siLLy puPPy The Napa, California based death metal band ABIOSIS released not one but two demos in 1992 which made me wonder why they didn’t just release one of a longer playing time? I dunno how these things worked back then so whatever. THE KILLING followed the eponymous debut demo and showcased a slightly more sophisticated development which thankfully included a more robust display of drumming duties courtesy of drummer Lincoln Lucas who sounded pretty lazy on the first run.

This demo featured five tracks and discovered the art of death-doom as well as blastbeats! Yay! Taking influences from all the old school deathies such as Morbid Angel, Obituary and Autopsy, ABIOSIS showcased a competent style of old school death metal that was just a wee bit too late to arrive at the death metal party in 1992. This second demo certainly shows significant improvement with a more diverse display of metal madness ranging from Black Sabbath infused traditional doomy molasses metal to fully fueled death metal on lightning bolt mode.

Raw and unfucked with in terms of production, this band displayed a clear loyalty to the death metal paradigm of the day but didn’t quite have the chops to take things above and beyond the call of duty and therefore has been relegated to a tiny footnote in the world of extreme metal having been buried manyfold by countless death metal bands with a keener sense of creative expression, however this is not a bad release by any means. While generic in many senses for those well attuned to the nuances of death metal, this band does have subtle indescribable idiosyncrasies.

Both THE KILLING demo and the previous eponymous demo were released in 2017 as the compilation album “Absence of Life” which allows detective sleuths of all things old school death metal to relish in glee.