Review of the Album Blessed Are the Sick by Florida Death Metal Band Morbid Angel

Here we go with the second chapter of the career of the band Morbid Angel or the second studio album of theirs called Blessed Are the Sick. This one was released in 1991 and this one clearly is an improvement from their 1989 debut album Altars of Madness in the sense that David Vincent’s vocals are more understandable and the riffing sound and production is better.

One thing that we should mention here is that the cover for this album seems to be disjointed and in a mess. But especially at that time, covers for extreme metal bands were taken to a bit of an extreme level. The music on Morbid Angel’s sophomore album is much better than what the cover shows.

After the intro track, the song “Fall from Grace” lyrically is about the descent into madness and hell so again Morbid Angel touches upon a very controversial subject: Satanism. The song even shows signs of being musically like one other early Florida death metal band and that one is Chuck Schuldiner’s created band Death. I had initially started to review this album but gave up on the thought of it until sometime in 2019. Maybe magical is not the term to use when describing the early Florida death metal scene but in that time period ranging from 1983 all the way through about 1995, American death metal was good enough to compete with the rest of the world.

Even though I was not aware of this album during my high school days, listening to it now makes me appreciate these early death metal albums. However, the band would still need improvement and they would really get there to a higher level by 1993. This whole album stylistically is usually slower, heavier death metal even as you can clearly hear the drums which pound heavily as well.

Doomsday Celebration is a classically orchestrated instrumental song which will catch the band’s longtime fans by surprise as they more than likely were not expecting this. This song though is a good thing as it gives our ears a temporary break from all the incessant heavy death metal songs.

Day of Suffering is yet another slow, heavy song that is about being cursed and the usual evil forces that are being unleashed upon the world. The title track is a song that lyrically tries to tell us that this world is full of sickness as the lead guitar seems to be drowned out into the guitar riffing in this song. Desolate Ways is another good instrumental song and this one has just acoustic guitar in it and it is less than 2 minutes long before the album gets back into the hard and heavy stuff.

Overall, Blessed Are the Sick is an improvement from this band’s debut however, the incessant reliance on lyrics related to Satanism combined with the slow, heavy death metal songs bring the score down just a little. “Brainstorm” is a song that shows the lead guitar prowess at work done by the very famous Trey Azagthoth. Having instrumental songs in their albums that have that classical influence makes Morbid Angel less one-dimensional and knowing that is a great thing. It makes them less stale in the eyes of some music fans that may be looking for something more. Also, there are songs on this album such as “Unholy Blasphemies” that may be too much to handle if you are not in a good mood because of the roughness of David’s vocals and the fact that lyrically there is mention of evil in the skies and souls are blackened. We will give this album slightly more praise than in 2019 even with the less than desirable lyrics for some fans’ liking.

Final score for this album as of 2023: 82 out of 100 points