Reviews, features, and news coverage of Rotting Corpse by magazines, blogs and podcasts, with direct links where they’re still live. Looking for the band’s own long reads? Those are in Articles. Need a bio, photo, or logo? See the press kit →
A two-page interview in the print fanzine Throatgrind Magazine (issue #3D): the tape-trading days, the reunion shows, the vinyl reissues, and what comes next. Interview by Jochen and Ralf; photos from the band’s own archive.
Ian Christe — author of Sound of the Beast and founder of Bazillion Points — on the band, written for the 2025 anthology.
“The Lone Star State even had its own Slayer! Riding out of Dallas like a tornado, spitting out guitar splinters, came sick-sounding early thrashers Rotting Corpse.”
Christe places the band in the tight, statewide clan of 1980s Texas metal that ran from Corpus Christi’s Devastation to Austin’s Watchtower — formed, as he puts it, by Dimebag’s guitar tech and a fellow Pantera roadie “while their bosses were still in spandex and pumping Keel and Cinderella covers.”
“The Rotting Corpse tapes have zealous energy that can’t be faked, and compared to a lot of excitable demo bands at the time, they could actually play their asses off — and hold fast tempos together.”
On what the band left behind without ever releasing a record: “For a band that for some reason never released a record, Rotting Corpse has a hell of a legacy. Along the way, they swapped members with Gammacide, Hellpreacher, and Devastation. Walter Trachsler briefly played guitar with Death on the ill-fated Spiritual Healing tour. It sure sounds like these guys influenced Pantera’s direction in the 1990s, which makes sense and carves a path straight to current-day Texans like Power Trip.”
And the closing line: “Well, if that’s the case, Pantera chose the right pony by partying with Rotting Corpse instead of Keel!”
Brian McLean’s feature, written as the reunion was picking up speed.
McLean caught the band a few months into their comeback and put the reason for it in Walt Trachsler’s mouth: “Old friends have come out of the woodwork, and a lot of people involved in the scene 20 years ago are taking an interest in us again.” Trachsler laughingly called it a mini middle age renaissance, and the name stuck to the piece.
The story also captures what the band sounded like to a room in 2005, in Steve Murphy’s words:
“When we play, it trips people out. It’s refreshing. We approach it from the early Exodus, Slayer, Dark Angel, Nasty Savage type of vein. It’s like a time capsule.”
And it recorded something that mattered more to the band than the tour dates did: the night after the first official reunion show, an Arlington homecoming at Division One, where original guitarist John Perez came up for a song and first vocalist Jim Mulqueen turned up too. McLean’s summary of the whole thing has aged well — “Some things rot with age but with Rotting Corpse, things have stayed the same.”
A run of long interviews from the reunion years, kept in the band’s own files, is where most of the detail on this site comes from — Steve Murphy with Texas Metal Underground on the Dallas scene and the Eldritch Rite years; a lengthy round-robin done for a Chinese metal magazine, with Murphy, John Perez, Randy Cook and Dave Gryder all answering; a European interview covering the demos song by song; and a fanzine piece with Murphy and Luke Brewer.
Some of what they cover: the yellow ESP that Darrell and Vinnie Paul gave Trachsler and that broke at every single show, the boat traded for studio time, the Arlington storage unit the band practised in with the door shut, the Dark Angel dates that lost money and broke down, and the label interest in 1986 and 1987 that nobody signed.
“It was a weird cool time and I wouldn’t trade being young now or back in the 80’s for anything.” — Steve Murphy
Written for the Thrash in Pain or Die Insane release by the author of Sound of the Beast. Quoted at the top of this page.
Brian McLean’s December 2005 feature on the reunion, the Arlington homecoming, and why young crowds started turning up.
Announces The Demos, a 100-copy, hand-numbered, signed CD compiling all four original tapes chronologically.
Read it →The original reunion announcement. Trachsler: "Many well-known guest musicians have expressed interest in playing on and playing with Texas’ first thrash metal band."
Read it →Review of Thrash in Pain or Die Insane, comparing the band to Devastation and Morbid Saint.
Read it →Demo-archive feature on the band’s formation and 1986 debut demo, from the publisher behind several major metal history books.
Read it →Named October 8, 2005 Artist of the Month by the webzine Stream of Consciousness, with an interview featuring bassist Steve Murphy and a review of the band’s September 24, 2005 show at the Phoenix Music Complex in Arlington.
Read it →Bobby Burns of Soulfly interviewed the band on the road during a joint U.S. tour with Soulfly, Prong and Incite, with guitarist Walt Trachsler discussing new material recorded at Monster Music in San Antonio.
Read it →Not a feature on Rotting Corpse itself — a profile of Rigor Mortis’s Bruce Corbitt that name-checks Rotting Corpse bassist Steve Murphy as part of the same North Texas scene.
Read it →Rotting Corpse never got its own Wikipedia page, but it turns up inside other bands’ and musicians’ entries — a real, independent trace of how small the Texas scene was.
“John Perez quit his former thrash metal band Rotting Corpse in early 1987” before forming Solitude Aeturnus, per the doom metal band’s own Wikipedia entry.
Read it →Lists Walter Trachsler as one of the roadies recruited to replace Chuck Schuldiner on guitar for Death’s 1990 European tour, when Schuldiner declined to go.
Read it →The personnel credits for Massacre’s death metal classic From Beyond list “Walter Trachsler — rhythm guitar (uncredited)” among the additional musicians.
Read it →
Recorded in about two weeks north of San Francisco in 1984, held back by a nervous label until 1985, and still the record people mean when they say Bay Area thrash.
A birthday-party gig, a hurricane, a Fort Worth club, two months at Pantego Sound and roughly 300 nights on the road: the making of Pantera’s major-label debut.
A Gulf Coast band that cut its own debut, signed to Combat, made one of the heaviest records of 1991 at Morrisound, and called off its European tour before it began.
