the style of Michigan Death Fest or Maryland Death Fest, but featuring all the old school bands because back then, they were the new school and scraping by to survive.
Not only do they give us a review of each band playing, but they also offer a CDR of the event — two songs each from Autopsy, Repulsion, Incantation, Cannibal Corpse and Deceased in either lossy MP3 format or lossless FLAC format if you want to burn an exact original. This is quite a treat as live material from the time is quite rare, because next to no one thought this death metal thing would take off.
Check out the lineup:
- Radiation Sickness
- Lucifer’s Hammer
- Deceased
- Suffocation
- Goreaphobia
- Incantation
- Mortician
- Disharmonic Orchestra
- Cannibal Corpse
- Immolation
- Baphomet
- Repulsion
- Autopsy
The scary thing is that most of these bands have come back and are recording or touring. Amazing how time flies past and yet people remain essentially the same. I would kill to be able to go back in time to this show, however, as it was during the formative days of one of the few modern music genres worth writing about.
Check out the blog post and consider downloading the CD-R. It’s worth it, if for nothing else the glimpse of this time, but the sound quality isn’t bad and the music is vital from the most intense years of these bands.
Tags: a day of death, alan moses, book, brian pattison, glorious times, zine
