(In the following article our contributor Wil Cifer, who spent a lot of years in Atlanta, comments on a compilation set for release on September 6th by Boris Records and Deanwell Global Music which serves as a retrospective of the Atlanta metal underground from 1982 to 1999. It includes remastered original recordings by more than 20 bands from the area.)
In the ’80s Norway was not the bustling mecca for metal the media tries to portray it as today, so even Atlanta, Ga was impressive to me at 12 years old when I began visiting my grandparents in the States for a few weeks in the summers at their Stateside home just outside the city limits of Atlanta. My first exposure to what the music scene in America was like in the flesh is captured in Surrender To Death: A History of the Atlanta Metal Underground Vol. 1, a compilation by Boris Records and Deanwell Global Music. For me, it’s a fun indulgence of nostalgia for those summers spent venturing into the city for all-ages shows.
Despite this first-hand experience, I don’t even remember the first two bands on this compilation, as they preceded my time in Atlanta. The first band, Messendger, is more proto-metal owing more to AC/DC and Thin Lizzy — two influences common for bands from this region, as AC/DC was almost more of a punk band in certain respects. This style of harder rock band played at a club called Charley Mcgruders in the northern suburbs of Atlanta proper. The second band, Fortnox, would have fit in with this crowd as they aspire towards a sound mimicking Judas Priest‘s arena-rocking anthems
The compilation does not get into the actual metal scene until the 3rd track by the thrash band Ghost Story. When it came to metal Ghost Story wrote the best songs during this time. They were like Atlanta’s answer to Sacred Reich. I’m surprised they chose “What Few Even Dare” to feature, as “Anger of the Lynch Mob” seems a more fitting choice; it was a staple on the college radio show WREKAGE which was broadcast Friday nights by Georgia Tech’s student-run station WREK.
Necropolis carried a more feral sound closer to Venom, which can be heard on “Waters of Lathe”. There was a very deliberate mosh-inducing crunch to this one.
MX was another band more likely to have played bars out in the suburbs, bringing up the interesting divide in the Atlanta scene. Most metal heads, punks, and goths in bands or in their respective scenes lived in the three-mile radius of Little Five Points, which was the mecca to these cultures with clubs, record stores, and other retail outlets that catered to this misfit culture. It leaned heavily in the punk direction, and many of the latter-day metal bands like Mastodon, Withered, or Death of Kings, all started in the punk scene.
This created the more hipster inner-city circle of bands who played clubs downtown, with the clubs out in the suburbs fostering bands not in these cliques, like Sinister Angel, who sounded like they listened to more Iron Maiden than Discharge. Kinectic Dissent was certainly one of the more popular bands from this period, though listening back to their “Reflected Fear” has not stood up to the test of time as well as Ghost Story or Necropolis; this also highlights why they faded into the where are they now files, and did not break into even the lower tiers of thrash success occupied by bands like Atrophy. Dark Overlord sounds more like “Kill ‘Em All” era Metallica, as a large dose of rock n roll flowed in their veins.
Unblessed marks a transition from thrash into death metal. It is a reminder of the sometimes unwieldy nature of that transition. Production-wise, many of these albums were recorded by Skip Bryant, the go-to metal guy, in a local rehearsal warehouse during this time with his studio. Everything was recorded to tape, in the days before Pro-Tools. Lestregus Nosferatus would be the band that birthed death metal in Atlanta. They had a darker murk to their sound. Yet they still cared about writing songs. They still possess the most powerful chug of the bands represented here.
This compilation shows the progression of the genre, in which regional scenes prove to be a microcosm of the genre as a whole. Rot played a raw, blown-out style of death metal that had its charm at the time. The vocals did not have as powerful of a roar behind them, in some ways they reminded me of Rigor Mortis. Avulsion was a step in the direction of the death metal that already sprung from Tampa during this time, which is not far removed from the death metal of today.
The compilation jumps into the ’90s with Dawn of Orion, who came from a hardcore background, which can be heard in the stomping nature of their riffing. There is still a rawness to bands like Haborym and Tragic Demise, as death metal begins to creep into deeper darkness and shed the thrash roots. Tragic Demise was the more dynamic of the two bands.
Genres shift as Demoncy is the first band that begins to incorporate elements of black metal into their sound with a more tortured rasp, and the buzz of tremolo-picked guitars. The production value also sucked, as did many early “cvlt” recordings of the emerging second wave of black metal.
The track featuring Necroflesh is more groove-oriented, reflecting death metal adapting to the influence of nu-metal playing a more dominant role in metal at the time. Sludge must be more of a focal point in the forthcoming second volume, as the selected tracks here begin to lean more into the death metal side of the equation with the more death-n-roll riffing of Procostimus, and then black metal is summoned up again with Darkened Skies, though black metal has never been as popular in Atlanta as death metal, thrash, or sludge. So including a band like Vastion seems an exaggeration of the amount of black metal to have come from the city. It served more as an influence on bands like Withered and Cloak than something there is a scene for in-town, since the “cool kids” would be more likely to call it “problematic”.
Though overall this compilation does a good job of capturing a sense of nostalgia for an underrated time in the city’s musical history.