If you were hanging around the East Coast extreme music scene in the mid-90s, you probably heard the rumors before you actually heard the music. There was this band from Yonkers. They weren't just fast. They weren't just heavy. They were—honestly—kind of a mess in the best way possible. When Mortician finally dropped Hacked Up for Barbecue in 1996, it didn't just join the death metal canon. It basically sat on it and crushed it into a pulp.
The album is a relentless, disgusting, and strangely charming tribute to 70s and 80s slashers. It’s the sonic equivalent of a VHS tape that’s been played too many times in a damp basement.
Let’s be real for a second. Most death metal bands in '96 were trying to get technical. They wanted to be the next Death or Morbid Angel. They wanted respect. Mortician? They just wanted to see how much low-end they could push through a speaker before it caught fire. Roger Beaujard and Will Rahmer created something so distorted and so repetitive that it practically invented its own sub-sub-genre. People call it "caveman" death metal now, but back then, it was just Mortician.
Why Hacked Up for Barbecue Still Grosses People Out
It starts with the samples. Oh, the samples. If you’ve ever sat through the full 45-minute runtime, you’ve spent about 15 of those minutes just listening to dialogue from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Driller Killer, and Maniac. It was a bold move. Some people hated it. They felt like the band was cheating by padding the length of the record. But for horror nerds, it was like a secret handshake. It set the mood. Before a single note of "Zombie Apocalypse" hits, you're already unnerved by the sound of a chainsaw idling.
The production on this record is famously "bad," which is exactly why it’s perfect. The guitar tone is basically a wall of fuzz. It lacks any sort of traditional mid-range. It’s all bass. When the blast beats kick in—courtesy of a drum machine, which was a huge controversy at the time—it sounds like a jackhammer in a thunderstorm.
The Drum Machine Debate
Back in the 90s, using a drum machine in metal was seen as a cardinal sin. If you didn't have a guy behind a kit sweating through his shirt, were you even a real band? Mortician didn't care. Using a programmable unit allowed them to hit speeds that were, at the time, physically impossible for most human drummers to maintain for a whole set. It gave the album an inhuman, industrial coldness. It felt robotic. It felt like a killing machine.
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Roger Beaujard handled the guitars and the programming, while Will Rahmer provided the vocals. And calling Rahmer's performance "vocals" is doing a bit of heavy lifting. It’s a subterranean belch. There are no lyrics to follow in the traditional sense, even if they are printed in the liner notes. It’s just rhythmic guttural noise that blends into the bass frequencies. It’s awesome.
Breaking Down the Tracklist Chaos
You can't talk about Hacked Up for Barbecue without mentioning the title track. It’s the mission statement. It’s slow, it’s grinding, and then it explodes into a flurry of notes that you can barely distinguish.
Then you’ve got "Drilling for Brains." Short. Violent.
"Eon of the Night."
"Blood-Drenched Survival."
The songs are short. Most of them hover around the two-minute mark, and that's with the movie samples. It’s a grindcore sensibility applied to death metal. The repetition is the point. It’s hypnotic. You stop looking for "riffs" and you just start vibrating along with the low-end. It’s a physical experience more than a musical one. Honestly, if you aren't listening to this on speakers with a decent subwoofer, you aren't actually hearing the album. You're just hearing the static on top.
The Relapse Records Era and the Yonkers Sound
In 1996, Relapse Records was the epicenter of everything weird and heavy. They had a knack for finding bands that pushed boundaries. Mortician fit right in, but they were the black sheep. While bands like Brutal Truth were getting sophisticated, Mortician stayed in the mud.
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There's a specific "New York Death Metal" (NYDM) vibe that’s different from the Florida scene. Florida was about precision and swampy atmosphere. New York was about the "slam." It was about the mosh pit. Mortician took that slam element and stripped away everything else. They removed the melody. They removed the solos—mostly. They just kept the impact.
