Obituary’s Alive And They’re Dying Of Everything
This piece originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market on November 2022.
John and Donald Tardy are reviewing my PowerPoint. The brothers are amused. “Those are completely, totally wrong,” John, Obituary’s vocalist, tells me over Zoom. “All wrong,” Donald, the band’s drummer, adds.
For Obituary, though, everything is going right. The Floridian death metal institution is between stops on the Amon Amarth, Carcass, and Cattle Decapitation tour. Turned Inside Out: The Story Of Obituary, an exhaustive biography by David E. Gehlke, was released earlier this year by dB Books, the publishing arm of Decibel. Most importantly, the quintet has a new album due on January 13 via Relapse Records. The appropriately titled Dying Of Everything, the band’s 11th LP in a career that began decades ago, is one of its finest albums. And, as icing on the cake, John’s beloved Miami Dolphins are having their best season in years.
But, instead of recapping these triumphs, I’m punishing John and Donald with my PowerPoint detailing one of the great metal mysteries of the internet age. Lyric databases ranging from Lyrics.com to Encyclopaedia Metallum to Genius list lyrics for Obituary’s entire back catalog. That’s notable because, according to Donald, the band didn’t officially release lyrics until 2014’s Inked In Blood. And what’s even more remarkable is that, on all of the websites mentioned above, 1989’s Slowly We Rot has been transcribed in full, an album that, pretty famously, is light on lyrics.
“Even if you asked me to write out what I sang, some of those things that came out of my mouth weren’t even words,” John says of his pivotal performance. Driven by youthful exuberance, John found his voice by aligning it with guitarist Trevor Peres’ instantly recognizable tone. “…my voice just gravitated towards trying to sound more like his guitar, if you will, trying to get in tune with that,” John said in a 2017 profile by Hank Shteamer for Rolling Stone. And thus, he growled, screamed, and howled, creating one of the defining sounds of death metal.
But that’s just it. A few audible phrases aside, Slowly We Rot is mostly sounds. Lyrics? Nope. “It’s not even the English language,” Donald says. “They’re just sounds,” John confirms. “So, I couldn’t even write them out, but the lyrics certainly wouldn’t be ‘slowly read in your love.'”
Right. That’s the other thing. Some of the alleged Slowly We Rot lyrics that sites have printed are, how to put this, fucking ridiculous. Each database’s interpretation is a little different, but they’re all littered with humdingers that crack the Tardys up as I show them slide after slide of goofball gobbledygook attributed to John. Here’s a sampling of couplets Genius has posted for “Slowly We Rot.”
Kill them all, fight death/ And slowly read in the love
Dead to all, fighting as you/ Slowly read in your love
Fighting the sword/ The sword is your plow
The sword is your plow! “I’m going to use that on some friends tonight, man,” Donald says, all of us laughing. “Just to see their eyebrows.” Slowly read in your love! It’s like the Tristan Tzara cut-up method used on the works of Rod McKuen. And, I mean, these aren’t even mondegreens because there are no lyrics to mishear. They’re not audio illusions, either. No one is listening to “Slowly We Rot” and being like, “Oh yes, I hear ‘yanny,’ ‘laurel,’ and ‘fighting the sword.'”
And yet, these wildly inaccurate interpretations of well-known Obituary songs are published across the world wide web. So how did that happen? Well, I have an idea. It has something to do with a quirk of the internet and Obituary’s continued influence and relevance.
While the digital lyric transcribers of yore might’ve struggled, you can hear John loud and clear on Dying Of Everything. Now 54, the singer sounds stronger than ever, even utilizing his low death growl again. It turns out I’m not alone in making that observation. “God, I think Jeff Walker [of Carcass] asked me that the other day. I’m not sure what you guys are talking about. I feel like I’ve been doing the same kind of thing.”
Dying Of Everything’s strength is that it’s the same kind of thing that Obituary have been doing for years, but one of the best versions of that thing. On songs like lead single “The Wrong Time” and album standout “My Will To Live,” Donald and bassist Terry Butler, who joined the band in 2010, lay down monumental grooves and construct big pockets. Peres pulls the undeniable metal spirit of Venom and Hellhammer out of the forge and shapes that steel into his own riffs. Lead guitarist Kenny Andrews, who ascended to shredder duties in 2012, rips through heroic, air-guitar-ready solos. And John’s demon-stretched-on-a-rack wails hold it all together.
“There’s certain parts of this album that I’m super proud of,” Donald says. “The drumming and John’s voice and his lyric and vocal and everything he does, you know? ‘My Will to Live?’ I think it’s the epitome of an Obituary song. It is not anything technical. But you can’t get much heavier than that.”
