Despite the fact that it’s a Sunday, we’re going to have at least three new posts on the site today, beginning with another installment of this series in which we reflect upon metal from yesteryear. Our focus for this edition of The Rearview Mirror is the NY death metal band Mortician.

While many of the bands we’ve remembered in this series are long gone, Mortician aren’t officially dead yet, though more than a decade has passed since their last album. For most of their career they existed as a duo, originally formed by Will Rahmer and Roger Beaujard in 1989 under the name Casket but soon re-named Mortician in honor of the late Angus Scrimm’s character in the 1979 horror movie Phantasm and its sequels.

This isn’t going to be a retrospective on Mortician’s discography. I simply want to play for you the band’s 1996 debut album Hacked Up For Barbeque, which was discharged following a hand-full of short releases. I hadn’t thought about the album in eons, but a conversation on Facebook yesterday reminded me of it, and I impulsively dived back into it. Continue reading »