The verdict first, because it is the only interesting thing about this album and everything else in the piece exists to defend it. Slowly We Rot is the least skilled record made in Tampa in 1989 and it is the one that has aged best, and those two statements are the same statement. Every other band in the city was competing on velocity and precision. Obituary entered that competition, looked at it, and refused to take part.
What they did instead was work out how slow this music could go and how little of it could be words. That is a compositional decision as real as any time signature, and it is why the record still does not sound like anything else that came out of the boom years in Florida.
Five men from Brandon who would not go fast
The band had been going since 1984 under the name Executioner and then Xecutioner, and only settled on Obituary at the end of 1988, months before the album was finished. The line-up on it is John Tardy singing, Trevor Peres on rhythm guitar, Allen West playing the leads, Daniel Tucker on bass and Donald Tardy on drums, and it is the only Obituary release Tucker appears on. West left before the second album. So the record everybody treats as the definitive statement of a style was made once, by a group of people who were never in the same room again.
The tempo is the argument. There are fast passages, but the centre of gravity sits at a walking pace that death metal in 1989 had abandoned as unserious, closer to what Celtic Frost had been doing in Switzerland than to anything down the road. The guitars are tuned low and played with a right hand that lets notes hang instead of chopping them off. It sounds effortful and stubborn, which is exactly right for a record about decay.
A voice that is not made of words
The strangest thing on the album is the vocal, and it is strange in a way that most singers would not risk. Lyrics are credited to John Tardy on every original track, and the printed words bear only a phonetic relationship to what is actually on the tape. The band has never explained this and generally deflects the question. What is on the record is a human noise shaped like language, pitched somewhere between a shout and a retch, mixed close and dry so there is nowhere for it to hide.
Treat that as an instrument rather than a failure and the whole album opens up. A singer who is not delivering text does not have to fit the phrasing of a line into a bar, so the vocal floats across the riff, entering late, holding past the change, cutting off in the middle of a phrase. Nobody else in Florida was doing that. Almost nobody has managed it since without sounding like an imitation of this record.
A singer who is not delivering text does not have to fit a line into a bar, so the vocal floats across the riff, entering late and cutting off in the middle of a phrase.
The session
Tracked across 1988 and finished in March 1989 at Morrisound Recording, produced, engineered and mixed by Scott Burns with John and Donald Tardy, and released by R/C the same year. That is a long time to spend on a debut by the standards of the scene, and it was not spent on polish. The album is deliberately unclean: no scooped guitar tone, no manufactured space around the drums, a bass that is felt rather than heard, and a mix that puts the voice in front of the listener rather than behind the band.
The economy behind it was the ordinary one. Roadrunner carried the band through the nineties, the advances were small, and a group that had been rehearsing in a garage in Brandon and in cheap rooms around the Tampa scene arrived able to play everything without a click track holding it together. The looseness on the record is a choice made by people who could have played it tighter.
The sound of being smashed to pieces by hammers, dropping the scalpel precision in favour of blunt trauma.
T Coles, Death Metal
Three songs that make the case
"Internal Bleeding" opens the album and establishes the method inside forty seconds: a riff that repeats without developing, a drum part that refuses to accelerate, and a vocal that arrives from somewhere off to the side. The title track is the one everybody quotes, and it works because the band trusts a single figure to carry the song with almost no decoration on it. "'Til Death" is where Allen West earns his place, and his leads are the one element on the album that is conventionally virtuosic, which makes them land harder than they would on a record full of them.
What none of these songs have is a structure you could diagram. There are no bridges, no build and release, no second half that answers the first. Each one is a state rather than a journey, which is the single most divisive thing about Obituary and the reason listeners either take to them immediately or never at all.
What the method was worth
The proof that this was a method rather than a limitation is what happened next. Allen West left, James Murphy came in on lead guitar straight from Death's Spiritual Healing sessions, and the band cut Cause of Death in September 1990 with the same slow riffs played by a better lead guitarist and a heavier mix around them. Two years later The End Complete sold over a hundred thousand copies and got played on television, which no Obituary record before or since has managed.
Nothing about the writing changed between those three albums. What changed was the money and the personnel, and the songs held up under both, which is not something you can say about most bands whose first record is their most admired. The debut is the crude version of an idea that turned out to be robust.
The verdict, both directions
The praise is easy and the criticism has to come with it. AllMusic gave the album four stars, Sounds gave it four and a half at the time, and it has sat in the death metal canon for more than thirty years without ever being fashionable, which is a better test than a chart position. It is also repetitive, the second half is weaker than the first, and a listener who wants riffs that go somewhere will find it monotonous in the way that a wall is monotonous.
Here is the part that decides it, though. Every other important Florida record of that period can be copied by a better band with a bigger budget. This one cannot, because there is nothing in it to copy except a refusal, and a refusal is not a technique. Anybody who imitates Slowly We Rot ends up sounding like a group that cannot play fast, which is not the same thing at all as a group that will not. The next record in this sequence went in the exact opposite direction, hired musicians who could play anything and proved the genre could hold technique, and that is human.
