Mortification (band)

By 1990, in the Melbourne suburb of Moorabbin, they were renamed as Mortification with the line-up of Rowe, Michael Carlisle on guitar and Jayson Sherlock on drums.

[citation needed] Mortification issued their tenth album, Triumph of Mercy in August 1998 and accompanied it with a tour of North America.

In 1990, Rowe, was determined to play heavy music with a Christian message, and was joined by drummer Jayson Sherlock and guitarist Cameron Hall under the LightForce name to record the demo Break the Curse.

Also, Rowe proved to be an excellent death metal vocalist, presenting his "Grind Baritone vocals of extreme reality" throughout the album.

"[7] In 1992, the band signed a deal with Nuclear Blast Records in Germany,[5] which had many European death metal groups on their roster.

[8] In late 1996, Steve Rowe was diagnosed with acute lymphatic leukemia, and after 18 months he was in remission[5] despite a seemingly failed bone marrow transplant.

This was due to the fact that – like Nuclear Blast founder Markus Staiger stated in a newsletter – had become "some kind of superstars in the Christian metal scene".

[11] On 4 February, Rowe announced that the album titled The Evil Addiction Destroying Machine was partially completed, and it was released early June.

Rowe noted in a message for The Metal Resource about the reception of The Evil Addiction Destroying Machine: "With all new Mort releases there have been mixed response; pretty black and white.

Mortification successfully infused the down-tuned, sledgehammer riffs and gruff vocal style usually associated with the death/thrash metal genre with positive and spiritually uplifting lyric themes.

On the old albums sinners screamed in pain in the fiery pits of hell, Satan was slaughtered; the rhetoric's fit the spirit of the brutal music better.

Apparently the fatherhood and going through the disease has calmed Rowe down too much, although on the early records the previous members Jayson Sherlock and Mick Carlisle wrote a lot of the lyrics.

[15] According to Australian writers Gary Garson and Peter Schultz, Mortification is the world's most successful Christian extreme metal band.

During the tour for Blood World they played with Napalm Death, Sick of It All and Entombed for audiences consisting of thousands of people, and sold more merchandise than the other bands in the venues.

[8] In Raised by Wolves, author John J. Thompson pointed out that upon forming Mortification, Rowe "suddenly had one of the most credible Christian death metal bands in the world on his hands."

Thompson defined Mortification as "one of the heaviest bands ever to hit the Christian scene" and described its albums as "a blatantly evangelistic work of shredding death metal.