Morbid Angel: Altering the Course of Time

Blessed Are The Sick is my favorite Death Metal album. It's an unusual choice. Albums like Altars of Madness and Covenant enjoy much more popularity, but you already know what I think about popularity. Released in 1991. Just 39 minutes. And nothing sounded the same after it.

Some people say that Portal is the equivalent of David Lynch making a Death Metal album. Maybe. But without Blessed Are The Sick, Portal wouldn't exist. This album doesn't seek to confirm anything. Its purpose is far more brutal than that: to destroy everything we thought we knew.

I bought it at that hidden store that few of us knew about in the '90s. You know which one. The kind of place where you found things that shouldn't exist yet.

The album was conceived in the epicenter of Florida Death Metal: Morrisound Studio, the same space where Death and Obituary had created genre classics. Many expected a continuation of Altars of Madness, just as fast and brutal. But Morbid Angel wasn't interested in repeating themselves.

Trey Azagthoth, the band's creative mastermind, set the course. More influences from classical music, mainly Mozart. A slower, denser, more disturbing sound. For Azagthoth, Blessed Are The Sick is an album of music played backwards. And it's not a metaphor. Many of the riffs and guitar solos sound exactly like that: inverted, as if they were arriving from the future into the present. Like Christopher Nolan's Tenet, two decades earlier. Or later?

Azagthoth had been listening to music backwards for months and wanted to translate that effect into his new compositions. The result is something the brain recognizes as music but the body feels as an anomaly. Richard Brunelle was tasked with joining him on the other guitar during that adventure. And Pete Sandoval, behind the drums, defied all known laws of physics with a precision that doesn't seem human.

The context makes it all even stranger. Hair metal was in full decline. The independent underground of the '80s was beginning to surface. It seemed like extreme metal bands were about to have their big moment. It was the perfect instant to release something massive and definitive. And it was right then that Morbid Angel chose to release one of their rarest, darkest, and most difficult to digest albums. That's what makes them great.

Blessed Are The Sick is not an album to play in the background. It's an album to listen to with full attention, in silence, and feel how time bends beneath your feet. As if the clock stopped turning in one direction and suddenly everything flowed the other way.