Dying Of Everything’s production is a big reason why it’s so heavy. Recorded by the band and mixed by its longtime live engineer Joe Cincotta at his Full Force Studios, the album sounds enormous. Even the tiniest element feels big, like Obituary are playing the record right in front of you. In a time when it seems like every modern metal band is quantizing and slathering on the same presets, the album stands out. It demonstrates how weighty a real performance can still sound.
Dying Of Everything will also be available in Dolby Atmos, one of the first death metal albums to receive that mix courtesy of Morrisound Studios. “War,” a mid-album pummeller that opens and closes with sound effects-heavy skirmishes, was one of the first songs Obituary pulled out for the Atmos treatment. “Let me tell you what, there are 13 speakers around all over the place,” John says of the session at Morrisound. “And that war scene at the beginning? You find yourself ducking and hiding in the corner when that thing starts.”
However, even though they’ve become adept at capturing themselves at their home studio and trusting Cincotta and company to twiddle the knobs,1 John and Donald knew the key to the album was the performances. Obituary put in the work. “We did not hit record until we were 100 percent ready,” Donald remembers. “With the songs, performances, instruments, mic placements, inputs, how hot are we hitting things, the arrangements. We were very prepared before we hit record on this album.”
Likewise, during the writing phase, Obituary freed themselves from rushing things. They gave themselves time and space to let the creative process play out, allowing the band to find songs organically. “We actually go in pretty open-minded and easygoing and have a good time coming up with something new,” Donald says. “We’re also not that band that focuses on, ‘What do we need on this record? The last time we had a fast one, we need a faster one on this one. [Other] bands are doing this thing.’ Whatever happens in the studio that day, you know, crack a cold beer, and what happens happens. And if nothing happens, not a big deal. It’s our studio. There’s always tomorrow. And with that approach, you don’t put pressure on yourself, and you end up coming up with some pretty tasty and fun riffs.”
The fruit of that tasty riff labor is the title track, which has a compositional cleverness and patient confidence. You can almost sense the band smiling when it locks in for that gloriously chugging coda.
Dying Of Everything also closes with a world-beater, the doomy “Be Warned,” an instant Obituary classic that is a showcase for Donald’s rocksteady, Reed Mullin-level workout. The rest of the band sounds ferocious, building up a slow stomper of a progression that culminates in a devastating Iommian bend.
“It’s so heavy,” Donald says. “I don’t even know what we did, how we did it, or why we did it. It’s just one of those riffs that Trevor came up with, and I knew what I wanted to do on drums immediately.” “There’s a lot of songs where that happens to us, too,” John adds. “I think we’ve just been writing together for so long that we just kind of anticipate what somebody else might do. We’ve gotten so good at feeling each other out, and it just works out that way for us.”
Another thing that has worked out is John’s lyric-writing process. “It’s cool when I come up with lyrics that I feel are really cool and fit the song so well but actually have something interesting behind them,” he says about his current methodology, which has evolved beyond sounds but is still rooted in the thrill of screaming over cool riffs. “You know, people have been asking me a lot about these things. ‘Weaponize the hate? What does that mean?’ I don’t know, but it sounded cool when I came up with it. And it’s a cool song title. But the lyrics and the song titles are the last things that get piled onto the music. I don’t write lyrics and go up to these guys and say, ‘Hey, came up with these lyrics. Let’s try and write some music that fits.’ Doesn’t work that way for us. It starts with the music, it starts with me mumbling and jumbling over the top of stuff. And I turn that into syllables. I turn that into lyrics.”
John has worked hard at penning catchy phrases. He’s always had a knack for it, but this new album is chock full of them. “Beware/ be warned,” he growls on “Be Warned.” It’s the sort of sticky sloganeering that everyone at a show is dying to shout along to. “I love trying to come up with those,” John says. “It’s fun for me to come up with song titles, cool phrases, that maybe people use all the time and never really thought that, Hey, you know what, that’d be a good song title or a good line in a song. It makes you feel like you’ve kind of heard it before, you know?”
Unless, you know, you’re prone to hearing lyrics completely wrong. Or, in the case of the great Obituary Lyrics Mystery, you turn a bunch of sounds into erroneous verses. And so I ask, do the Tardys know how and why nearly every lyrics website has whiffed so hard on Slowly We Rot’s lyrics?
“Maybe they just held Siri up to the radio and that’s what she spit out,” John joked. And, hey, great minds. I had the same idea.
In order to test the theory that some sites were batch auto-transcribing songs, I isolated the vocals in “Slowly We Rot” and fed them into Otter.ai, a real-time transcription service that utilizes AI. Here’s what it spat out:
Hi Bob! We got you up. Sign up. Join now. Boy!
“We can officially say that’s as close as what that other guy came up with,” Donald deadpanned. Yeah, I don’t think we’re close to the singularity that involves a Terminator screaming, “Hi Bob! We got you up!” while it crushes my skull. And AI wouldn’t necessarily fit the timeframe anyway since these lyrics have been kicking around the internet forever. No, I think “slowly read in your love” had a much more human origin.
