From the Ludwigshafen area came one of the first death thrash bands in the region and became a breeding ground for musicians who are active today in successful, albeit stylistically different sounding groups. However, you don't have to be a fan of Crematory, Mystic Circle or Blood to like Excess (later: Malignity), or even find them fascinating, but their traditional roots clearly reveal themselves. Excess was founded in the summer of 1988 and after a short time the first line-up was formed with Harald Heine (bass, vocals), Thorsten "Smog" Aschenbrenner (guitar) and Markus Jüllich (drums). They shared a rehearsal room reeking of rotten beer with the locally hip thrash band Sudden Darkness, whose material was also released on Golden Core via double CD a few months ago. The guitarist of this group recorded the first Excess demo "Torment Of Death" with limited means, but at least already multitrack, which sounds amazingly good for the circumstances. Many a black metal band in the nineties would have liked to have this sound on their album. Of course, the technical skills of the three musicians were still very limited, but it is this "forced primitive" that makes these five tracks so authentic, but also brutal. You can't plan or consciously create this aesthetic. The most famous and certainly most popular demo opens the CD: "Crucifixion" from 1992. Reinforced with singer Clausi (later active with the band Blood) and with a change on the drums, they offered a real quantum leap, but without leaving the simply kept mix of death, thrash and in places doom. The production of Guido Holzmann (Economist, Mystic Circle, Graveworm, etc.), whose studio was still under construction in 1992, is to this day an incredible, yet transparent "Wall Of Sound" that is unparalleled. The renaming to Malignity was followed by the last demo before three of the four musicians joined better known acts, with whom they serve different scenes than the ones they started with as Excess/Malignity. Nevertheless, all involved agreed to this re-release and support the work on it. Thus, a gap in the history of German death thrash can now be closed.
