Rot – Diabolus (The Unholy Rot) LP

Rot – Diabolus (The Unholy Rot) LP

The story of ROT is the story of four friends—outsiders—fighting for their lives amid Atlanta’s unforgiving music scene of the late 1980s. Drummer Corey Pallon, guitar player Richard Googe, bass player James Liu, and vocalist, guitar player, and principal songwriter Kevin Cornilius lived in musical, cultural, and geographic isolation. Metal was a rising force amid the Reagan era, but ROT’s musical style looked far beyond what antagonistic audiences in the southeastern United States demanded. ROT drew power from the same down-tuned dirges of Swedish death metal luminaries Entombed as well as early Carcass and the concentrated grindcore riffage of Napalm Death’s debut album Scum. Cornilius, Pallon, Googe, and Liu played the music that was written in their bones, capturing a portrait of a place, a time, and an attitude, driven by unrelenting darkness. The group’s would-be legendary status was constantly at odds with a litany of socio-political hurdles that came from every direction. They played as though their lives depended on it.