...AND THEN COMES LIVIDITY

"...and Then Comes Lividity" is a demo tape by Canadian death metal act Gorguts. The demo ultimately led to a record deal with Roadrunner Records. There are 5 tracks on the 15:07 minutes long demo of which the first is a short intro. The original cassette tape demo is of course long out of print but the material are available on the Galy Records "Demo Anthology (2003)" compilation album.

I read about the demo in a Danish metal magazine I was reading at the time the demo was released (1990). I remember the reviewer praised the demo very highly and listening to "...and Then Comes Lividity" today I do understand his enthusiasm. Quite a bit of water have run under the bridge since then though and my experience with the demo today is a bit different than it might have been back then. The music on the demo is old school US influenced death metal but the playing is on a pretty high technical level and "...and Then Comes Lividity" is an example of the more technical early US death metal releases. References to especially Death are inevitable, both because Luc Lemay has a similar high pitched growling style to Chuck Schuldiner (Death), but also because the riffing style on "...and Then Comes Lividity" is comparable to the riffing style on "Leprosy (1988)" and especially to the riffing style on "Spiritual Healing (1990)". Both seminal early death metal albums by Death.

Out of the 5 tracks on the demo only the short intro "...And Then Comes Lividity" and "Haematological Allergy" made it unto Gorguts debut album "Considered Dead (1991)". The compositional level on the demo is generally pretty high but I´ve always felt that the early releases by Gorguts lacked memorability and that includes the tracks on "...and Then Comes Lividity". The sound quality is decent but not really well sounding. Don´t expect a professional sounding production.

"...and Then Comes Lividity" is a testimony to how technical death metal sounded in 1990. Only a few years later the genre had progressed considerably and if you compare this demo to the output by some of the most prolific acts in the technical death metal genre like Atheist, Cynic, Pestilence and Death it doesn´t really hold up to those high standards. The comparison might not be all that fair but it´s meant to give you a picture of the quality level of the music on the demo. This is of course a demo and that should be taken into consideration before hard judgements are made. Gorguts do show some promising signs of future greatness and a 2.5 - 3 star (55%) rating is warranted.