Reviews list for Obituary - Slowly We Rot (1989)

I've had the privilege of seeing Obituary twice under very different circumstances, and "Suffocation" from this album was my introduction to Death Metal.

The first time was after a 5-year hiatus, checking out wikipedia I think it was a year before they would release "Inked in Blood" so I'm guessing 2013 was the year. The show was in the middle of the week, I think late November in Grand Rapids MI. The Pyramid Scheme was the venue, and the openers were local Death N Rollers  From Hell, and a grind duo called Brutal Intention. Now, on this particular night there was an awful blizzard "do not go outside or drive unless you absolutely must" type shit. However, The good hard working folks of Sterling Heights blessed me a with 5.7L Hemi and 4-Wheel drive, so I'm going to this thing. I can't overstate how brutal the cold was that day. The venue was me and maybe 20 other die hard metal heads. I recognized Terry Butler so I bought us a pitcher of beer to split and shoot the shit about Death Metal and so forth. That was very cool and a memory I will forever cherish. Obituary tore the roof off the damn place and I felt privileged to be there.

The second time was at a packed house called the Masonic Temple in Detroit. They were part of "The Great Heathen Tour"; Cattle Decapitation, Obituary, Carcass, and Headlining Amon Amarth. All bands worth your time. Obituary came out after Cattle to "Snortin' Whiskey, Drinkin' Cocaine" by the Pat Travers Band, and I have to be honest they were a bit underwhelming that particular night-that play-on was more memorable than anything else they did that night. Cattle Decap are an incredibly intense live act and tough to follow, and Carcass are just fuckin' legendary, so being sandwiched between the two was a tough position for any band to be in. Additionally they didn't play any of the classics all new material that just didn't hit the same. That being said you should still see them live if you haven't. 

SLOWY WE ROT:
I always listen to this album from start to finish, I've done it many many many times, but always in this fashion. It's just such a damn fun environment to immerse oneself in. As the other Reviews for the album have stated, John Tardy is a force of nature, he has a little extra slime to his death metal grunt that is immediately distinguishable, and he has a gigantic stage presence. However, I believe the heartbeat of Obituary is actually his brother Donald on the drum throne. You see there are a few elements that make Obituary different form the typical death metal band; they are a slower and groovier affair that hangs it's hat on smooth transitions and tempo shifts. There is also a lot of blues and southern rock influence under all that guitar distortion. Other death metal bands tend to go for dissonant scales like the minor, harmonic minor, Phrygian, and Scandinavian, but Obituary are just as happy to play the blues. It all combines for a unique and satisfying Death Metal experience that only they can offer. 

Florida death metal legends Obituary have been a huge part of my life since the very early 1990’s. I first discovered them while listening to a late-night underground metal radio program shortly after the release of their 1989 debut album “Slowly We Rot” & immediately became infatuated with the vocals of the iconic John Tardy who has been my favourite death metal front man ever since. It was the title track from the album that would be my initial taste & my death metal band Neuropath would cover that song in a live environment for several years during the mid-90’s. 1990’s “Cause of Death” sophomore album would absolutely blow my socks off & would be followed up by the very strong “The End Complete” album in 1992, both of which kinda relegated “Slowly We Rot” to the bench. I feel that I’ve often overlooked it in the several decades since but I still remember my first impressions & how often I would scrank Obituary’s debut album back in the day so it’s about time I put my money where my mouth is by formalizing a firm position on its merits.

Obituary had been around for a good half decade by the time “Slowly We Rot” was recorded but not always under the same moniker. They began life as Executioner back in 1984, a thrash metal band whose “Metal Up Your Ass” 7” single floated by without much fanfare. They’d adjust their name to Xecutioner in 1986 due to potential legal issues with another band of the same title & released their 1986 & 1987 demo tapes under that name. These cassettes would clearly show that the boys had transitioned over to a death metal sound with the name change & the 1987 tape would very clearly showcase the classic Obituary sound, even if it was nothing more than a cheap rehearsal recording. Xecutioner would sign with Dutch label Roadracer Records for their debut album & would record it with a young producer by the name of Scott Burns at the now legendary Morrisound Studios in their home town of Florida. Burns was fresh out of making his first genuine production statement with Sepultura & their classic third album “Beneath The Remains” so it was great timing for Obituary who would change their name one last time just prior to the release of the album.

