World Demise

To put it simply, year 1994 was a drastic decline in interest in death metal and the appearance of a tendency to soften or completely change the sound, even in the case of the biggest names that previously co-created this genre of extreme music. Of course, there were also those who consistently stuck to the original ideas, although they either quickly went into depths of underground or after a few years of playing they split-up (and possibly returned much later). At first, however, it certainly wasn't the American Obituary! The Tardy brothers and the co. decided to try to jump into slightly different areas at the first opportunity, by releasing their fourth album entitled "World Demise". In 1994, they decided to refer to the current fashionable, metal styles (like for example groove metal).

Well, in the context of this whole Obituary, I'm really hard to please. On the occasion of the previous album "The End Complete" I openly claimed that there were no clear changes and nothing more beyond the known patents. Meanwhile, on "World Demise" it's hard not to get the impression that it would be better if the Americans...stayed as before! It makes no sense, but let me explain. When death metal slowly began to fall out of interest, the Americans from Obituary decided that they would not completely break with those sounds, although they would very significantly bring groove metal rhythms, some hardcore accelerations and a general feeling in the spirit of Cro-Mags and Biohazard, and a minimally industrial climate (thankfully, mainly due to the samples). However, these intentions were quite successful here. Because despite the extension of the style with a number of changes that might not have suited the orthodox, death metal is the starting point here.

Yes, the death metal side of "World Demise" makes a really good impression. John's growls are amazing, the heaviness is overwhelming (and the prodution is one of the best that Obituary has ever done), the guitar and drum motifs are quite varied despite their simplicity (only after "Solid State" the songs are a bit too similar), Allen West again delights with quite a lot of explosive solos, and the concept of the album encourages reflection. Worse is - as I have already mentioned - the newer face of the band and its not always the same consistency with the older one. While from the beginning (more or less halfway through the album) these changes can be understood, the further in "World Demise" the more these novelties start to annoy - you can clearly feel that the guys wanted to modernize their music a bit artificially. And so, next to the great groovy, but very heavy "Don't Care", "Lost", the title track, "Paralyzing" and "Redefine", there are mediocre or unnecessarily tweaked "Kill For Me", "Splattered", "Final Thoughts" and "Boiling Point". "World Demise" wouldn't hurt either, a little volume reduction.

Obituary's fourth album is therefore one of the last that are so important in the output of these Americans. Of course, it's the weakest among their first four albums, but it's still quite a good portion of music, among which there are songs that are classics of Obituary's live setlist. "World Demise" despite the departure from the traditionally understood death metal, showed that it's possible to allow newer, more fashionable influences to the earlier style so as not to completely lose its own identity. Obituary took this turn without embarrassment and it's only surprising that in the following years they stopped similar decisions.

Originally on A bit of subjectivism...in metal

I’m semi-ashamed to confess that it was with the album reviewed here that I got fully exposed to Obituary… yep, prior to that I was certainly aware of the band’s existence, but apart from the “The End Complete” video that I’d watched at a friend’s house, I’d never gone the extra mile to check any of their earlier output. Death metal wasn’t a very essential part of my music diet at the time, and also having in mind that reading the obituaries glued to the columns and building walls all over town wasn’t really my favourite pastime (a friend of mine was very fond of that), I had no urgent issues to settle with the art of John Tardy and Co.

But back to said video: the earth-shaking, ultra-heavy rhythms and the infernal apocalyptic shouts of Tardy must have left quite a trace in my mind as I bought the cassette here almost instantly, on impulse, when I saw it in the shop. I mean, what’s not to like, the band name… or the bleak pessimistic cover… or the promises for a few seismic down-tuned death metal strokes to disperse the thickening aggro/groovy clouds in the mid-90’s…

however, the time was hardly one to meet the fans’ expectations, with every second practitioner rushing to please the numetal audience with more or less humiliating cosmetic alterations. The thing is that by 1994 one already knew how to treat the new vogues in music, with three fan types already consolidated: those who loved the groove to bits, those who didn’t mind it but seldom listened to it, and those who hated it with all the passion they could summon. The latter fraction was also a fairly unforgiving one, not hesitating to discard their idols even, if the latter had happened to surrender to said vogues. In other words, skin shedding was a very commonplace occurrence, largely causing exasperation and frustration unless you had the temerity to pull out a most black album some three years earlier.

