A warehouse find of the 1996 cassette version of Massacre's radical music departure / oddity Promise!

Maybe not up to the level of stylistic what-the-fucks like Cold Lake or Grave New World, this is definitely still one of the weirdest left-field excursions from a 1990s death metal band. This had wigs spinning like crazy when it came out - part of the nascent Floridian death metal scene (and featuring members with ties to the legendary Death), Massacre's 1991 debut album From Beyond was a minor celebrity in Floridian death metal circles, and certainly delivered the goods if you were a devotee of that sound. So when the band resurfaced five years later with their follow-up Promise, most listeners didn't know what to think. The once vicious death metal carnage of their early material had now transmuted into a kind of experimental goth metal, or something along those lines. Easily one of the biggest curveball sophomore albums I can think of. And widely panned - just looking back over the reviews online is a bit brutal.

But it has its fans, like me ...

Taking it on its own terms, Promise is actually a strange mixture of gothic doom and knuckle-dragging industrial death metal with plenty of interesting things going on, alongside the moments of inarguable heaviness. The sound on Promise is big and cavernous, initially erupting in volleys of double bass, stomping groove-thrash riffing alternating with a slower, scooped out doom-death like crush. Guttural thrash metal-style vocals show up, shifting into weirdly catatonic moaning and menacing whispers on tracks like "Nothing"; that opener is pretty basic post-thrash barbarism with interesting death metal guitar sound and offbeat vocals swirled into it. Moving further in, cold, chorus-drenched guitar leads waver around chant-like backing vocal parts that pop up throughout, leading into the more straight-forward mid-tempo death metal of "Forever Torn". "Black Soil Nest" and "Suffering" are even more overtly death metal in style, with a couple of ass-kicking riffs amid harsher, demonic barking vocals, some pretty goddamn heavy shit punctuated with a kind of quasi-industrial metallic clank. There's wandering, almost proggy bass guitar and eerie harmonized vocals that show up as well; hell, with it's factory-grade inhumanity, freaked out soloing, and skull-caving staccato riffs, some of these songs really don't sound too far removed from what Napalm Death were doing circa Diatribes. Maybe.

So this is all a bit more interesting than I thought it was going to be going in, certainly heavy as fuck, yes, perhaps unimaginative in the lyrical department, but the "groove metal" label that so many online commentators have slapped on Promise seems less appropriate the further I get into this disc. Sure, the weaker songs like "Bitter End" and "Unnameable" definitely lean harder on the chug-a-thon grooviness and start-stop rhythmic crunch, but there's bulldozing down-tuned crush galore with the seething, sneering "Where Dwells Sadness" and that mechanized mid-paced grind on "Suffering" that fuckin' punishes. And the last song "Inner Demon" is another straight-up death metal slammer, frontman Kam Lee busting out some of his sickest shrieks alongside the guttural lows, steamrolling heaviness guiding Promise to its embittered end amid squalls of freaked-out , atmospheric, divebar-blasting solos
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But then right smack dab in the middle of the album is that cover of Concrete Blonde's "Bloodletting" with some hilariously Pete Steele-on-barbiturates / post-peanut butter sandwich crooning and cranked up metallic rendition - it's just so weird and ill-advised and what-the-fuck. Most definitely an uneven and unfocused album, sure. And marred by the adolescent angry lovesick lyrics that devolve into some laughable misogyny at certain points. But it's also pretty quirked out, and absolutely skull-stomping at times. One of Florida death metal's weirdest moments, for sure.