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Obituary - Slowly We Rot O.G. on Roadracer (1989) 

I think there’s a valid argument in saying that Obituary were/are the standard bearer for Florida Death Metal in the 90s, and maybe the band that’s stayed truest to their roots of the old guard. They weren’t tech’d out like Morbid Angel (or Death), they weren’t Satanic like Deicide, and they weren’t as “shocking” as Cannibal Corpse, but I kind of will always view Obituary as the death metal band of the people. They were young as hell, and though they had missteps through the years, never really got distracted from their original goal of just ripping off early Celtic Frost and Death, nor did they ever sacrifice power riffs and insane vocals for artistic direction or cred. I think really the only band of the original big death metal groups to have a better trajectory might be Bolt Thrower, who actually aren’t all that different from the classic Obituary sound. Sort of the Death Metal AC/DC in some ways.

What really makes Obituary stand out is the growled and snarled vokills of the legendary John Tardy. Sometimes he’s not even singing actual words on Slowly We Rot, just growling and grinding his throat. Certain people are put on earth to do one thing, and I think there’s not much doubt that this is what John Tardy was meant to do. The riffs are relatively simple for a Death Metal album — there’s minimal tremolo type strumming and  simple, brief solos. The band chooses to focus on groove and atmosphere, with tight oppressive, and generally midpaced stuff that kind of works like a more over the top Hellhammer.

Surprising to some is the fact that most of the album was recorded on a reel to reel 8track by Scott Burns. I guess this is what it takes for him to not muck up a band’s songs because for the most part it sounds much better than the majority of the productions he engineered later on, even though his work on this album was a benchmark for the style. Almost as surprising is that the band is actually in standard tuning on this. It still manages to sound incredibly thick and deep. There’s really not many albums that bludgeon on such a primitive level so effectively, but Slowly We Rot has stood the test of time as a genre classic, and is far less dated sounding now, than most of Obituary’s contemporaries debuts.