Stop the Bleeding (Tourniquet album)

Stop the Bleeding is the debut studio album by the American Christian metal band Tourniquet. It was originally released on Intense Records in 1990. A remastered version was released independently on Pathogenic Records in 2001, which was later re-released in 2011. Retroactive Records released a Collector's Edition remaster on June 26, 2020. The remasters include updated artwork, expanded album booklets, and bonus tracks.

Recording history
The band recorded Stop the Bleeding at Mixing Lab A & B studio in Garden Grove, California. The band's line-up consisted of Ted Kirkpatrick, Guy Ritter, and Gary Lenaire. Session musician Mark Lewis played nearly half of the album's lead guitar solos.

Prior to the album's recording, during an "Artists vs. Label" softball game, a label executive accidentally ran over drummer Ted Kirkpatrick's foot (his main kick foot) while rounding second base, requiring Kirkpatrick to record the album under a great deal of pain.

The band faced other recording obstacles as well, such a power failure that forced the producer to mix the songs over again. In an interview in 2007, then-vocalist Guy Ritter reminisced:

At about 3:00 a.m., we are still trying to sleep. All of a sudden the lights go completely out in the studio! Gary was, like, "What was that?", and I said, "I think it was a power failure!" [laughing], and we looked at each other and went, "Uh-oh!" We called [producer] Bill [Metoyer], and he was screaming, "What?!" He had to come back in and mix a lot of the stuff over because of that power outage.

Another funny time was when we were recording "Tears of Korah," and we completely forgot a verse! We did not even notice it ‘cause, well, the song is, like, 35 minutes long! We used to have the joke, "Oh, it’s a Gary [Lenaire] song." The whole second side of vinyl would be just Gary songs or maybe just one, since they were so long! (laughter) "Harlot Widow" was like twelve minutes. "Tears of Korah" was like eight minutes or something. So anyway, we didn’t even notice it was missing, it was so long. And, remember, we were recording on two-inch tape, so it’s expensive to do, to put an eight-minute song down. So, I am in the vocal booth recording my parts when, all of a sudden, I go to sing the third verse, and there is nothing there. I was just stunned! The guitar solo was there, and I was supposed to sing another verse. (This is back in the days of tape.) So, what Bill did was he switched over to a couple of tracks, and I recorded the vocals to the third verse to the second verse on different tracks. I was going, "How are you going to fix this?! How are you going to fix this?!" when we were mixing the album. He bounced down the second verse to half-inch tape, and then he bounced the same verse again to the third verse to half-inch tape, and then the rest of the song to half-inch tape, and then got out a razor blade and cut it up and spliced it all back together so we had a complete song.

In the original booklet, the band gave co-production credits to Roger Martinez, vocalist of fellow California-based Christian thrash metal group Vengeance Rising. However, Metal Blade Records' Bill Metoyer actually produced the album. Ritter said about this:

Roger Martinez was asked to co-produce our first album. I think he asked to do it. (Imitates Roger:) “I need some, uh, co-producing points here. I would, uh, like to, uh, co-produce Tourniquet. Yeah, that would be really great, uh, if I could, uh, co-produce Tourniquet, yeah.” So they [Touniquet] let him. It was kind of weird, and we were okay with it just for the name on the credits. Everybody in the world at that time loved Vengeance Rising, so if they saw his name on the album, more power to Roger, but we would be in the middle of a session and Bill Metoyer would be getting everything perfect and everything set up great, and Roger would turn to Bill and say, “Yeah, um, Bill, um, yeah, can I have one more DB, please, on track two, um, yeah, one more DB?” And so Bill would pretend... I don’t think he would even change it, and Roger would say, “Yeah, sounds good, bro.” (laughter) That, to us, was one of our favorite things, and we did that continually on the next two albums. We would always say to Bill, “One more DB please.” (laughter)

Overview
Musically, the album was said to be "unlike anything else on the market at the time" and incorporates classical music to 1980s-inspired speed and thrash metal riffs. Guy Ritter's vocals on the album, which he said were inspired by glam metal vocalists, shift between low-baritone and high-falsetto vocals, although they were performed higher on the demo versions:

In some of the early demos of those songs there were lots more high parts. That whole first verse on “You Get What You Pray For” was all high. Only on the final versions in the studio are all the parts lower. So we did tone it down a little before we recorded it.

