Time has a funny way of making everything seem much more important than it really is, and Necrophagia are a prime example of this phenomena. Back when this was originally released, Necrophagia were considered "average" at best, and not exactly very high up on anyone's list of "essential purchases" - but give it a decade or so, and all of a sudden Necrophagia are a "cult" act who are described in the Red Stream press release as "innovative" (a complete and utter joke) and "highly influential" (doubtable, considering just how quickly this went out of print, not to mention there weren't exactly an abundance of "Season Of The Dead" CDs floating around for this to have been able to influence anyone, tape-trading not withstanding).

To be fair, "Season Of The Dead" isn't a bad album - as a matter of fact, it's actually pretty decent all things considered, but from all the press releases and various hype surrounding the re-issue, you'd think this was the holy fucking grail of extreme metal, and that just isn't the case...it's just another in a long line of decent albums that somehow got overlooked when it was originally released (probably due to the fact that yes, while it does crank out some serious metal vibes, it is pretty generic in the grand scheme of things). There are a handful of totally brilliant tracks ("Bleeding Torment", "Ancient Slumber", "Mental Decay" and "Terminal Vision" being the best of the lot), an abundance of pretty good tracks, and a few stinkers. The style is exactly what you'd expect from this period of time : proto-death metal. A good comparison (in my opinion) would be a tamed down version of Death's "Scream Bloody Gore" combined with Slaughter's "Strappado" album (notably the "skank" riffs) and the inclusion of a bit of early Slayer (notably in some of the guitar melodies and solos). Production is sub par (even on this "remastered version"), being far too quiet, clean and muffled sounding for the material - the guitar and bass don't really have much of a bite, and the drums sound like wet pillows. Killjoys vocals are pretty good, and he has a style all his own (for the most part) which helps separate Necrophagia from the legions of proto-death / proto-gore / deathcore bands of the period, but at the end of the day, a vocalist does not a band make...

Bottom line: this album is worth picking up (especially if you have a penchant for early (non brutal) death metal), but don't believe all the hype. It's generic, it's poorly produced, the artwork is a bit on the silly side (although revamped from the original), but for all it's faults, it's got a certain charm and does have an "aura" around it (it's pretty moody sounding actually) that I enjoyed and that's what saves it from being an over hyped wash-out. Funny...perhaps if it *didn't* have all this talk around it, I might have enjoyed it more...

© 1999 chorazaim