Mercyless

As well as drawing attention to France's curious propensity for producing metal bands with slightly misspelled English monikers like Agressor, Massacra, and Carcariass (!?), Mercyless were one of a handful of French death metal bands to gain recognition outside their own borders during the genre's worldwide heyday during the early '90s. Founded as far back as 1987 in France's eastern Alsace region, Mercyless began recording home demo tapes by the very next year, and soon established a reputation for lyrics steeped in graphic horror and anti-Christian sentiments, perhaps best exemplified by their 1990 demo EP, Nauseating Vomit. Come 1992, the quartet of vocalist/guitarist Max Otero, guitarist Stephane Viard, bassist Rade Radojcic, and drummer Gerald Guenzi had been signed by the Vinyl Solutions label and unleashed its debut long-player, Abject Offerings, which drew decent reviews and many comparisons to contemporary albums by Holland's Pestilence (pre-prog-death wackiness) and Germany's Morgoth. The following year's Coloured Funeral was released by Century Media and fared even better by greatly improving upon this selfsame formula with better musicianship and increasingly varied songwriting tricks, but Mercyless were coming to a creative crossroads that would sideline them for several years to come as they tinkered further with their sound. By the time the group finally returned with third album Cold in 1996, after replacing their original rhythm section with bassist Pierre Lopez, drummer David Kempf, and a keyboardist (who may or may not have been a machine) named Tom Smith, Mercyless' sound had lost most of its familiar death metal hallmarks and taken a concerted aesthetic turn toward the progressive. Clearly, the musicians in Mercyless had had their minds blown by...