BRUTAL RECALL: Blessed Are The Sick – Morbid Angel
In storied annals of death metal history, there’s few bands like MORBID ANGEL. One of the strongest bands to rise from the Tampa death metal scene, the quartet were led by the eccentric guitarist Trey Azagthoth and death metal’s greatest rockstar David Vincent for their most prolific decade, releasing four stone-cold classics that take a place of honour in every death metal collection. Debut album Altars Of Madness might just go down as one of the best debuts of all time, ferocious and positively drenched in piss and vinegar it set a new standard for death metal for decades to come. Covenant has remained a cult classic since its release as the only record the band released as a trio, while 1995’s Domination – which saw MORBID ANGEL join forces with death metal virtuoso Erik Rutan – would prove to be the band’s most accessible album to date, offering a new blueprint for groove-focussed death metal as the 90s marched to an end and the 21st century began.
Blessed Are The Sick, however, is the album under the spotlight today. Celebrating its 30th birthday this year, MORBID ANGEL’s second album was a vital step for the band, doubling down on the quality of Altars Of Madness while keeping momentum rolling and ideas fresh, Blessed Are The Sick was the kind of second album, the sort of follow up to a magical debut, that most bands could only dream of creating.
“You have your whole life to write your first record, you only have a year, and change, to write your second.” Reflects Vincent on the progression within the band between Altars Of Madness and Blessed Are The Sick. “We didn’t really concern ourselves too much with that, we didn’t feel necessarily pressured to follow a timeline. But all of our records sound different, they all have their own timestamp as we grow as musicians, presumably becoming better players and better at our craft, and having a bit more of a budget in the studio to experiment more. That was always the main thing; with Altars of Madness we had a five grand budget – of course we went over that, as most people do, but we kept it in check as best we could. But we were pretty well rehearsed so we went in and chopped it together as quick as we could. With Blessed Are the Sick, the budget loosened up a bit and we had the privilege of being able to experiment more with different soundscapes and adding things that are best experimented with in the studio, like the keyboard stuff and the effects we used. Not having a keyboard player in the band per se, Trey and I came up with a lot of that stuff on the fly. With each record we had a bit more time, a bit more prowess and a bit more skill to realise some of these spontaneous creative moments [and Blessed Are The Sick was the start of that].”
Of all of MORBID ANGEL’s records, Blessed Are The Sick stands out in many ways – it smashed the expectations of what a follow-up to Altars Of Madness might sound like, it was a real taste of growth in the progression of Azagthoth and Vincent as songwriters, and it was one of the first real signs that death metal could maintain all of its brutality, all of its raw savagery, while bringing new levels of dynamism and artistry into play. However, away from the music itself, Blessed Are The Sick also stands out in MORBID ANGEL’s discography due to its cover art – a hellish 18th century painting entitled The Treasures of Satan by Belgian symbolist Jean Delville.
“At the time when we were on tour – and I still do this as much as possible – I would get out and visit museums and take in as much local culture as time constraints would permit. I saw that piece in a museum while touring Altars Of Madness in Europe, and I was just immediately moved by it. It was beautiful, it wasn’t tragic, it wasn’t necessarily negative in its demonic way, to me it looked almost like a perfect Garden of Eden. The fire and the energy in the painting, I felt it grab me. I immediately spoke with our manager and asked how we could secure it for an album cover.” Vincent reminisces on seeing The Treasures of Satan for the first time, before detailing how the visual representation of Blessed Are The Sick impacted the album itself.
“When we went to record Altars Of Madness, we had a certain amount of existing material but we wanted to do new stuff as well, so we split the tracks that ended up being recorded from the Abominations Of Desolation session between record one and two, mostly. The new material written for Blessed Are The Sick, I ran in the direction of the feeling I got from the artwork. It was lush, majestic, glorious, symphonic, all of these are music descriptors but they’re descriptors I felt in the painting. I look at that painting, and I imagine myself being in that river of souls, that’s where I was at. When I wrote the title track for Blessed Are The Sick, that song is 100% inspired by the feelings I got while looking at that art.”
It’s pretty fascinating to think that had Vincent missed whatever museum was housing the Treasures of Satan in 1990, MORBID ANGEL would have gone in a very different, totally unknowable direction for their second album. The butterfly effect in action.
While he is in a reflective mood, it’s impossible for the question of how he, David Vincent, himself sees Blessed Are The Sick today, over 30 years on from its creation not to cross one’s mind. So how does he feel looking back on the record, and, if he can stretch his mind back, how does he think Blessed Are The Sick eventually impacted the rest of MORBID ANGEL?
“I look at all the records in the same way – they are a timestamp of where I was, and indeed where all of MORBID ANGEL were, at the time. Thankfully, they’ve all withstood the test of time. We had our own sound, Blessed Are The Sick doesn’t really sound like any of our contemporaries at the time, which is fine because it was never our goal to sound like band A, B or C – we wanted to sound like MORBID ANGEL. When it came time to write, we looked inward. I think that’s a big part of why we had a unique sound, a unique approach to our craft – we weren’t concerning ourselves with what anyone else was doing, we were only concerned with what we were doing… It wasn’t until later on I realised people were moved by it, we wrote what moved us and thankfully it didn’t get lost on deaf ears. If I had to do Blessed Are The Sick again, I can’t imagine doing it any other way – we try to please ourselves first and foremost in that we’re releasing the energy and the creativity inside us.” Vincent contemplates, before discussing the impact of the record on MORBID ANGEL in a broader sense.
“We opened Blessed Are The Sick with a slow riff, and of course everyone said we slowed down – but really, the faster tracks on that record are faster than anything that’s on Altars Of Madness [laughs]. There’s a lot of variety, there’s a lot of emotion – there’s fast, there’s slow, there’s mid-paced stuff, there’s stuff that’s more lush and stuff that’s brutal.” He continues, discussing the ‘new’ way MORBID ANGEL would write that all started with Blessed Are The Sick. “That was something we enjoyed, making an album that wasn’t just a one-to-ten bludgeon the whole way. A bit of calm before the storm.”
Having discussed Blessed Are The Sick in an abstract fashion, you have to ask – what was life actually like in MORBID ANGEL at the time? Vincent and Azagthoth have had their differences over the years, and this romanticised view we have of a band being four or five best friends on the road together is rarely the reality. However, Vincent speaks fondly of the Blessed Are The Sick days.
“We were really getting somewhere, we were realising that what we were doing was starting to get some traction. We were always convinced that we liked what we were doing, and people would catch up if it didn’t hit them right away. We spent a lot of time together, we would rehearse constantly and we spent so much time together socialising as well – we knew each other really well. I wouldn’t say by any stretch that MORBID ANGEL was purely a business relationship, not by any means. We felt good together; the shows were getting better, we weren’t just eating bologna sandwiches every day. We were starting to reap the rewards from our hard work and being in the trenches together.”
There’s few words that can describe Blessed Are The Sick quite as well as ‘a true masterpiece.’ Tempering the raw savagery of their early work into a more refined form of brutality, this was the beginning of MORBID ANGEL’s most recognisable sonic profile. Dynamic, artistic, a soundscape built on more than pure bludgeoning. Death metal has come a long, long way in the last 30 years, but there’s still few albums that can match Blessed Are The Sick.
Blessed Are The Sick was originally released on May 22nd 1991 via Earache Records.
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