Excitement for the band’s upcoming tour just took a serious hit.

I’m not alone when I say that Morbid Angel is one of my absolute favorite bands. If you’ve seen me at any point in the last 6 months there is a good chance you saw me in a pair of Morbid Angel sweatpants (AND I’M NOT SORRY). They are, arguably, the quintessential American death metal band and have inarguably released one of death metal’s greatest achievements in 1989’s Altars of Madness.

We can all agree that Altars is a milestone in death metal right? A high watermark that helped define the genre and shaped it for years and years to come. You may have even gotten excited at the prospect of hearing “Immortal Rites” live when Morbid Angel announced their North American tour several months back! Well it looks like Steve Tucker and Blabbermouth dot com have some bad news for you: You aren’t going to hear “Immortal Rites” live, or anything else from the David Vincent era for that matter. Steve Tucker says:

“The setlist will be different, too — in the past, we’ve covered all of MORBID ANGEL‘s discography, but this time we went with the discography between Trey [Azagthoth, guitar] and I. I’m really excited about the fact that every song we play is a song I was a part of. There are some MORBID ANGEL classics that aren’t there, but we made our own classics.”

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I very audibly said “what the fuck is THIS” while I was at work and saw the headline. In case you need a reminder, the one known as Evil D was involved with Altars of Madness, Blessed are the Sick, Covenant, Domination and…whatever that other one was that we don’t talk about. That’s 4 stone cold death metal classics and…whatever that other one was that we don’t talk about’s worth of material that is being totally withheld from their set. Could you imagine going to a Metallica concert where the band says they aren’t going to play any material from their first 4 albums?

Admittedly that’s a really harsh comparison and a bit unfair to Morbid Angel and Steve Tucker. Steve Tucker Morbid Angel is great! Formulas is a blitz of Lovecraftian horrors, Gateways a death/doom crawl through space/time, and if it weren’t for the horrible production and weird 40+ songs of just drum sounds and cats vomiting Heretic might stand as the Tucker era’s grandest monument. Those are good albums, even great albums! But I would trade all of the songs on them for “God of Emptiness,” “Where the Slime Live,” or “Evil Spells” without hesitation.

Perhaps I’m more bitter about this than most because I’ve never seen Morbid Angel live before. Once they announced an absolutely stacked tour featuring Suffocation, Revocation and Withered my first thought was “If they play a few songs from Domination I can finally die happy.” Knowing that fulfillment in death has been robbed from me has put quite the damper on my excitement for seeing one of my favorite bands for the first time, and that is a shitty feeling.

Has anyone else’s excitement for this otherwise killer tour been impeded by this news? Sound off in the comments while we listen to a very appropriate Evil D era song.