The Cover Art Legacy
We have to talk about the art. Wes Benscoter. If you know that name, you know the era. He’s the guy who did the art for Cattle Decapitation, Slayer, and Nile. The cover of Hacked Up for Barbecue is legendary. It’s a vivid, orange-and-red nightmare of a guy being... well, the title is literal. It’s garish. It’s gross. It’s exactly what a parent in 1996 would have confiscated. It perfectly captured the "splatter" aesthetic that the band was obsessed with. It wasn't trying to be "artistic" in a pretentious way; it was a tribute to the grindhouse cinema posters of the 70s.
The Lasting Influence on Modern "Slam"
If you look at the "Slam" death metal scene today—bands like Devourment or the wave of "Maggot Stomp" style bands—you can trace a direct line back to this album. They all owe a debt to the way Mortician used the drum machine and the ultra-low tuning.
- The Tuning: They were tuning down to B or lower, which was extreme for the time.
- The Minimalism: They proved you didn't need to be a virtuoso to be effective.
- The Aesthetic: They bridged the gap between horror movie fandom and extreme metal in a way that felt organic.
It’s easy to dismiss Mortician as a joke band or a one-trick pony. But that trick is really, really hard to get right. Plenty of bands have tried to copy this sound and ended up sounding like a broken vacuum cleaner. Mortician had a sense of groove. Beneath the noise, there’s a swing to the riffs. It’s "catchy" in a very twisted way. You find yourself nodding along to "Fog of Death" without even realizing it.
Common Misconceptions About the Band
A lot of people think Mortician couldn't play their instruments. That's a total myth. If you listen to Roger Beaujard’s other projects or his later work, the guy is a massive talent. He chose this sound. It was an aesthetic choice to be this raw.
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Another big one: "The drum machine is because they couldn't find a drummer." Actually, they had drummers. They just liked the sound of the machine. It didn't get tired. It didn't complain about the tempo. It just stayed perfect. In a genre that prizes "realness," Mortician's embrace of the artificial was actually pretty punk rock.
How to Actually Enjoy This Album Today
If you’re coming to this for the first time in 2026, you might be used to hyper-polished modern production. This is going to sound like a wall of mud. That’s okay.
Don't try to pick out the individual notes. Don't look for a chorus.
Treat it like a movie score.
Listen to it in the dark.
Turn the bass up until the floorboards shake.
Hacked Up for Barbecue isn't an album you analyze; it's an album you survive. It’s a testament to a time when metal was still dangerous, still weird, and still deeply unconcerned with being "good" by mainstream standards. It’s a 24-track descent into the mind of a horror-obsessed kid from New York who just wanted to make the loudest, ugliest noise possible.
Actionable Steps for the Aspiring Metal Historian
If this record clicks for you, there are a few specific things you should do next to really understand this corner of the underground.
- Watch the source material. You can't fully appreciate the samples on "Hacked Up for Barbecue" or "Chainsaw Dismemberment" without seeing the movies. Start with the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Driller Killer. You’ll start to see the rhythmic way the band edits these clips to lead into the music.
- Compare it to the "Mortal Kamp" demo. If you want to see how the sound evolved, go find their early demos. You can hear them transitioning from a more standard death/grind sound into the sludge-heavy monster they became on the full-length.
- Check out the "NYDM" peers. To see how Mortician fit into their local scene, listen to Internal Bleeding’s Voracious Contempt (1995) or Suffocation’s Pierced from Within (1995). You’ll see that Mortician was essentially the "extreme" end of an already extreme local sound.
- Invest in physical media. Because of the way this album was mixed, high-bitrate digital files or vinyl often capture the "heaviness" better than low-quality streams. This is one of those records where the physical format actually changes the listening experience because of the low-frequency vibrations.
Mortician didn't change the world, but they definitely changed the basement. They proved that if you’re loud enough and gross enough, people will still be talking about your barbecue thirty years later. It’s a cult classic for a reason. It’s unapologetic, it’s ugly, and it’s one of the few albums from that era that still feels genuinely intimidating.