SPIRITUAL HEALING

Just 2 years after the release of Leprosy and 3 years after the release of Scream Bloody Gore, Chuck Schuldiner and Death are back once again with yet another astonishing release, called Spiritual Healing. It is important to note that it is with Spiritual Healing that Death and Chuck make their first major turn in their careers, since it's here that the thematics of the lyrics change from the infamous and fantasious gory lyrics that characterized (and still characterizes) death metal to more real lyrics, that talk about earthly issues, like teenage pregnancy, abortion and psychological, spiritual and social issues. Indeed, in this album the death metal gets closer to our everyday lives, getting more serious that the simple lyrical splatter movie musical extravaganza the genre was so far.

However, if in the lyrical department things were almost completely changed, the musical department was still very close to the previous albums. OK, i have to admit that the instrumentation is better, meaning that the band is giving more attention to the technicality instead of just playing their instruments and, because of that, the songs get a lot clearer and easier to listen. The vocals also have this improvement and Chuck's pronunciation in Spiritual Healing is probably his best ever. I mean, if you are used to death growls you don't even need to read the lyrics to understand what he is singing.

About the songs, musicianship and other features, there are somethings i would like to state:

As i said before, this album is technically superior, musically speaking, to the first and second Death albums and that is a great improvement since you can now appreciate better what the band is playing instead of just focusing in how extreme they are. However, it must be said that they only improved the way they played, what does not means that the songs are much harder to play (or they don't seem so), only that they are better executed.

The songs are all amazing. I seriously can't see a bad song in this album, so i won't: i will not point the best songs of this album, for they are all very good. Nonetheless, i don't think that Spiritual Healing is a masterpiece. The songs are just not as mind-blowing as the ones in Human, Symbolic or The Sound of Perseverance, but the album is still very good.

Grade and Final Thoughts

A great album, with great song, but not god enough to be a masterpiece? The only option left is give it the 4 star grade and, in fact, it seems to me as a fair grade indeed.

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