Brutality: Screams of Anguish (1993)
We're now so accustomed to a world in which all music can be sampled, if not "owned" (whatever that means anymore), via on-demand streaming services that I sometimes forget why I never heard this or that artist, back in the day.
I'll tell you why: because we actually had to BUY the fucking albums, that's why!
Brutality are a perfect case in point, being a secondary Floridian death metal band, the likes of which I've loved since the genre took shape in the early '90s, that simply didn't get a turn on my turntable because bigger names like Death, Obituary, and Morbid Angel were consuming my modest budget.
(In my defense, I flipped through several heavy metal reference books on my shelves and confirmed that Brutality were, in fact, omitted from ALL of them.)
Hailing from -- where else? -- sweltering Tampa, the group formed and recorded their first demo as Abomination in 1986; changed their name to Darkness in '87, then Brutality in '88, and cut four more demos followed by a pair of 7-inch singles, Sadistic and Hell on Earth, in '92.
Subsequently signed to Nuclear Blast, Scott Reigel (vocals), Don Gates (guitar), Jay Fernandez (guitar), Jeff Acres (bass/vocals), and Jim Coker (drums) then recorded their first full-length, Screams of Anguish, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
And, boy, am I glad I finally got my hands on this Svart Records reissue, which proved that nothing short of poor promotion and death metal market saturation stopped Brutality from reaching a wider audience.
Album standouts like "These Walls Shall Be Your Grave" and "Cries of the Forsaken" boast all the essential Floridian D.M. ingredients (savage roars, wicked crushing riffs, dive-bombing leads, plus blast-beats) set to an optimal balance of violence and technicality, judicious melodic content and devastating (natch!) brutality.
Oh, sure, to all of you extreme metal "deniers," it'll sound as chaotic and noisy as usual (see the relentless "Ceremonial Unearthing"), but trust me when I say these songs have, errrr ... class!
You just have to weather the storm on stellar tracks like "Septicemic Plague," "Crushed," and "Spawned Illusion" to appreciate their harmonic payoffs, usually over slower tempos, which I'd characterize as more musical than Morbid Angel, more complex than Obituary, but not as sophisticated as Death.
Unfortunately, Screams of Anguish, like many death metal LPs of the day, harbors a pair of unnecessary instrumental interludes -- synths for "Sympathy" and acoustic guitars for "Spirit World" -- but it is what it is.
1994 saw Brutality touring Europe with Swedish death metallers Hypocrisy and delivering their sophomore LP, When the Sky Turns Black, at which point line-up instability kicked in and the band eventually split following a third album, In Mourning, in '96.
So when you next find yourself taking the present day's universal access to music for granted, spare a thought to those of us who still remember the torment of monetary (and geographical) restrictions imposed in the days of physical music products.
Oh, the Brutality!
More Brutality: When the Sky Turns Black.