James Murphy's name is a revered one in the pantheon of death metal, a musician who always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, helping a number of the genre's seminal bands create some of their best work. It was through his fluent, technically innovative work on classic albums like Death's Spiritual healing (1990), Obituary's Cause of death (1990) and Cancer's Death shall rise (1992) that Murphy gained his reputation as one of death metal's primo axemen, and after sharpening his skills with each of those groups, it only seemed natural that he formed a band of his own. "I just wanted to have an outlet for the new music I was coming up with" explains the guitarist. "By the time I was in Obituary I had started writing in a whole new direction... it just happened naturally, from my perspective, but it was coming out like a cool mixture of extreme technical death metal, catchy melodic riffs and all-out doom. It was way too far removed from what Obituary was doing at the time and they felt it didn't really fit their style. As soon as I realized that, Disincarnate was born". Dreams of the carrion kind, the first, and so far only, album from Disincarnate, is a minor masterwork of the genre. Taking elements of the styles Murphy had helped define with his previous bands, Disincarnate spewed out a precise, progressive and above all, vicious slab of death metal, unwaveringly aggressive and grim, yet never sacrificing structure and even hints of melody for simple brutality. Not that Dreams... wasn't brutal; "Stench of paradise burning," the album's dizzying opening number, featured a pulverizing technically precise array of tempo and riff changes that found Murphy, Carman and Viator fully in control of a progressive sound that easily rivalled that of Death. Viator in particular proved a real find, his blast beats, fills and double bass work on par with many established death metal drummers already on the scene.