Possessed and
Death may have brought death metal to life, but
Obituary brought it to fruition. After releasing some demos as
Xecutioner as far back as 1986, the five-man band debuted as
Obituary in 1989 with
Slowly We Rot, and in a word, the album was a landmark. The previous forays into what would quickly become tagged as death metal -- primarily by the above-mentioned bands, Possessed and
Death, along with grindcore innovators
Repulsion and
Napalm Death -- were exercises in relentlessness. These bands took the breakneck abandon of
Slayer's
Reign in Blood one step further, to the point of sheer, sometimes even ridiculous musical abandon.
Obituary, on the other hand, varied their tempo considerably -- and did so at the absolute height of speed metal nonetheless.
Yes, the band could play at breakneck speed, but within the same song, guitarists
Allen West and
Trevor Peres could slow the tempo down to dirge-like levels at a moment's notice, all the while keeping the music heavy as hell thanks to downtuned guitars and the snarling vocals of
John Tardy. As a result,
Slowly We Rot made quite a splash back in 1989, influencing an entire legion of death metal bands in Florida:
Morbid Angel,
Deicide,
Malevolent Creation,
Cannibal Corpse, and numerous others now forgotten among the thousands of international bands that followed. In a way,
Slowly We Rot was the prototypical death metal album, establishing a template that would come to define the style (one that is distinct from grindcore or black metal, it should be pointed out).
A few albums followed --
Cause of Death (1990) and
The End Complete (1992), both also very influential -- but by the mid-'90s,
Obituary had run their course and the band splintered, reuniting now and then. Yet even as the bandmembers went their separate ways (most notably
West going on to much success as the guitarist in
Six Feet Under),
Obituary continued to stand tall as one of the definitive death metal bands, if not the definitive (a distinction that probably goes to
Death, whose
James Murphy was actually a bandmember for a while).
A long period without recording ended in 2005 when the band released
Frozen in Time. Although Xecutioners Return followed just two years later, it appeared on a different label (Candlelight instead of the band's perennial Roadrunner) and it was recorded without guitarist
West (whose alcohol and drug problems led to his being replaced by
Ralph Santolla of
Millenium and
Deicide fame). Darkest Day followed in 2009, also on Candlelight. Both
Santolla and longtime bassist
Frank Watkins (the latter of whom passed away in 2015 after battling cancer) left not long after, and in 2014 the band released its crowdfunded ninth album,
Inked in Blood. It was the first
Obituary album to feature
Kenny Andrews on lead guitar and Terry Butler on bass. The album performed surprisingly well on the charts, resulting in
Obituary's first appearance on the U.S. album charts. Two years later, the band issued
Ten Thousand Ways to Die, which featured a pair of brand-new studio singles along with 12 live tracks. In 2017,
Obituary released what would be their tenth studio album. The self-titled record drew widespread acclaim, with many critics noting a sense of renewed life in the band. ~ Jason Birchmeier