Obituary - Slowly We Rot/Cause Of Death

Roadrunner 618360

Death metal, because its fanbase is mostly composed of video-game-crazed teenagers and their older brothers, doesn’t get much credit for being one of rock’s most avant-garde subgenres. Its fixation on complexity and technical difficulty, combined with the violence and Manichean worldview of the lyrics, tends to send all but diehards running. That’s why reissues like this two-CD set are important—they allow everybody whose attention was elsewhere to play catch-up after the fact.

Obituary shambled out of the Florida swamps in the mid-1980s, part of a mini-wave of pioneering death metal acts like Deicide, Morbid Angel and Death. All of these bands played fast, crisp songs with barking lyrics about murder and Satan. Obituary were different—their songs oozed, and they weren’t crisp at all. They took inspiration from Black Sabbath and Black Flag in equal measure, then cranked the energy level up a few notches and—most importantly of all—they took rock about as far from the blues as it was possible to go. This was death metal’s great achievement: instead of playing older metal’s amped-up blues, these bands mimicked some vast industrial blender, riffs chopping the air in repetitive, mechanistic patterns that made an ideal soundtrack to skateboarding, or the barely controlled violence of the moshpit.

The debut Obituary release, Slowly We Rot, had one other thing going for it—vocalist John Tardy. Supposedly because he was wary of being pigeonholed because of lyrical content, he decided not to have lyrics. Instead, Tardy growled and barked, and when there was an intelligible phrase, it was delivered in the voice of the guy ranting in the back of the bus. He wasn’t aiming to intimidate, the way Deicide’s Glen Benton did, with his low growl; John Tardy just wanted to freak the listener out. He often succeeded, too, sounding like one of the castmembers from a hillbilly-horror movie like The Hills Have Eyes. If the hitchhiker from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the guy who chops his palm open in the beginning, had a band, they’d sound like Obituary.

Their second album, Cause Of Death, wasn’t much more refined. Like the Stooges, Obituary knew that keeping it simple was their most powerful weapon. There’s an added precision to their attack, though, which brings them more into line with metal of the past. They’re not quite the moss-draped savages of Slowly We Rot, but they’re still never going to be confused with Judas Priest.

John Tardy’s vocals alone make Obituary one of the most interesting bands from the first wave of death metal. (Part of me is still shocked he was never embraced by John Zorn, who was all about the metal underground in those days.) But the grungy, slovenly riffs and thundering beats backing him help these two albums achieve what the genre’s always striving for. At their best (as here), they’re genuinely frightening.