Horrified

Horrified is the only studio album by American grindcore band Repulsion. Originally released as a demo tape titled Slaughter of the Innocent, the band recorded the album for US$300 at the basement studio of engineer Larry Hennessy in June 1986. It features fast songs combining elements of thrash metal, death metal and hardcore punk; blast beats; and bloody, gory lyrics. Although Repulsion disbanded not long after its recording due to a lack of record label interest in September 1986, the Slaughter of the Innocent demo was circulated in tape trading circles, and the album was eventually given an official release with its present title and adjusted artwork through Necrosis Records, a sublabel of Earache Records owned by Bill Steer and Jeff Walker of Carcass, in July 1989.

Horrified is retrospectively considered a classic and highly influential grindcore album and has been credited with pioneering the goregrind subgenre. In 2009, Decibel ranked it as the greatest grindcore album of all time, with Terrorizer ranking the album as the second-greatest American grindcore album.

Background

In 1984, Matt Olivo and Scott Carlson formed the band Tempter in Flint, Michigan. In the fall of 1984, they briefly renamed themselves Ultraviolence before settling on Genocide.Template:Sfn The band recorded its first demo, known as Armies of the Dead, in November 1984.Template:Sfn In the spring of 1985, following a period of lineup instabilities, Carlson and Olivo agreed to disband and merge Genocide with Chuck Schuldiner's Death.Template:Sfn In August 1985,Template:Sfn only weeks after they arrived in Altamonte Springs, Florida, drummer Kam Lee left Death. Unable to find a new drummer, the band attempted to work on new material. Carlson and Olivo found themselves at creative odds with Schuldiner; Carlson said that the latter wanted to take things in a more technical and guitar-oriented direction, while he and Olivo wanted to "completely thrash out".Template:Sfn After returning to Flint, Carlson and Olivo reformed Genocide and recruited drummer Dave "Grave" Hollingshead, a punk rock drummer whom they heard about from a newspaper article about a grave robbery.Template:Sfn Hollingshead's musical background in funk and new wave differed from those of his bandmates, who were primarily into heavy metal.Template:Sfn

In October 1985, Genocide recorded the Violent Death demo and began playing local shows around Flint.Template:Sfn Hollingshead initially struggled to play to the speeds Genocide wanted, leading him to play what they described as a "cheating beat"—"hitting the hi-hat every other time he was not hitting the snare".Template:Sfn Within a few months, his drumming speed rapidly increased; Carlson said the lyrics of "The Stench of Burning Death", "Six Feet Under", and "The Lurking Fear", which were meant to be played at a slower, Slayer-esque speed, became "garbled".Template:Sfn In January 1986, Genocide recorded The Stench of Burning Death demo at WFBE Studios with the help of guitarist Aaron Freeman, who was made a permanent member thereafter.Template:Sfn The band attempted to shop the demo to various record labels, who responded with indifference and viewed the band as too extreme and uncommercial.Template:Sfn According to Carlson, the demo was rejected by Combat, Metal Blade, and New Renaissance Records. In May 1986,Template:Sfn Genocide changed their name to Repulsion, after the Roman Polanski film of the same name, due to the existence of several other bands under their former name.Template:Sfn

Development

Olivo said that 75–80% of the songs on Horrified were written while Repulsion was known as Genocide.Template:Sfn All but eight of the album's songs are taken from the band's previous demos,Template:Sfn and most were completed before Freeman joined the band.Template:Sfn The intro of "The Stench of Burning Death" was taken from the chorus of an old Repulsion song titled "Crack of Doom".Template:Sfn "Six Feet Under", "Decomposed", and "The Lurking Fear" were written during Carlson and Olivo's time with Schuldiner and Death in Florida.Template:Sfn Carlson and Olivo were primarily responsible for the album's writing, either through the former bringing in a complete song that the latter would contribute to or both of them combining their ideas in equal measure.Template:Sfn Freeman contributed to the writing of "Eaten Alive",Template:Sfn "Acid Bath",Template:Sfn "Crematorium",Template:Sfn and "Splattered Cadavers".Template:Sfn Carlson later described his and Olivo's organization style as a "dictatorship" that he believed was not enjoyable for Hollingshead.Template:Sfn Although he said Repulsion "kind of ended up using [him] as a drum machine", Olivo felt Hollingshead brought in his own influences, such as with his use of downbeats when playing blast beats.Template:Sfn Freeman highlighted Hollingshead's use of swing beats on "Slaughter of the Innocent" and "Bodily Dismemberment" as representing his experience in hardcore and funk bands.Template:Sfn

In June 1986, Repulsion recorded Horrified, then known as Slaughter of the Innocent,Template:Sfn at the basement studio of engineer Larry Hennessy.Template:Sfn According to Freeman, the album was recorded in three to four days, with two days spent on drums and another two days on guitars and vocals.Template:Sfn Carlson said the recording marked the first time Repulsion's members had to be isolated from one another, which "threw everybody off" and made the band less "tight" than they had been during rehearsals.Template:Sfn Repulsion self-funded the album's recording due to the lack of label interest.Template:Sfn Doug Earp, the owner of a local record store called Wyatt Earp, paid the recording costs of US$300; the band did not pay him back until the album was released.Template:Sfn Carlson said that Repulsion had intended to release Slaughter of the Innocent as an album rather than a demo, either through their own or an established label, but were unhappy with Hennessy's recording.

