Obituary
Slowly We Rot

Raw, rotten, brutal, and bastardly. This is how you can summarize the first chapter of the career of the Floridian band Obituary, a key group in what was that magical death quartet (to which the Sepultura of "Arise" would later be added): Morbid Angel, DEATH, Deicide, and Obituary, exactly.

In this album, you can only find one thing: DEATH metal!!! Death as it was meant to be understood once before the arrival of a mess of subgenres and different currents, pure and raw death!
But what most struck the deathsters of the time about this killer debut was Obituary's ability to provide metal that can be defined as 100% death while trying to distance themselves from the patterns of their aforementioned colleagues, yet delivering an excellent result.
Slower tempos (so to speak, eh eh), heavier riffs, and above all, the most rotten voice the metal has ever let us hear, that of John Tardy, the fantastic vocalist who seems to be vomiting the demons of hell when he sings.
Like all the seminal death records of that era, the major influence was exerted not only by Slayer (and who would have thought...), especially those of Hell Awaits, but also by the equally seminal Napalm Death.

Also noteworthy are the lyrics which, even when rereading them today, never fall into the trite or the banal; the main topics are:
1. death
2. death after being dismembered
3. slow and painful death
4. bloody death
5. infernal death
6. death due to disembowelment (not to be confused with point 2)

Musically, I don't think there's much to say, I think I've made things clear enough with the first four words of this review, but nevertheless, the tracks that emerge from the rot are undoubtedly the title track and the complex "Intoxicated", which with its irregular (for the time) and complicated (again, for the time) structure anticipated techno-death (and what years later would become the various "Overactive Imagination"...)
Also noteworthy is the bass performance: probably Daniel Tucker had the same teacher as Paulo Pinto and Tom Araya.
A masterpiece of eighties Death Metal.
"Never trite, never banal... always brutal" (who guesses the quote is a genius)