Well, you can’t expect a display of the brightest colours out there from a band named Obituary, a misanthropic team who’ve bet on the DDD (death, demise, doom) trichotomy from the very beginning, and having made quite a living for themselves thanks to it. With “The End Complete” having sold nearly half a million copies, the band had quite a bit to live up to, and the greatest piece of news was that they didn’t have to sacrifice much from their style, this slow-burning, impossibly heavy at times, even anti-speed if you like, approach to song-writing which could pass for anything, from post-death to sinisterly disguised doom and everything in-between. So, if there had to be a band from the old guard to retain their entire fanbase during those gruesome times, it’d got to be Obituary.

If I had evaluated this opus on the spot, when I gave it a listen the first time, I was probably going to give it a score somewhere in the upper-80’s… I took it for what it was, a standalone statement, with no attachments to previous recordings, a heavy pessimistic slab of death art that had the anger, had the groove, had the trendy sterile vibe that had lastingly permeated the music industry… and yet it carried the Obituary brand all over; unmistakably. Even if Tardy doesn’t open his hellish throat immediately at the start of “Don’t Care”, you know what band you listen to, the volcanic steam-rolling rhythm-section engulfing you like a tank, the dirgy corrosive riffs the perfect musical match to the bleak life-denouncing lyrical stance, a steady monolithic avalanche that descends slowly but surely, sometimes enhanced by threatening thumping sounds (the title-track), sometimes dissipated by the odd fast-paced explosion (“Paralysing”). Diversity is out of the question, the message delivered simply doesn’t need fancy decorations, world demise is coming, the masses have to bow down, squashed by the ever-replenishing ultra-heaviness, this wall of sound which shatters the senses… nope, it’s not a hallucination that “Solid State” throws in a few more playful rhythms, including an urgent speedy section, a breath of polluted air that will help the listener survive the angry “Splattered/Final Thoughts” melee, a brooding doom-laden fiesta which also opens a groovy gap in said wall, the latter explored (“Boiling Point”, “Kill for Me”) a bit more towards the end.

This is it; when you don’t go bowing to the scene, the scene comes bowing to you, adapting itself to your stylistic whims. Obituary didn’t have to do much, if anything at all, in order to adjust to the new currents. They had already predicted way back how the music industry would evolve, choosing an approach that would transcend decades, and would cover the world with obituaries from top to bottom… they stood proud in the midst of a difficult period, without having to radically alter their music by hopping a playful goofy wolverine blues, or drowning their sorrow in sentenced-to-run-amok dark/gothic romanticism, or gathering all the children in their backyard with sprawling epic tales from the thousand lakes… nope; they didn’t have to do all these things. They had long since gone with the flow, even when said flow was just a trickle.

Accolades aside, this effort doesn’t score sky-high when it comes to xecution… sorry, execution; it’s monotonous, it’s one-dimensional, it’s plain tedious at times… but all this has been chosen intentionally, and this is where the kudos come. If world demise is what’s coming, who needs flashy guitar work, a frequent change of tempos, and complex entangled arrangements… this isn’t a phoenix-like resurrection, for crying out loud! The moment you press the button, depression mode settles in and stays there till the very end (complete)… and this is probably why this album didn’t resonate as successfully with the audience; it failed to sell even half as well as its predecessor. I guess at this stage the fandom had gotten weary of the band’s message: they rotted slowly with them, saw numerous causes of death, nearly reached mankind’s end two years prior… how much more can one endure before throwing the towel, and starts seeing at least a tiny light in the tunnel? Even if that light could be just a figment of his/her imagination…

how well Allen West did to team up with Chris Barnes for the Six Feet Under initiative a year later remains debatable, but once he came back, he literally brought about the band’s demise… yes, it was supposed to be a “back from the dead” stint, the exact opposite to the guys’ preachings of old, but this 1997 instalment was a resounding disaster. With both the speed and the groove increased, this outing was simply too naive and pretentious to side even remotely with the earlier pessimistic odes, not to mention the downright terrible rap closer “Bullituary”… enough said. The band put their signatures under their obituary, and stayed dormant, by no means dead, for about five years. With five pretty decent opuses accumulated during the new millennium, it seems like the Obituary saga isn’t slacking… it will continue churning dark foreboding messages until the world’s inevitable demise.

