The story of Rot is the story of four friends—outsiders—fighting for survival amid Atlanta’s unforgiving music scene of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Drummer Corey Pallon, guitar player Richard Googe, bass player James Liu, and vocalist, guitar player, and principal songwriter Kevin Cornelius lived in musical, cultural, and geographic isolation. Metal was a rising force amid the Reagan/Bush era, but Rot’s musical style looked far beyond the eyeliner and Aqua-net that antagonistic audiences in the southeastern United States demanded.
Rot drew power from the same down-tuned dirges of Swedish death metal luminaries Entombed as well as early Carcass and the concentrated grindcore riffage of Napalm Death’s debut album Scum.
Cornelius, Pallon, Googe, and Liu played the music that was written in their bones, capturing a portrait of a place, a time, and an attitude, driven by unrelenting darkness. The group’s would-be legendary status was constantly at odds with a litany of socio-political hurdles that came from every direction. The scene was stalked by a diabolical skinhead crew at nearly every turn. As a band that included two Asian members, guitarist Googe and bass player Liu, and Cornelius, a Black frontman, Rot found itself in the crosshairs, subjected to real violence and torment. The group played as though their lives depended on it, and often times it did.
On stage and in the practice space, Cornelius progressed quickly on guitar, rising from beginner status to death metal master within just 18 months. Working alongside his bandmates, he wrote and recorded gnarly odes of putrescence during the early gestation period of grindcore and death metal. He also experimented with a whispered vocal style that Nuclear Holocaust later made famous with their 1991 album Dawn of Satan’s Millennium.
Upon arrival, Rot’s demo tape, Diabolus (The Unholy Rot), promised great things to come. Songs bearing titles such as “Mutilation of the Christians,” “Pray To Death,” and “Parasitic Withdrawal” were and still are unrelenting in their raw intensity of sound and bleak musical textures.
The demo tape has lied in obscurity for more than 32 years, existing only as a grainy video buried deep on the Youtube. Now, Boris Records has pressed the first official vinyl release of Diabolus (The Unholy Rot), unleashing one of the most strikingly raw and gutteral death metal recordings to ever come from the Atlanta scene.
The album places a remastered recording of Rot’s original four-song demo EP alongside two previously unreleased cuts, “Baphomet” and “Violent Beast.” There’s also a recently unearthed live recording filling out the B-side. Really, though, it’s John Mincemoyer’s in-depth storytelling in the liner notes that adds depth, context, and a human element to the story of these four friends, illustrating the countless hurdles and seemingly insurmountable odds they faced, and the extremely hard, fast, and loud music they created during their brief but fiery existence.
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