Though local wags in Boston dubbed these zoned-out punk metal thrashers “Post Boredom,” this band deserves credit for digging its shallow trench for over ten years before calling it quits in the mid-1990s. At the start, they were just ugly misfits who evolved from punk to metal and played a lot of shows, both with name-brand metal and hardcore bands. By the time anybody noticed, Post Mortem had already developed a unique downer style, combining speedy Kreator-style riffing with My War-era Black Flag dirges.

This demo is called “Turkey on Your Nose,” I don’t want that fact to ever leave you. In a way, it is a six-minute concept demo, mediating the realms of the afterlife with three gristly thrash song poems; first “Ready to Die,” then “Waiting for the Funeral,” and ultimately “Armies of the Dead.” If the band seemed single-minded, well.. they were. And this quick dose of deathly thrash comes across like a slow, basement version of Bazillion Points Blog favorites like At War and Whiplash.

POST MORTEM * “Turkey on Your Nose” 3-song demo 1986 [14.2MB rar]

This old Maxell cassette was really rotting — for some reason, the sound quality gets noticeably better with the second song. In theory, you can pull a better version of “Ready to Die” directly from the band, since Metal Archives claims they released a rarities CD in 2007. The Post Mortem MySpace and PostMortemBand.com don’t mention such a thing, and it’s possible that a slew of promised re-releases like the Coroner’s Office LP 0n New Renaissance along with several other archival chunks won’t be surfacing for a while.

Regrettably, John McCarthy, the misanthropic jester that fronted Post Mortem, passed away in January 2009 at age 40. Apparently, the band had reformed as a five-piece, and were recording new material. The best eulogy for his weird and tragic tale comes from About.com, of all places, who in February posted this long-as-hell look back at the creation of Post Mortem’s 1986 debut Coroner’s Office.

And a second R.I.P. to Michelle Meldrum of Wargod and Phantom Blue, who passed through Post Mortem long enough to contribute to the stupefyingly weird and thus great The Missing Link EP.

Related posts:

1. Is Cold Lake Better Than Into the Pandemonium? The Unpublished Mean Deviation Interview with NunSlaughter’s Don of the Dead
2. Fårikål, by Jan Axel “Hellhammer” Blomberg of MAYHEM