“The past was never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

At its core, Faulkner is saying we’re never truly done with the past—it will, in some way, continue to shape the present and alter the future. And on a parallel level, those who have left this earth too soon are simply silent echoes of the past. For a band created as a tribute to fallen Death figurehead Chuck Schuldiner, the past is never truly out of reach. In reality, the band is the living embodiment of it.

Faulkner’s quote took on a greater meaning for Gruesome throughout the writing of their third studio album, Silent Echoes. For as much as the band stayed within the early era Death boundaries on 2015’s Savage Land and 2018’s Twisted Prayers, Silent Echoes is the quartet’s true put up or shut-up moment for one simple reason: It was written and recorded in the spirit of Death’s 1991 progressive death metal masterpiece, Human.

The prolonged gestation period between Twisted Prayers and Silent Echoes was the combination of several factors, yet none more significant than the untimely and unexpected passing of Cynic and Human-era Death drummer Sean Reinert in 2020. Reinert was the best friend and mentor to Gruesome drummer Gus Rios and was originally slated to produce the album. Instead, Rios, along with vocalist/guitarist Matt Harvey, lead guitarist Daniel Gonzalez and bassist Robin Mazen, turned Silent Echoes into a tribute to Reinert, whose influence and presence on Silent Echoes is everywhere.

“While this album is indeed intended to be our alternate universe Human, I won't diminish or discount everyone else's efforts in its exhausting creation,” says Rios. “In my eyes, that task was simply impossible to accomplish, especially regarding the drum performance. Setting aside my personal relationship with Sean, I had the amazing fortune to literally sit behind him every night and watch him play all of Human on tour. NO ONE PLAYS LIKE SEAN. End of discussion. He had such a unique and beautiful blend of finesse, elegance and sheer power as a player. I can certainly mimic some of his more obvious musical mannerisms, but I seriously lack his vast vocabulary on the instrument. I was terrified of this album. I called him in November of 2019 and told him this, asking for his guidance. His immediate reply was, ‘Dude, you don't need me; you're the death metal guy now, not me.’ Afterward, he said, ‘Absolutely, come over and hang for a few days, and we can figure parts out together.’ I've written about what happened next several times, but life's cruelty took Sean from all of us way too soon.

“Years later, I was finally deep enough into the grieving process that recording this album felt like my duty,” he continues. “And for full disclosure, I'll save any and all critics the hassle: the drums aren't as good as Sean Reinert's on this album. But I can assure you that I gave it EVERYTHING I had to simply say, ‘Thank you, and I love you’ on the drums to my fallen mentor and, more importantly, my brother. In my heart, that is enough.”

Similar to Death’s marked, seismic jump from Spiritual Healing to Human, Gruesome’s path to Silent Echoes follows suit. While the technical prowess and backgrounds of Gonzalez and Rios have never been in question, the dyed-in-the-wool, old-school, pure death metal lifer in Harvey needed, in his words, “to shit or get off the pot” and expand his guitar and vocal repertoire to match the 1991 version of Schuldiner. Harvey may have also found himself at an advantage: He did not obsessively pour over Human like he did for Death’s first three studio albums.

“I owed doing this kind of record to Gus and Dan,” he says. “Dan is the technical guitar player influenced by [Allan] Holdsworth. Gus had Sean as his mentor and best friend. For Gruesome to stay in our reactionary, regressive death metal bubble, singing about horror movies and me making vomit noises wouldn’t have been fair to them. For as much as we are a tribute band, we’re a real band. We’re trying to grow within the confines of what we can do and stay relevant. That’s always the objective. I took it as a challenge to get better as a musician and grow. It’s my way of embracing Chuck’s legacy most directly. And just like when Sean and Paul [Masvidal] joined for Human, the gauntlet was thrown down by Death to be more ambitious. I think we accomplished that here.”

Silent Echoes is Gruesome’s transmutation into the complex, jazz-influenced fields ploughed on Human. As Harvey states, “there’s less winking at the audience on this one,” which is true: The overtly intentional homages found on the band’s previous two albums have been replaced with fluid, agile drum work from Rios, as well as spiraling, multi-faceted guitar riffing from Harvey and Gonzalez, the latter responsible for the album’s melodic leads. The album also features an instrumental, “Voice Within the Void (Astral Ocean),” serving as the album’s ode to “Cosmic Sea.” In keeping true to Schuldiner’s growth as a vocalist, Harvey also modified his vocals to a sharp, pointed attack that even belies some of his best and most festered growls in his main band, Exhumed.

“Vocally, I’m self-taught,” says Harvey. “I never set out to sound like anyone, so it took some time for me to figure out Chuck's timbre. Around Human, he started to sound very hoarse. For a guy like me pushing 50, trying to sing like a dude in his mid-20s was a challenge, but I looked at it from an alternate universe where Chuck is older and always has a cold. It also helped that on tour, I was singing every night. We got home, and then I went right into the studio with Jarrett. Your body is your instrument, so the more warmed up you are, the better. I was primed and ready to deliver, but it’s still a weird thing for me. I want to obfuscate behind Chuck’s voice. I don’t want people to think of me—I want them to think of Chuck.”

The development subsequently stretched into the lyrics. The horror and gore topics of Savage Land, and the six o’clock news-derived lyrics found on Twisted Prayers have transitioned into a more introspective angle. While Silent Echoes is not a concept album, the regular thread of buried identity pops up more than once, tying to broader ideas that Schuldiner often touches upon, including how people hide behind their fears and insecurities. “It was an interesting angle to pursue,” laughs Harvey. “We’re a tribute band, so by design the band doesn’t have its own musical identity, but the irony is that this theme of identity, of fighting one’s way toward a truthful, meaningful sense of self, comes up again and again in the lyrics for this album.”

Jarrett Pritchard handled the production of Silent Echoes. A veteran of two previous Gruesome studio albums (and dozens of other respected extreme metal acts), Pritchard’s engineering techniques and knowledge of gear played a crucial role in enabling Silent Echoes to recapture the feel of early 1990s death metal recorded at Tampa’s famed Morrisound Recording. Not only did Pritchard lean on the advice of Death producer Scott Burns, but Rios also used the same snare drum that Reinert did on Cynic’s Focus.

“We didn’t want the record to sound like Human,” clarifies Harvey. “We wanted it to sound like how Human feels. I view Jarrett’s production on Silent Echoes as similar to how Mel Brooks shot the movie High Anxiety. He did everything that Alfred Hitchcock did when making the film. We wanted that kind of technique so that Jarrett could do everything that Scott did, but in a more updated way.”

Gruesome eclipsed the ten-year mark as a band last year, perhaps laying to rest any questions about the sincerity of their efforts. At a time when the thirst for all things Chuck Schuldiner remains unquenchable, leave it to four accomplished, true, well-intentioned death metal veterans to help continue the man’s legacy.

“When we started the band, we thought it would be a novelty,” closes Harvey. “I remember telling my wife, ‘We’ll never play a live show.’ And then after all these years, we’re still here. We’re lucky to be doing this. I feel like if James Murphy was cool enough to do a solo on one of our records, Sean Reinert was cool enough with it and Terry Butler and Rick Rozz are as well, then I’m cool with it.”

-David E. Gehlke