Piece of Time

This is a record a Florida band taped in 1988 and then waited nearly two years to see released. It was cut at Morrisound Recording in Tampa with Scott Burns producing. Their first label, Mean Machine Records, went bankrupt and the release stalled; Active Records in Britain picked it up and issued it locally in August 1989, and it reached the wider market in 1990 through a licensing deal with Metal Blade. It is the only Atheist album on which Roger Patterson plays bass. He died in a road accident in 1991, having already written much of the bass for the follow-up, Unquestionable Presence. What marks the music is that the beat never lands where you expect. The riffs do not run in straight lines and Steve Flynn's drumming pushes and pulls against the pulse. It is played in the vocabulary of death and thrash metal while pointing at the jazz-rock of Return to Forever and after, and it has been described in exactly those terms for decades. In 2005 Rock Hard placed it at number 402 in its book The 500 Greatest Rock & Metal Albums of All Time. The running order here is the original's as printed; the master the player carries appends demos from the period.