The early Floridian death metal scene is praised for being the Mecca of the genre, and rightfully so. Interestingly each one of the major iconic bands to have heralded from the Tampa area and its vicinity has developed a distinct sound and approach to death metal: Morbid Angel had the divine/spiritual feel, Deicide was furious blasphemous metal, Death had that prog tendency, Atheist was strongly jazz-oriented... and Obituary were basically the punkish death metallers of the bunch. Focusing on the sound and demeanor of this record in particular, there's that sort of angry suburb vibe to the band. Tardy's vocal style sounds exactly like what one would imagine if fed the notion of death metal vocals plus a teenager's tantrum. This is particularly clear on the opener, as he delivers the line "I don't care. I do what I want", which will surely remind certain parents of the pains of raising their 15 year olds.

The music is equally sulky, deliberately very negative in tone although never quite bleak, but definitely carries more girth to it than Tardy's thin, arguably whiny vocal presence. The album is mostly heavy guitar power chords, plain suspended a lot of the time if not boosted by a few palm muted strokes or chained up in rapid succession for dynamic impact. The solos, in typical first wave Floridian death metal fashion, have that wild pentatonic feel to them with the usual delay at the back and constitute a rare strength for this record. The punk vibes are quite apparent here. The drums usually serve as the main groove generator and never explore the more extreme modes of death metal drumming. Blast beats, for example, are nowhere to be found and we're given instead a lot more groove oriented beats. The bass is actually audible - always a plus for death metal.

Beyond the obvious nature of the music; that is basic metal which authors are angry at their sports teacher for making them run laps 6 years prior or probably something along those lines; there are some genuinely heavy grooves. There just isn't enough going on to make this a redeeming piece of music though. One either loves the style to death, and can tolerate a whole hour of this - it's 51 minutes long, 51 minutes of John Tardy's spoiled brat whims complaining about the inconvenience of having to take the bus every day to get to his gymnastics class ...and power chords, power chords, and more power chords. Then there's the power chords too. Or, the listener gets jaded pretty quickly.

We overlook that fact but death metal needs to be damn good to be taken seriously at all. It has to be either deep on some level, or technical enough to make it worthwhile. If not, it might just come across as silly pretty quickly after a couple of tracks and one will immediately contemplate listening to better music that doesn't live in one tiny little corner of possible artistic expression. This sounds like the death metal equivalent of that group of kids back in the school days that drew these edgy dark-ish images during recess. They weren't actually dark or deep or special in any way, they were merely the doodling of unwell children trying to externalize the angst in their sheltered lives. But that in itself didn't make them talented, or their productions necessarily good. A few years would pass before they would conform to some type of societal model and forget all about these barely troubling days. After a while, Obituary music would retain some of the darker death metal feel but focus more on the grooves, and would permanently turn into "let's have a good time" metal. Really heavy rock n roll, to make a shortcut. Which there's nothing wrong with, but won't get you a 95% rating. There are so much deeper places to reach through music.

By the time World Demise rolled around, the audience for extreme metal had already begun to change far and wide. A lot more punk and hardcore kids were attending the shows, in my region even making up the bulk of any death or thrash gig attendance, and it only makes sense that bands would begin to adapt. If you'd been to a performance by this band in the mid to late 90s in the States, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now, I'm not accusing Obituary of some chameleon strategy, and a band cannot necessarily choose its audience (nor should they), but there can be no dispute that the band was beginning to incorporate an increasing amount of heavier grooves into their songs, perfectly suited to the mosh tastes of a wider fan base seeking the release of youthful testosterone (or estrogen) over the endurance of lasting, legendary music.

On the one hand, World Demise creatively channels the underlying themes of their classics Slowly We Rot and Cause of Death into an urban bricklaying force, with a near excess of manly swagger. We had already been inundated with the hilarious "Don't Care" from the EP of the same name earlier in the year, but here it sits atop its proper throne of primal, driving grooves and crude but effective chorus. John Tardy sounds quite good here, as he does on the concrete crushing of the title track, another of the clear favorites here for the relationship of the descending chugs and resonant growling; and a great pure old school, creepy death bridge. Other pieces of note include the almost hypnotic sway of "Lost", the warlike percussion of "Redefine", and of course "Final Thoughts", with the hugest and most menacing groove on the entire album. Most of these do suffer from a faint reek of useless repetition, and in most cases :30 seconds could have been snipped to greater effect, but they're all fun enough songs that the album was almost instantaneously more memorable than its dull predecessor The End Complete.

