While Death’s later works Symbolic and Human are branded into the souls of many metal guitarists working (and learning) today, my appreciation for technical extremity still traces back to 1988's Leprosy.

Death’s principal songwriter, Chuck Schuldiner, had advanced very far as a composer and musician after the band’s debut, Scream Bloody Gore. Much of the gear shifting, arrangements, and complex riffing on Leprosy still sound fresh a generation later. Back in ’88, the thrash era was waning a bit, and from this the renaissance of what became the Floridan death metal scene began to take shape.

After a valiant but ultimately failed attempt to merge personnel with Michigan’s Genocide (a.k.a. Repulsion) and Canada’s Slaughter, Chuck Schuldiner finally managed to get a working lineup together, and merge Death’s paint-peeling brutality with virtuosity. Tracks such as "Leprosy," "Left to Die," and the classic "Pull the Plug" are taste-tested examples of how to balance sharp musicianship with balls-out dark extremity.

Chuck’s ultra-demonic vocals were a hard sell back in the day, though. At age 17, I was dimly aware of how awesome Leprosy was, but couldn’t completely ignore the quizzical stares that came from my Dokken / Bon Jovi / and-even-Maiden peers. "That’s not music," was something I’d hear pretty often, and in retrospect, the whole affair seems pretty quaint when nowadays the salad bar of extreme metal seems to have no end! Thankfully, I ignored the closed-minded "fans" and made my own judgment call.

Out of Death’s considerable discography, Leprosy stands on its own because it heralds the direction Schuldiner would later take with his project, but also provides a great time capsule of guilty pleasures that helped me abide homework.