Hollingshead recorded his parts in the studio's utility room with a Tama Rockstar drum kit. Olivo tracked his parts in the control room with a Vantage Flying V; Freeman also used a Gibson Flying V.Template:Sfn Situated in a room between Hollingshead and Olivo, Carlson recorded his parts—intended as scratch tracks—with a Squier P Bass into a Boss distortion pedal connected to a DI box at the recording console,Template:Sfn so Hollingshead could hear them while recording drums. He described the resulting sound—which William York of AllMusic called "an unholy mess of distorted sludge"—as a "happy accident". The guitars and bass tracks were re-recorded thereafter. According to Carlson, the re-recorded bass tracks were lost when Hennessy "blew over" them during the recording of guitar solo overdubs, resulting in his scratch tracks being used on the final album.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Prior to recording, Carlson caught strep throat but continued to practice vocals and "didn't let [his] voice heal properly", resulting in it permanently moving to a higher register after the studio sessions.Template:Sfn

Composition and lyrics

Horrified consists of 18 songs with a running time of just under 30 minutes, with its tracks averaging around one to two minutes in length. Carlson cited Discharge as an influence on the album's length, stating that the band "needed 30 minutes, we figured—we were really into punk bands—and Discharge albums were about 30 minutes long, so we figured '18 songs'."Template:Sfn Musically, the album has been described as both grindcore and death metal. RevolverTemplate:'s Eli Enis viewed the album as a "missing link between mid-Eighties American thrash and early English grindcore", while Alex DiStefano of the Phoenix New Times described it as a "hybrid" of death metal and hardcore punk. Backed by raw production, the album's songs are fast-paced and show few signs of groove and melody. They feature thrash metal riffs and blast beats, as well as "noisy whammy-bar-eruption solos" reminiscent of Slayer. Carlson's distorted bass was influenced by Motörhead, Discharge, and Venom. At the time of HorrifiedTemplate:'s recording, Hollingshead said he was listening to "death metal, anything fast—Slayer, Metallica, Sodom, [Corrosion of Conformity], D.R.I., GBH, [and] Black Flag."Template:Sfn Alexander Santelt of Metal.de described the album's drumming as "chaotic, yet extremely driving".

J. Bennett of Terrorizer described the lyrics of Horrified as "blood soaked".Template:Sfn DiStefano said that they tell stories of "cannibalism, rancid corpses, zombies, blood, gore, the horrors of war, and the apocalypse." Santelt writes that while the lyrics are primarily focused on "gore horror", songs such as "Slaughter of the Innocent" show elements of "socially critical hardcore". In a 2012 interview with BrooklynVegan, Carlson said that his lyrics were "a product of [his] surroundings", with some songs "conveying real fears and emotion while others are just pure exploitative fun." He drew influence from splatter films such as Dawn of the Dead and Evil Dead, horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and Twisted Tales, and the bands Crucifix and Discharge. He credited the latter with influencing the lyrics of "The Stench of Burning Death", "Slaughter of the Innocent", and "Pestilent Decay". Carlson's vocals, influenced by Cronos and Jeff Becera,Template:Sfn were called "brutal" by Distefano and likened to a guttural, "zombie-fied version" of Slayer's Tom Araya by Enis. York called them a "mid-range sneer" that would differ from the "exaggerated Cookie Monster style of much later grindcore".

"Slaughter of the Innocent" is about the end of the world and was musically written by Carlson and Olivo with Discharge and Celtic Frost in mind.Template:Sfn According to Carlson, "Decomposed" is the "ballad of a flesh-eating zombie".Template:Sfn Selected as one of the album's highlights by York, "Radiation Sickness" was described by Joe DiVita of Loudwire as "a frenzied attack of clanging cymbal bashing and gnashing guitars". DecibelTemplate:'s Gregg Pratt described "Splattered Cadavers" as "speedgrindmayhem". The lyrics of "Festering Boils" were taken—largely unaltered—from a "rought draft" written by Carlson's friend Jim Mark.Template:Sfn "Crematorium" was the last song written for Horrified, being completed days before recording commenced.Template:Sfn The song's lyrics were written by Carlson, Freeman, and Dejecta vocalist Lee Williams,Template:Sfn the latter of whom Carlson later called its "main songwriter". "Driven to Insanity" was inspired by Re-AnimatorTemplate:Sfn and features a "victorious", galloping punk riff. "The Lurking Fear" was titled after the short story of the same name by H.P. Lovecraft, although its lyrics "have nothing to do with it", according to Carlson.Template:Sfn "Black Breath" was inspired by the Nazgûls of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings series and is the only song on Horrified to not feature a blast beat.Template:Sfn Carlson wrote the lyrics of "Maggots in Your Coffin" after its title was suggested by Tom Puro, a friend of Repulsion.Template:Sfn

