Crowbar - Obedience Thru Suffering (1991)^{Release ID: 3416}

I didn’t get into New Orleans sludge metal establishment Crowbar until much later than some as it wouldn’t be until my return to metal in 2009 that I’d first give one of their albums a crack. I’d very quickly find myself traversing their entire eight-album discography in quick succession from there & tended to find that I liked Crowbar a lot from a purely stylistic & conceptual point of view but that their albums often suffered a little from poor production which saw them never quite managing to reach their full potential. 2001’s “Sonic Excess In Its Purest Form” would be the first record to break away from that curse in my opinion & it would become my go-to Crowbar release over the many years since. The band’s 1991 debut full-length “Obedience Thru Suffering” offered me the least appeal from memory, even though I still remember quite enjoying it. I haven’t returned to it in something like 14 years now though so it’s definitely about time I reassessed that position.

Despite what my vague recollections may have been telling me, the production job on “Obedience Thru Suffering” is actually quite acceptable & shouldn’t be a problem for too many listeners. The quality of the music is way better than I was expecting too, even if it is a touch samey. To offset that characteristic though, the consistency of the song-writing is very strong with no weak tracks included. The album probably just lacks a few more genuine highlight tracks with “My Agony” being the only one that I feel reaches tier one status.

It's pretty common to see “Obedience Thru Suffering” tagged as both sludge metal & doom metal but, despite the album undeniably being chock full of enormous doom riffs, I’m not sure the doom tag is really necessary because sludge metal is essentially a biproduct of doom to begin with. There’s a detectable hardcore flavour to most of this material (particularly in the depressive & gravel-throated vocals of front man Kirk Windstein) that keeps the album centred in sludge territory for mine but doom fans will still be able to relate to it pretty comfortably too. I might be being presumptuous here but I’d be very surprised if Celtic Frost wasn’t an influence on Crowbar as the riffs take a similarly simple yet crushingly heavy format a lot of the time which can’t be a bad thing now, can it?

On the evidence here, it's hard to understand how “Obedience Thru Suffering” isn’t talked about in the same breath as Crowbar’s next six or seven albums to be honest. It’s been many years since I revisited those records so perhaps I’ve simply underrated some of them but I tend to think it’s more a case of this one being underappreciated. I’m guessing it’s a retrospective opinion based on fans of Crowbar’s later material finding the album to be a little different to what they were expecting as the band would only get angrier & more oppressive from here. That doesn’t mean that “Obedience Thru Suffering” should be overlooked though & I strongly urge you to add it to your essential Crowbar list, particularly if you’re into sludge metal artists like Acid Bath, Eyehategod or Melvins.