Ritter's falsetto vocals are often compared to those of King Diamond:

...it is true, a lot of people used to ask me [Guy Ritter], “Have you heard King Diamond sing?” And, seriously, I had not ever heard him sing until after Stop the Bleeding came out. So many people said, “Oh, come on, you probably listened to a lot of King Diamond.” Finally, I was at Ted’s apartment, and he pulled out a CD, and he said, “Okay. You have got to listen to this King Diamond and see what you think," and I had to agree that, “Wow, this is kind of similar” (laughing).

The album cover art features a snake restrained by chains, representing the power good has over evil and how that relates to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which was the ultimate victory over Satan. The bible verse 1 John 4:4, which reads in part, "Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world," inspired this concept.

Reception
The song "You Get What You Pray For" was the band's first single and stayed on top of the CCM metal charts for 21 weeks. It was also a GMA Dove Award nominee for "Metal Recorded Song of the Year."

The band's controversial music video for "Ark of Suffering," which contains graphic footage of animals in laboratories and slaughterhouses, received airplay on MTV before the channel ceased airing it after complaints that it was too graphic. Despite MTV's ban, the video won the Christian News Forum Contemporary Christian Music Award for "Rock Video of the Year," and Heaven's Metal magazine readers voted it their "Favorite Video of the Year." The music video was later included on the VHS tapes Hot Metal 4 in 1991 and Video Biopsy in 1992, as well as the DVD Ocular Digital in 2003.

About the song's airplay, Ritter said:

They [MTV] did play it, and quite a few times, as a matter of fact. We had people like [ Boston's ] Tom Scholz and Paul McCartney and [ Jefferson Airplane/Starship's ] Grace Slick calling MTV saying, “You have got to play this video!” So, what was happening was that Animals Agenda and some of these other magazines were calling these celebrities that they knew and saying, “We need you to call and get this MTV video on the air!”, and that is how it got played, by these stars, who we never got to meet! I can’t take credit for that. (laughter) And there was an interview, too, I think in Animals Agenda, where they interviewed Ted Nugent, and then they interviewed us and put us back-to-back in the same magazine. He [Nugent] talked about slaughtering the animals, and then we would come back and say, “Don’t slaughter the animals.” I still have that article. It was pretty cool.

Track listing
1. Excluded from the 2011 Brazilian remaster.

Personnel
Tourniquet
 * Guy Ritter – lead vocals
 * Ted Kirkpatrick – drums, bass
 * Gary Lenaire – guitars, vocals, bass

Additional musicians
 * Erik Jan James – bass guitar
 * Mark Lewis – lead guitar

Demo recordings
 * Guy Ritter – lead vocals
 * Ted Kirkpatrick – drums
 * Gary Lenaire – guitars
 * Mark Lewis – lead guitar

Live recordings (2001 remaster)
 * Ted Kirkpatrick – drums
 * Luke Easter – lead vocals
 * Aaron Guerra – guitars, vocals, mixing and arranging on "Concert Intro 1999"
 * Steve Andino – bass guitar

Production
 * Tourniquet – producer (1990 version)
 * Roger Martinez (Vengeance Rising) – producer (1990 version)
 * Bill Metoyer (credited as Gordon Shumway) – producer, mixing, engineer (1990 version)
 * Eric Greedy, Guy Ritter – engineer (1990 version)
 * Eric Kibbe – assistant engineer (1990 version)
 * Matthew B. Hunt – executive producer (2020 version)
 * Ted Kirkpatrick – producer (2020 version)

Additional personnel
 * Devino – visual performance art
 * Jim Martin, Tourniquet – logo concept
 * Ed McTaggart – art direction
 * Jim Muth – photography
 * Ken Taufer – illustration
 * Charmeine Ellison, Lisa, Meloeny, Cherie Sunn – hair styling
 * Joe Potter – layout (1990 version)
 * William Cooke – remastering at Raven Mastering in Chatsworth, California (2001 version)
 * Rob Colwell, Mark Fields – remastering at Bombworks Sound in McKinney, Texas (2020 version)
 * Scott Waters (Ultimatum) – design, layout (2020 version)
 * Ted Kirkpatrick – liner notes (2020 version)