Necrophagia
Season Of The Dead

Honestly: one of the ugliest albums I ever allowed myself the luxury to purchase and repeatedly listen to, incredulous of such scarcity, in the vain search for something (almost anything) to save.

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The meager substance is as exposed above: I would therefore ask the kind Fellow Readers to peacefully abandon me here. Those who, friends, acquaintances, and assorted nuts, decide to continue will do so at their own R(i)diculous risk: persevering in the vacuous as well as mnemo-nostalgic reading will, in short, be Your Own Cabbage.

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And yes!

Because Dear, my cordial Friends of the more or less crushed Metal, when you are just a little over than of age (year of release of such an ineffable "masterpiece": 1987), realizing in hindsight having squandered in such a way the miserable pocket money derived from yet another home painting (or, depending on the current seasonal phase, cleaning of the home garden) is at least unacceptable if not entirely disheartening.

Despite this (but are you really sure you want to continue with the pointless reading?) and despite the "Season Of The Dead" Necrophagist being currently heavily covered, almost hidden, by the dust that has settled thanks to the calm passage of neutral and unbreakable time, it is still here that silently presents: it is part, albeit in a very marginal way, of my vilified existence and it seems right to me, albeit in hindsight, to recognize and highlight any flaws (we shall see how many) and improbable virtues (we will refine which).

As a partial "excuse" for the origin causing the rash purchase and the logic that drove such a bold step, it is good to highlight the very nature of the music-times just recalled. Today-like-aujourd'hui, it is, in some ways, all much simpler and faster and cheaper: you type, scroll, hastily read, click and (optionally) download [more or less lawfully] what you desire: if what you eavesdropped (perhaps not even actively "listened to") does not prove to be to fast-taste it may happen that integral and bulky hard-disk discographies may be definitively clouded in the short span of an imperceptible mouse click: the produce-download-die brought to its extreme and daily, often even saving consequences.
Those were really different space-times: at the time of the publication of this execrable work when we talked about network (at least in my parts) the ideal association led directly to the not too abundant pots "inhabited" by breams and scorfano-fished by Good cousin Luigi and the cheerful characters from his swaying wooden boat. Buying a record (often in total "blind box") meant an extreme sacrifice and a certain spirit of adaptation: if the LP was not to your liking, having however bled for it, you made yourself "enjoy it by force" listening to it and re-listening to it hoping that maybe at the n-th passage of the stylus on the micro-grooves something good would come out sooner or later from the shaky speakers: in this precise occasion the disappointment of each passage summed up, piling up, to the previous ones: a tragicomical picture that not even Hieronymous Bosch.

Apart from the fundamental and coalescing word of mouth among aficionados, there existed music-critically of the journalistic-pen of few, quite amateurish as partisan "journalists"-enthusiasts, who in order to spread and defend the often indefensible cause of their more or less hard favourite music were sometimes willing to idolize and propagate with "Buy Or Die"-imperatives sonic aberrations like this "Season Of The Dead": if anyone still jealously guards a copy among their warehouse shelves of already secularized numbers of "H/M" they will easily verify and confirm what is stated above.

However, to be honest, even today, and despite the free and globalizing web-information, which should somehow re-establish historical truths, and the truly prodigious potential means at web-disposition of a vast and transgenerational audience, I find, with a certain veiled sadness at the bottom, web-discernments of this kind:
"Necrophagia were a famous underground band in the early '80s. Through their hard and powerful sound, this band became the founder of a new musical genre, death metal." (Source Wikipedia)

Therefore, after much insignificant mnemo-eulogy, I would proceed to try to analyze such an improbable First Work of the Necrophagic self-named ensemble; in the first instance, after having (re)heard [for fairness and duty of record] the vinyl in question, I ask myself what necessity there was to give themselves the moniker of habitual eaters of rotten carcasses: what was the finely retro-cultural reason that pushed the "good" Killjoy (a name, a program) vocalist and leader of the incapable (and not exactly cheerful) necrophagist group to orient towards a similar moniker; perhaps it was a consequence and honest acknowledgment of the irreversible death of their artistic-compositional faculties in the realization of such a cornerstone? It could be a moderately plausible explanation.

Because this Album, Dear passionate and non-fans of UltraMetal, despite the over twenty years of lethargic decanting, to quote literate and learned, still turns out to be a Villaggistic "Incredible Crap": literally played like dogs (with all due respect to four-legged animals) and perhaps also further penalized (as well as the damage the classic mockery) by truly indecent, semi-monophonic and flat recording that not even a Restali billiard table offers forty minutes (alas) abundant of incredibly dull, linearly ineffective cave-thrash/proto-death, poor offspring of Bathory era "The Return", Death period "Scream Bloody Gore" and/or the primordial "Apocalyptic Raids" by Hellhammer, wonderfully devoid of any minimum reason for interest: I affirm this not so much for the empty taste of targeting the passing and easy music-Red Cross, but rather animated, besides than the love for blabbering, by the intention to try to protect the less "metal-oldies", who could incur, in light of current incomprehensible death-revanchist attitudes, in today's sentences that elevate similar vacuities to the rank of epochal peaks of no better specified underground-death scenes.

The undisputed non plus ultra of this suffered musical hecatomb I would assign without particular worries to the progressive track number six with the programmatic title "Mental Decay" (autobiographical?): after an "encouraging" intro in the form of musical-vertigo that laboriously unwinds for about a minute twenty, from post to branch we veer one eighty degrees (moreover against traffic) towards a completely monolithic and meaningless t(h)rash-hoeing stuffed with typical Hanneman/King-derived guitar-solos foaming at the mouth, totally brainless and inconclusive: all until the grand finale in which we reimmerse in the ignorantly limp butcher-style ad libitum with the usual annoying guttural muttering of the vocalist: practically Geniuses (albeit completely misunderstood).
Blandly limping rhythms, stale and sterile hand-to-hand assaults resulting from tired, inanimate, bloodless reiteration of worn formulas probably stolen from their "historical" disks Idols-themselves: not an idea in the grace of God (or of Belzebuth, if you will) worthy of being recognized as such: adding to it a "singing" (kind of aphasic speaking) monotonously "evil", so fake and ridiculous that it would not be able to scare even the most innocent of grandchildren reached the venerable age of six.

Personally I considered it (and herewith confirm in full) an aberrant, unjustifiable, supremely disappointing total fiasco on every front: stuff, if we were attached to the vile money, to be cited for moral as well as material damages for having been subjected (for a fee) to such an indecent, sublime, torment.

I finally learn, not without some surprise, from the web that they even had the audacity to reform (at the end of the nineties) and are now more than active on the "artistic" front: they will surely have improved.

Also because worse than this is hard (apart from the dolls Sonora that I discovered, unfortunately, tonight)!