“Slowly We Rot” sounds amazingly tight & heavy for a first up effort. The rhythm guitar tone of Trevor Peres (Meathook Seed) & Allen West (Massacre/Six Feet Under) is thick & deathly, everything you could want from an old-school death metal record really. This is further enhanced by a really tight & well thought-out contribution from the rhythm section of future Nocturnus bassist Daniel Tucker & Meathook Seed drummer Donald Tardy. While West’s lead guitar work is certainly not up to the standard of James Murphy who would bring a new dimension to the band for their follow-up record, he hasn’t completely given up to pure whammy-bar worship just yet so his performance was effective enough. The real hero here though is clearly front man John Tardy who contributes a genuinely inhuman & scary sound that no man alive has yet been able to match. He’s simply untouchable & Obituary wouldn’t be the band they are without him. He & (to a lesser extent) Peres are the clear masterminds behind this legend of the Florida death metal scene.

Obituary’s early sound was comprised of a few different elements from an instrumental point of view. Firstly, there’s a clear Slayer influence in the faster material which is often backed by fairly punky, energetic & up-tempo beats. I find this material to be the least interesting. Then we have a mid-paced Celtic Frost influence that keeps things very simple yet executes with crushing efficiency. And finally you’ll find smatterings of genuine doom metal that are the clear highlights of the album in my opinion. It would seem that the band felt very similarly because they’d wind the tempo down far more regularly on “Cause of Death” & would reap the rewards for doing so too. The other thing they’d improve on with that album can be found in the better defined structure in their song-writing. On “Slowly We Rot” we see them pasting together some fairly disparate ideas in a haphazard fashion at times, often finishing songs suddenly & well before they’ve fully explored their potential.

While the tracklisting is very consistent with no week tracks included amongst the thirteen songs on offer, “Slowly We Rot” definitely offers a little variation in quality. If I’m being honest I’d suggest that the infamous title track is actually the one that appeals to me the least these days along with “Gates of Hell” & Words of Evil”. The real classics here are “Godly Beings”, “Suffocation”, “Bloodsoaked” & my personal favourite “Intoxicated” all of which demonstrate the potential in the doomier side of Obituary's toolkit. It’s a really solid late 80’s death metal record in its own right but I do still think that it looks & feels a little like a entrée to the “Cause of Death” main course. That may have caused me to unfairly overlook it over the years but I’ve never forgotten its importance or the impact it had on me as a youngster. “Slowly We Rot” should be essential listening for fans of bands like Autopsy, Jungle Rot & Asphyx.

Obituary has special attention here on Metal Academy.  Quite a few people here  love it, especially the debut as opposed to their more renowned sophomore album, Cause of Death.  Not having been familiar with either, and having found myself in a death mood, I hightailed it to this band the instant I was done with Morbid Angel.  They're one of those bands I avoided for years due to violent lyrics.  I've been a bit of a goody-two-shoes about that considering that I was mostly avoiding it not to make peers around me mad.  No I just don't care about that anymore, so Obituary is a top-priority band now.  The people here love it, so it had better be good.

That doomy sound of there's hit me as soon as it made itself known.  We get plenty of death energy on this album, but the defining trait that set them apart was their love for the epic doomy stuff, and they didn't even need to go into the "traditional" territory to crush the soul.  That creepy and slow vibe in songs like "'Til Death" has so much ooze seeping out of it that it might as well be goring out like a Re-Animator movie.  And this isn't just a psychological vision induced by the album's green and slimy logo.  This is GROSS guitar, more sleazy than Bon Scott ever got.  And during some of the lighter moments there's some thrash energy.  Coincidentally, the title track features both traits.  So Obituary already set themselves apart as a death metal band with a broad range of attractors, attractors most death bands were missing at the time because they were too busy being "death."

Of course, while I love variety more than anyone on Metal Academy, and commend the band's efforts for variety and fluidity, this doesn't mean I've fallen head over heels for the compositions.  They're fun and energetic, but it's kind of in that Ramones "gotta-love-the-genre" kind of way rather than the intellectual way that make bands like Morbid Angel and Death so good.  Because of this, while the album remains good and commendably heavy, the thrashy and punkish charm loses its personality overtime, as well as the surprise of the slower doom.  In other words, this album with various attractors has songs that eventually mold into each other.

Obituary's debut certainly does have a strong appeal factor to it, and I appreciate everything it did right, becuase those aspects were performed at full throttle.  But they really weren't the best songwriters then.  At least the album remained pretty entertaining until the end, which means there's a keen consistency.  I can't see this making my top 50 death metal albums or anything, but for its mix of punk and doom influence, it was fun.