On the other, I really would have liked more fast material on this album. It's all too rare that the band will surge into one of their morbid and wild, frenetic scenarios, like the bridge to "Solid State" and its winding, deceptively sloppy lead sequence. There are some decent old school rhythms here that hearken back to the heyday of Xecutioner and Death ("Set in Stone", etc), but not enough. A lot of 'one and done' tracks choke off the album's efficiency: "Burned In", "Paralyzing", "Kill for Me", "Boiling Point" are not incompetent, but they suffer from familiar vocals patterns and tempos that have already been done better (by this very same band). As an EP with 6-7 songs, this would have been all I could hope for, but the 51 minutes of its entirety are swollen with redundant ideas and a decided lack of restraint.

Scott Burns had a hand in the recording here, and it's another success for him, ably capturing the band's broad Hellhammer guitar tone and vocal dynamics. Despite the simplicity of the song titles (not a first for Obituary), the minimalist lyrics are rather poignant, a disjointed poetry, though there is no question the band was aiming for a more socially conscious subject matter than their past albums. The cover art is probably the worst of the band's career (even suckier than some of their post-hiatus flops), but it too reflects this shift towards matters of importance with impunity. All told, World Demise is far from the worst of Obituary's full-length excursions, but neither is it consistently engaging. A scant few tracks belong among the band's career highlights, and the rest snuggle comfortably into oblivion.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

I can still remember the day my cousin made me listen to this record. I was quite young and my small metal collection included just some Metallica and Iron Maiden stuff. When I first listen to this cassette I was shocked! This was the heaviest thing I’ve ever heard. Actually, listen to this one now, I must say that it’s not the heaviest thing on earth, but it’s always a fucking Obituary album!!
I’ve listened to this album about a million times and I definitely love it.

“World Demise” is a classic in the Obituary discography, recorded after one of the best sold death metal album in history, “The End Complete”. Actually, this one is a bit different from the albums before, but always remaining fucking Obituary in style (rotten, down tuned and death metal). Anyway, it is a bit slower with less fast parts. The biggest fast parts have some “hardcore” components, so new for the group. The tempo parts are a bit changed, while the drums are less direct but more various and technical.

The guitars are always low tuned and the first track, Don’t Care, contains a bit different lyrics from the past albums: this one talks about pollution in the world, the decadence of the nature, killed by the men. From this song they took a video, the first one in their career. The atmosphere in this album is still obscure, more than in “The End Complete” album, that was more direct. The new “punkish” influences can be found also in the beginning of the song Redefine.

One of the Obituary’s most important characteristic is the use of some gloomy noises during or at the beginning of the songs…noises that can come directly from polluted cities, abandoned factories and so on. Explosions, metallic noises, so dark and weird. They contributed to give something darker to an already not so happy music. Great. The beginning of Lost song is, I think, one of the darkest in the entire album. Solid State song, along with Don’t Care, is one of the classics. It's simply great with his main, fast riff break in the middle. Still played live by the group.

Splattered and Final Thoughts are songs dedicated to all those motherfuckers, bastards that kill animals for their skin… brutal photos can be found in the booklet of the CD, about people with AIDS, children that play in dirty, rotten places and so on…a good picture of our dying planet.

With this album, Obituary, still remaining death metal, wanted to slow down a bit their music, concentrating the attention on the songwriting. The tracks are more complex, with more tempo changes and they are always supported by their typical atmosphere of death, their guitars so violent and obscure and finally the unique, animal growl of John Tardy. Total support for this band and this album. A must for every death metal fan.

Obituary continue their pace forward with their fourth full length album. It is basically the same formula as their previous works, except that John Tardy becomes a bit clearer. You can actually hear what he is saying most of the time, but his lyrics still don't make any sense.

The thick guitars, tuned lower than normal (even for death metal), sludge on at a pummeling pace, but they never get as fast as they were on Slowly We Rot.

Donald Tardy really shows his skills on drums. While he isn't the most skilled at speed drumming, his unique rhythm work on the bass drums puts him above the par line. Don't expect too many blastbeats. There are a few, but they are few and far between.

One of the things that has seperated Obituary from the rest of their peers is their use of sound affects. A wierd ass reverberation noise is used in the title track (during the chorus). The entire album is riddled with sound affects, tribal drums, and other strange extras. These actually spice up the album, and make it more interesting then Obituary's other late works.

All together, this album is a breath of fresh air in a stale genre, where everyone is concentrating on blastbeats and speed riffs. Don't expect a cookie cutter album, the Tardys and their cohorts like to experiment. They succeeded.