Spiritual Healing has been described as "bizarre," "enigmatic" and "more
avant-garde" than Death's previous releases up to that point, utilizing complex
time signatures and more technical musicianship. Despite this, the album retains many of the trademark characteristics of the death metal genre, such as
death growls and low-register guitar riffs. Describing the album as stylistically lying in "limbo" between the band's second and fourth albums, Matt Mills of
WhatCulture assessed that
Spiritual Healing "is too progressive to
just be death metal, but it uses enough of the genre’s conventions that it’s not entirely progressive, either." Jon Hadusek of
Consequence of Sound called the album's style "minimalist
heavy metal," making note of
Scott Burns' "thin" production. Lead guitar duties are traded off between Chuck Schuldiner and James Murphy. The album's
song structures and guitar tones are rooted in
thrash metal. Additionally, the title track features a brief keyboard arrangement performed by Death manager
Eric Greif on a
Kawai K1 synthesizer.
Spiritual Healing has been called Death's "most lyrically dominated album," and is described as a
concept album about
mental illness and
physical disability. According to
Metal Hammer,
Spiritual Healing "showed death metal could replace guts’n’gore with brains’n’ambition
." The album's opening track “Living Monstrosity” explores
drug addiction during pregnancy, and is written about an infant “born without eyes, hands, and a half a brain.” The album's third track “Defensive Personalities” explores
bipolar disorder and
schizophrenia. ==Release history==