Classic Album Review : Cryptopsy - Blasphemy Made Flesh (1994)
Being a metalhead in high school in the nineties (boy, do I know a thing or two about that) was basically a perpetual scavenger hunt to find the most extreme-sounding band in existence. At first, the search was rather linear: there was Slayer, then Suffocation and Cannibal Corpse. There was somewhat of a sonic logic to it and each time, it seemed like the logical endpoint for extreme music, whatever that meant. We didn't think too much about it.
Extreme was something you either felt or not.
But somewhere along the way, the whole idea of what it meant to be extreme got slippery. Was it the fastest drummer? The most incomprehensible lyrics about things you didn’t even realize the human body could endure? The rawest, most barbarically produced album that still technically counted as "music"? Or were the most extreme musicians the ones who could play sixteenth notes at 240 BPM and quote obscure jazz theory in an interview? No one knew anymore.
I suspect this problem with meaning started with the release of Cryptopsy's debut record Blasphemy Made Flesh in 1994. This record was everything at once: blisteringly fast, unapologetically blasphemous, surgically technical, sonically grotesque, and, somehow, mind-expanding. It didn’t raise the bar for metal musicianship so much as replace the bar entirely with some unknowable alien measuring system. The first two Cryptopsy records were an unexpected big bang moment for extreme metal.
Blasphemy Made Flesh is ten songs and thirty-nine minutes long, slightly more than the eight-song, thirty-something-minute formula that would later make Cryptopsy iconic. This is basically None So Vile: Volume Zero, a rawer, more catastrophic prequel to the masterpiece of controlled chaos that metalheads are still romanticizing three decades later, the way some people can’t stop talking about “that one ex” even though she’s now married, lives in another province, and definitely doesn’t remember your birthday.
The highs here climb just as far into the stratosphere, but the terrain between them is a little rockier, a sliver less consistent, like they were not sure where the fuck they wanted to take this freight train.
The opener Defenestration is one of my favorite onslaughts from Cryptopsy’s catalogue. It’s savage and animalistic, helped by a Lord Worm an unsuspecting world was hearing for the very first time, yet weirdly groovy, as if the boogeyman decided to chase you in 7/8 time. The tempo changes are stranger than they have any right to be, the bass popping in ways that feel almost disrespectful to the concept of bass in death metal. It’s slimy, toxic music, the kind you imagine oozing under your bedroom door at 3 a.m.
And then there’s that moment: the song stops, dead, halfway through, whether by production glitch or compositional sadism, and then reanimates itself into something even more savage. It’s the musical equivalent of an assassin stabbing you once, pausing to look you in the eye, and then stabbing you harder. This kind of hard turn was rare in 1994. Honestly, it’s rare now. Few death metal bands dare to be this unpredictable even today.
Open Face Surgery is the other undisputed classic here, and maybe the best single example of the savagery-vs-technicality knife fight that defines Cryptopsy’s classic era. It’s also home to two of Lord Worm’s most immortal high-pitched shrieks: sounds that don’t even feel human, more like cassette tapes of a banshee being rewound at high speed. Lord Worm became legendary for mangling his own lyrics until they were more texture than language, inventing a kind of feral Esperanto in the process.
You don’t need to know a single word in Open Face Surgery to understand it’s about pain. Not metaphorical pain, not artistic pain: actual, physical, someone-is-holding-you-down-while-you’re-being-tortured pain.
I don’t think anything else on Blasphemy Made Flesh quite scales the Kilimanjaro-of-the-extreme heights reached by Defenestration and Open Face Surgery, but Born Headless has always had a place in my personal shrine. It’s pure, unfiltered aggression, the kind of track that could soundtrack grainy, found-footage clips recovered from a serial killer’s storage unit, complete with inexplicable jump cuts and a single bare lightbulb swinging overhead.
Sonically, we’re closer to early Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse than to the controlled chaos of None So Vile, but the unhinged, over-the-top hostility here feels like an actual assault caught on tape. And then there’s that throwback solo at the end, less a "lead break" than a raised middle finger to subtlety, that gives the song an extra edge you won’t find anywhere else on the record. It’s ugly, it’s primal, but in the best possible way. The ugly, primal that makes you impossible to forget.
There are other fun and completely unhinged tracks on Blasphemy Made Flesh that still mess with the boundaries of what death metal is "supposed" to sound like, even thirty years later. The alien spasm of Abigor. The gloomy, suffocating Serial Messiah, with its creepier-than-it-has-any-right-to-be intro and even creepier guitar tone. The bass-heavy, almost jazz-fusion wrongness of Mutant Christ.
But I’m not here to give you a guided museum tour of an album most of you already know inside-out. I want to talk about something more important: how Blasphemy Made Flesh didn’t just play by the technical rules of death metal, it mastered them, then used that mastery to embody the philosophy of the genre.
Jon Levasseur, Lord Worm, Flo, and the rest aren’t just playing their instruments flawlessly, they’re doing it at breakneck speed, with a theatricality that feels halfway between a religious rite and a prison riot. The production (whether by accident or design) grants the whole thing an organic aura of savagery you can’t fake in Pro Tools.
It’s the kind of savagery you could only get "back in the day," when every band sounded like they were recording in a basement that wasn’t up to code. Bandcamp oddities might be the closest modern equivalent, but it still can’t replicate the sheer thrill of stumbling on a cassette tape that sounds exactly like what your parents were right to be worried about even if they hadn’t and would never hear it. Knowing that it existed and that it was hard enough to chase the normies away was all that mattered.
*
Blasphemy Made Flesh is a death metal classic and a historical landmark, the kind of record you point to the way people point to moon landing footage or the Zapruder film. Two years later, None So Vile would refine the chaos into perfection, but this is where the revolt started. It’s music you either get or you don’t; there’s no middle ground. A jazz musician could listen to this all day and appreciate the compositional intricacies, but the ghoulish, subterranean energy at the heart of Blasphemy Made Flesh is not up for debate.
You’ve either lived in that emotional headspace, or you haven’t. And that kind of revolt, against convention, against comfort, against the way music was supposed to sound, can’t be faked, imitated, or performed. It has to be real, and it has to be dangerous like it is on Blasphemy Made Flesh.
Matter of fact, it's so iconic that the band gave it new life on this new killer of a medley:
