NECROPSY, Another World (1991, demo)

The skull:
By now, you’d think we’d have encountered pretty much every situation a skull can get himself into, more or less, but this is definitely the first time we’ve seen a skull splashing out of a lake. He’s like some grim aquatic jack-in-the-box, and he looks every-so-pleased with himself. Of course, after he’s popped out of the water and scared the shit out of you, he doesn’t have a lot left to offer. He bobs there, grinning and dripping, and you admit, “Ha ha, you got me dude!” and then there’s an awkward silence, neither of you really knowing what to say, before he slowly sinks back into the water to wait for the next hiking sucker to stroll by his pristine Finnish lake, and you continue on your walk, thinking, “What a dick.”

The music:
Necropsy were one of those bands that released a ton of demos, but never managed a proper album. Usually these bands are terrible, so I didn’t approach Necropsy with much excitement, but now I realize they must just have been unlucky, because they were rather good. The band that immediately came to mind when I started listening to Another World was Demigod, and in fact the two issued a split EP together. Another World offers measured, precise, mid-to-fast paced death metal that isn’t tripping over its own feet trying to out-brutal every other death metal band out there. I’d also say that the basic template for Necropsy came from Florida, not Scandinavia, although the occasional keyboards and snippets of weird melody will quickly dispel any confusion between Necropsy and, say, Malevolent Creation. Another World also bears more than a passing trace of the thrash that spawned all death metal in the early days, although subsequent demos by the band evidenced fewer and fewer of these tendencies. All in all, this is a fine demo, and not even too bad sounding for the times, but the advent of Entombed and the explosion of creativity in the death metal scene at the dawn of the 90s probably made it very difficult for even solid bands like Necropsy to find a deal when they lacked any obvious hook or novelty. In retrospect, a lot of the junk that was signed and released in that period was a lot worse than Necropsy, but that’s just how it goes. Century Media just released a sprawling collection of every Necropsy demo, though, which I’d highly recommend to enthusiasts of this critical period in the evolution of death metal.
— Friar Johnsen