Slowly We Rot is actually the only Obituary album I've heard prior to this and that only a couple of times, it not really making much of an impression on me, which I guess makes it ripe for a revisit. I have had to give it a fair few spins this time round as it was initially suffering from following hot on the heels of the quite superb Altars of Madness in my listening rotation (as it did in real life, I guess, being released a mere month after Morbid Angel's debut).

The first thing that strikes me is that whereas most other early death metal bands take their lead from Slayer, Obituary seek to emulate Swiss thrashers Celtic Frost and you don't need the cover of Into the Crypts of Rays from their follow-up to illustrate that, the guitar tone that Obituary strive for is ample proof in itself. Compositionally Obituary favour a mix of dank and doomy medium-paced and slower riffs, interspersed with short high-tempo bursts of aggression, in a similar style to that employed by Autopsy on their debut Severed Survival and that allow for some variety in the tone and atmosphere rather than the out and out blitz of Morbid Angel's debut. Despite this variation I still don't think the songs stand out as much individually as the tracks on Altars of Madness, but in fairness that album is a particular exception to the extreme metal rule rather than being an indictment of Obituary's songwriting prowess. I do love that guitar tone, it brings a nice dank, crypt-like atmosphere to the band's sound as it did for Celtic Frost and it combines perfectly with John Tardy's particularly evil-sounding vocal delivery - check out 'Til Death for particular proof if any is needed and the foreboding, brooding atmosphere that is created.

The riffs are solid and the lead work is fine if not particularly spectacular with the soloing following the Slayer-esque stylings of most of the early death metal protagonists. The rhythm section again is solid rather than remarkable, but does form a solid foundation. I feel like I am sounding awfully harsh on the band here, but don't misunderstand, I love the atmosphere that Obituary create on the slower material but also when they do let rip and get in full flow they feel like a really tight unit and these faster sections are impressively executed, so although I feel like they may not be the most technically flashy performers they function exceedingly well as a unit and as such produced an evilly atmospheric and heavy-as-fuck debut album that deserves all the credit it receives.

As intros to death metal go, mine wasn’t too shabby.  I bought “Slowly We Rot” blind, in the days of (me) having no internet and just a sick logo and equally sick artwork to tickle my pubescent fancy!  I had never even heard any death metal at that point but I instantly loved every fucking minute of this record.

I had to play it at my grandparents house and luckily my grandad had a great stereo set up.  When he first heard the record he thought he had something wrong with his equipment.  I had to convince him for a good few minutes that it was supposed to sound like that.

I was instantly enthralled by Tardy’s vocal style and remember thinking how insane it was that a human could make such a noise.  It was like a dumped high school girl puking and sobbing her hatred for boys out with only the occasional word actually audible through all the hatred and vitriol.  

The atmosphere on the record scared the shite out of me, like some soundtrack to some mind-bending horror film.  The record plays like a writhing, shifting mass of fetid, acrid evil just toying with the listener and taking great pleasure in doing so.  The riffs on here are fucking scathing too so any flesh left on your bones from the Tardy onslaught is soon detached once the riffs kick in.  Peres and West made a great partnership, leaving as much of an impact with their six strings as Tardy did with his vocal chords.

Although end to end this is a thoroughly ferocious affair it does lose me sometimes, not necessarily out of complexity more out of if sounding a little samey in places.  Still though this is a benchmark Death Metal album for me based on both nostalgia and the overall genre impact it had.

Regrettably I sold my vinyl copy of this record and now don’t even have it on stream but I can still recall every track and every terrifying Tardy howl.

Although Obituary have turned out to be tiresome over the years, their entrance into the death metal genre was grand indeed. Armed with a vocalist that could tear your face off from 100 metres, these guys unleashed Slowly We Rot onto an unsuspecting scene without any concern for our health or sanity. This was filthy, messed up, death metal with a groove to go. I think along with Autopsy and Carcass, Obituary were hugely influential when it comes to just how grotesque and dirty death metal could get.

The riffs are of the slower end of the spectrum, being dark and malevolent. The leads have never been exceptional for Obituary, apart from when James Murphy was part of the band. But it's without a doubt, John Tardy's vocals that stand out. Many consider him to be the best death metal vocalist out there and he's not far from it. His sound is pure unadulterated anguish and evil, just the way it's supposed to be in this wonderful world of death metal.

It's hard to pick out highlights from the album as generally it's all solid in quality. I do enjoy the first 4 or 5 tracks a touch more than the rest, but the remaining tracks certainly don't drop the ball. Obituary would get better on their next classic Cause of Death, but no death metal fan should go without Slowly We Rot in their collection. It's just one of those important, influential albums that still holds up today.