Release

Repulsion hoped the Slaughter of the Innocent demo would garner them label attention, and its subsequent failure to do so left them feeling confused and disillusioned.Template:Sfn In July 1986, Hollingshead left Repulsion to join the Army, which Carlson attributed to him and Olivo constantly pushing him to play faster.Template:Sfn The band recruited Tom Puro as a replacement drummer that month.Template:Sfn By this point, Carlson felt that Repulsion had said all that they needed to with Horrified and were creatively burnt out.Template:Sfn The band subsequently disbanded following one final performance in September 1986.Template:Sfn At Earp's request, the Horrified lineup would reunite twice thereafter to perform at the Fallout Shelter in Flint on November 7, 1987, and January 1, 1988.Template:Sfn In a 2020 interview with Echoes and Dust, Carlson said that Hollingshead's departure and the birth of Freeman's son shortly after the recording of Horrified resulted in "a transitional period [that] we just never recovered from", and believed at the time that the album "would just be forgotten forever" after record labels showed no immediate interest in Repulsion. In the intervening years, the Slaughter of the Innocent demo was circulated in tape-trading circles.Template:Sfn At the urging of Napalm Death bassist Shane Embury, who was pen pals with Freeman, Digby Pearson of Earache Records contacted Repulsion in early 1989 with an offer to release their album.Template:Sfn Carlson said that, ironically, Earache was one of the few labels Repulsion did not send their demo to, as they had only put out two releases at the time—a reissue of The Accüsed's debut album and a flexi release by Heresy.Template:Sfn

With some funding from Pearson,Template:Sfn Slaughter of the Innocent was remixed in March 1989 at Silver Tortoise Soundlab in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by Carlson, Freeman, and Jonas Berzanskis. Hennessy was supposed to work on the mix, but Repulsion could not contact him when it was time to do so.Template:Sfn Around this time, Jeff Walker and Bill Steer of Carcass expressed interest in signing Repulsion to a record label they wanted to form to exploit the Enterprise Allowance Scheme.Template:Sfn Walker said that Pearson was afraid that—like Heresy had done in the past—Carcass was attempting to secede from Earache.Template:Sfn Ultimately, Walker and Steer agreed to release Repulsion's album through their own Earache sublabel, Necrosis Records.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Prior to its release, Carlson changed the name from Slaughter of the Innocent to Horrified, which he considered a better fit for its cover artwork.Template:Sfn The album was released through Necrosis and Earache on July 10, 1989.

Artwork

The cover of Horrified, illustrated by Carlson in the style of EC Comics, was inspired by a story in Twisted Tales about a "burned up kid who comes back from the dead on Halloween and goes trick-or-treating."Template:Sfn Mike Grossklaus, who worked on its layout, initially drew the album's cover,Template:Sfn which Carlson described as a "sort of psychedelic blur of a photo of a guy getting his head blown off". Earache rejected Grossklaus' cover, and Walker ended up handling the artwork uncredited. According to Carlson, Walker enlarged and painted over his illustration to depict a "rotten, green zombie", unaware of its intended representation of a "burned up kid".Template:Sfn Phil Skarich, whom Carlson knew from a band he was in called From Beyond, drew the liner notes artwork.

Olivo, who was stationed in Germany with the Army at the time of its release, recalled that his first thought upon receiving a copy of the album was Template:" 'Goddamn, this is shitty looking!' [...] that cover is just fucking awful", although he was happy with the rest of its packaging.Template:Sfn In a 2004 interview, Carlson criticized the cover for deviating from its intended idea and said it was "terrible and we're stuck with it cos that's what people have seen." Conversely, Freeman considered the cover to be the "better choice" in hindsight, calling it Repulsion's version of Eddie.Template:Sfn Bennett described the cover as "iconic".Template:Sfn

