Settling the Debate Between “Seven Churches” & “Scream Bloody Gore”: Who is the Alpha/Beta Among Death Metal’s Founding Fathers?

A weekend of deep probing and careful analysis concerning the San Francisco, Spring Break-spawned Seven Churches (1985) leaves one impressed by how messily and dizzyingly it unpredictably spins repeated, retrograde ellipses around Scream Bloody Gore (1987) in every about-to-be-touched upon area of its delinquently juvenile and sheepishly amateur body of work, cover art excluded (Ed Repka’s painting is admittedly prettier to look at than Combat’s philistine-selected, casket-black backdrop). The compositional elements that makeup Seven Churches‘ 10 gut-torn tracks are more structurally, melodically, and rhythmically advanced than anything Death would record until 1991’s Human, plus the damned thing just sounds and feels 666x more sinister, since all of its thematic energy is fully devoted to SATAN, instead of the wimpy humanist ethos Suck Chowdinger would convert to on Spiritual Healing, and would keep inserting—until it became fully widespread—in his increasingly soy-flavored, low-T, fruity blend of progressive metal, all the way up to that bulbous point when Symbolic finally came out, and showed everyone watching from outside his inner circle that his probiotic cleansed bowels were actually white with Christ-taught cum, not church-burnt ash, as he publicly recentered Death’s formerly inverted cross logo while removing all traces of its initial burning tip and blood-soaked bottom.

Cuck Sumbinerd was extreme metal’s first woke pinko womenazi. His musical vibe never screamed hard gay (like those Cynic dudes who tookover his rhythm section for a single CD), but I think you could comfortably peg that kitten-shirt-sporting dreidel-spinner as the type of person who—if AIDS hadn’t taken him out before the technological (and moral) renaissance of streaming, high definition, no-boundaries-but-your-imagination-and-their-budget Internet porn could takeoff—would have undeniably gotten off by watching some dog-collared, nipple-clamped, electrode-stuck chick being double- then triple-stuffed while imagining (for those whole four minutes plus thirty-two tacked-on seconds) that he’s her.

Possessed, had they simply placed a more nuanced percussive performance underneath Mike Torrao’s and Larry LaLonde’s shoveling, stop-start riffs and ember-popping solos, could have easily melded Seven Churches into TRUE BADASS prog metal a la Coroner’s Punishment for Decadence, instead of merely being a BESTIAL death/thrash hybrid with slight prog leanings.

Possessed’s respected but rarely celebrated role in metal’s unruly upbringing will (likely) never be as fervently fellated by the genre’s Johnny-come-lately fanboys as Death’s polygamous, increasingly gay musical matrimonies irrevocably are, probably because the former only blew one brief, fiery burst of unfiltered ungodliness (Seven Churches) out their smokey throats before choking on a bundle of cheaply produced carcinogens (Beyond the Gates) that the band collectively burnt through quicker than a box of bubble gum cigarettes being passed around at an end-of-season, co-ed softball team pizza party, and whose fumes would end up obscuring the bright red + dark black DANGER plaque that, in ’85, aptly described, but by their ’87 disbandment, falsely mislabled their sooty, fully exhausted furnace (Eyes of Horror).

If Morbid Angel hadn’t entered the scene and finished the LUSTFUL task of emptying BEELZEBUB’S butt juice goblet—beginning at the sharpie-marked point where Possessed decided to roll over like a wood log down a Northern Californian riverbed and ride away into (temporary) retirement by pushing off its pentagram-spinner wheelchair spokes—then I doubt death metal (or first wave black metal) would have developed the same way that it did in the late 1980s, since none of the other sick fucks who commercially dominated the extreme metal market that decade (especially not braindead glass eaters like Cannibal Corpse) ever managed to match Possessed’s BLACKENED SATANIC CHAOS brand of backward guitarplaying and downsideup songwriting.