Steve DiGiorgio is a well-known extreme metal bassist thanks to his exemplary fretless playing with a Who’s Who of genre luminaries such as Death and Testament, but his early work with Sadus is still hard to track down. The 1988, 1990 and 1992- released LPs have been selling on eBay at impressive prices for years now. Why Roadrunner haven’t reissued them (these 2000-only CDs have been licensed out to Polish indie Metal Mind) is a mystery. It’s their loss, as all three (bolstered with impossible-to-find songs from the Death To Posers and Certain Death demos of 1986 and ’87) are worth your time.
On Chemical Exposure, Sadus were young and dumb and sounded it, playing at inhumanly fast speeds and coming across like early Sepultura as a result. By Swallowed In Black, DiGiorgio’s jazz-fusion chops and the band’s inclination towards experimentalism came to the fore, in particular on Images and Oracle Of Obmission. A Vision Of Misery was a step further still, being one of the first fully avant-garde thrash albums out there.
While the production values haven’t dated well, and both the speed and aggression have been outdone in recent years, these three albums remain key to the development of extreme metal.