Reception and legacy

In his retrospective review for AllMusic,Template:Efn York writes that Horrified is "widely regarded as a classic album" amongst grindcore fans as well as one of its most influential early works, though it could still be enjoyed as a "direct blast of youthful, horror-inspired thrash/grind mayhem" without having to consider its impact or legacy. Kerrang! stated in 2019 that HorrifiedTemplate:'s "agitated pace is also what gives [the album] its charm, and for a generation of kids uninterested in a lot of extreme metal's technical obsession, the record became influential beyond anyone's wildest dreams." In 2021, Alexander Santelt of Metal.de wrote that the album "remains absolutely relevant today, both as a historical audio document and the birth of [grindcore], but also as a still incredibly entertaining, [...] primitively antisocial, yet charming and catchy blast." Calling it the genre's "first, and definitive" album and crediting it with "legitimizing the blast beat by employing it in bulk", Andrew Bonzanelli of Decibel ranked it first on the magazine's list of "The Top 30 Grindcore Albums of All Time" in 2009.Template:Sfn That same year, Terrorizer ranked it second on their list of the 20 best American grindcore albums, stating that Repulsion was "directly and indirectly responsible for [the existence of] every other band" on their list.Template:Sfn Kerrang! and Metal Hammer also listed it as one of the genre's most essential albums. Horrified has also been credited with pioneering the goregrind subgenre.Template:Sfn

Bennett remarked that although many did not understand Repulsion's style at the time of HorrifiedTemplate:'s recording in 1986, "the handful that did would go on to form bands that would define grindcore and death metal in the late '80s and early '90s". As the Slaughter of the Innocent demo, Horrified garnered a following from "aspiring extremists" such as Nickie Andersson, Lee Dorrian, and Fenriz of Darkthrone,Template:Sfn the latter of whom would get a matching tattoo of the album cover on his arm.Template:Sfn Embury and Mitch Harris both cited the album as a massive influence on Napalm Death,Template:Sfn who also covered "Maggots in Your Coffin" on their 1999 covers EP Leaders Not Followers. Entombed recorded a cover of "Black Breath" for a 7" single in 1994.Template:Sfn Anders Björler of At the Gates credited his experience listening to Horrified at the house of bandmate Tomas Lindberg with exposing him to grindcore and death metal.Template:Sfn Brutal Truth bassist Dan Lilker said he was surprised at the speed of Repulsion when he first heard the album in demo form in the mid-1980s;Template:Sfn vocalist Kevin Sharp considered Carlson's bass tone to be genre-defining for grindcore, comparing it to the influence of the Ramones' "riffing" on punk music and Dave Lombardo's "Reign in Blood beat" on thrash metal.Template:Sfn Soilwork drummer Dirk Verbeuren expressed admiration for the album, which he considered a "grindcore milestone".Template:Sfn Mortiis cited the album as an influence. Horrified has also been described as laying the groundwork for other bands, including Cannibal Corpse, Death, and Pestilence.

Aftermath

Repulsion reunited in 1990 and produced two demos and an extended play, Excrutiation (1991), through Relapse Records.Template:Sfn The EP's success led Relapse to re-release Horrified in 1992, with new artwork and the bonus track "Black Nightmare", taken from Repulsion's Stench of Burning Death demo.Template:Sfn In a 2004 interview, Carlson and Freeman said that the album had sold 6,000 copies through Earache and another 5,000 through Relapse. The band disbanded at the end of 1992, due to Carlson losing interest and moving out of Flint.Template:Sfn

On February 4, 2003, Relapse reissued Horrified again with a bonus CD consisting of various demos and other recordings titled Rarities. Shortly after its release, Repulsion were offered a headlining slot at the final Milwaulkee Metalfest, leading to their reunion; the band has continued to tour and perform, primarily at festivals, since then.Template:Sfn In 2009, Repulsion performed the album in its entireity in New York City with Pig Destroyer and Brutal Truth. The band initially reformed with its Horrified line-up; by 2013, Carlson remained its sole constant member.Template:Sfn

To date, Horrified remains Repulsion's sole album.Template:Sfn When asked about the possibility of recording new material in a 2012 interview with BrooklynVegan, Carlson said that if "the material and motivation ever come together, I think [Repulsion] could do something that would not tarnish our name". In the 2016 edition of Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore, he said that new material would have to come naturally instead of forcing it, but otherwise believed audiences would not be interested in it.Template:Sfn

Personnel

Personnel adapted from liner notes.

Repulsion

• Aaron Freeman - guitar, mixing
• Matt Olivo - guitar
• Scott Carlson - bass, vocals, mixing
• Dave Hollingshead - drums

Production

• Doug Earp - production
• Repulsion - production
• Larry Hennessy - recording, engineering
• Jonas Berzanskis - mixing

Artwork

• Scott Carlson - cover illustration
• Jeff Walker - artwork (uncredited)Template:Sfn
• Phil Skarich - inner artwork
• Mike Grossklaus - layout

Bibliography

• Template:Cite work
• Template:Cite work

External links

• Horrified on YouTube (streamed copy where licensed)