DarkLyrics.com is one of the oldest extant heavy metal lyric sites, plugging into the matrix in 2001. It looks like a Web 1.0 relic, although somehow, against all odds, people still submit lyrics to the database. Meshuggah’s Immutable was posted this year.
Is Slowly We Rot on DarkLyrics? It is. Is its transcription similar to all of the other lyric sites? …sort of. Like the version that appears in Encyclopaedia Metallum, DarkLyrics’ “Slowly We Rot” is longer and more detailed. That means all the good parts are there: “fighting the sword,” etc. But there are also some very intriguing notes sprinkled throughout the transcription.
“The below is a real question mark,” the DarkLyrics submitter admits in one aside before guessing that John Tardy must be singing, “Kill all who find death is not/ (To be) slowly rotting out??” “Kill all who find death is not” is a real question mark? Wow. You don’t say.
Based on that clue, here’s what I think happened. Way back in the dark ages of the internet, some brave soul decided to transcribe Slowly We Rot by ear. Maybe they believed in the utopian vision that decentralized access to the world’s knowledge would set us free. Maybe they wanted to cover “Slowly We Rot” at their next show. Maybe it was a bit that lost the setup and punchline. The motives don’t matter. What matters is that they made a valiant attempt but acknowledged their shortcomings. “This is also a question mark?” they wrote before jotting down a passage that reads like a philosophy professor having an aneurysm. “Then the one who finds death/ Is not (to be) slowly rotting out.” Is that Schopenhauer? Oh no, Someone call an ambulance.
What happened next is what happens all the time on the internet. The annotations were lost as the lyrics got shared and scraped by competing websites hungry for ad money. Like a grainy meme that looks like it’s being viewed through a fully zoomed in microscope because grandparents keep screenshotting it with shittier phones, the original transcriber’s question marks and misgivings got cropped out. What remained after these accidental edits looked authoritative enough since multiple other sites stole the same lyrics. And so “Slowly We Rot (Slowly Read In Your Love)” was now gilded with a patina of authenticity, like anything else on the internet that’s older than a week.
Did this actually happen? Who knows. No lyric website will talk with me. Apparently, you can show a PowerPoint to a legendary death metal band, but a lyric depot wants nothing to do with you.
While I lack closure, the Tardy brothers are good sports about everything, no doubt possessing the wisdom that comes with being in the music industry for over 30 years. “Tell you what, the next time I do a hit of weed,” Donald jokes, “I’ll write down what I think he is saying and we’ll crack the code.”
Later in our conversation, John formulates a new experiment. “I guess you can listen to the live DVD [of Slowly We Rot] and compare it to the original thing. Might be interesting to see what changes. I hadn’t even thought to compare the two because that would have been done 30 years apart from each other.”
“Yeah, that’s my question to John Tardy,” Donald interjects. “If they’re not words, how, after 33 years when we kick into it live, do you know what you’re about to say? There are no lyric sheets. Can you imagine a teleprompter? Teleprompter goes by, and it’s just WTF.” “It’d be like the Peanuts cartoons,” John cracks, both of them mouthing the muted trombone noises of the adult voices. Look, if there’s a future Obituary/Peanuts crossover in the works called You’re Chopped In Half, Charlie Brown!, I want the world to know I was there when it started.
Still, while the Tardys take it in stride, I think there has to be a psychic toll to having preposterous lyrics credited to you, especially when most of the world is unfamiliar with the Obituary mythos. “It’s horrible,” Donald admits. “Yeah,” John responds. “I mean, some of that stuff is silly. And I’m sure 99 percent of people that read that assume those are the lyrics I wrote.” “That’s the scary part,” Donald adds. “It’s just silliness,” John reiterates. “So hopefully, most people know that. That’s not even remotely close to what I think I’m saying.”
However, John also said something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. “When you go back to Slowly, that was such a weird time for us. We were so young. And we were writing songs in the studio. I would start singing, and half of it was making noises. We didn’t really think it was gonna be permanent. It was before we even thought we were doing an album, for God’s sake, some of those songs, you know?” Later, John adds this: “I know it’s hard for a lot of people to be like, ‘What do you mean you weren’t saying anything?’ But I’ll be honest, when we wrote those songs, we were young and it’s just the way I did it. I can’t explain why I did.”
Due to the eternalism of music, it must be bizarre to continually explain your teenage intentions, or lack thereof. Your impetuous output becomes the bedrock influence for hundreds of bands, and then everyone fixates on that time forevermore even though your life has moved on. It’s not like I have to explain, day after day, why I took the SATs with a blinding hangover.2 Then again, my SAT scores didn’t inspire Power Trip.
The Tardys are appreciative that they’ve been embraced by so many. “There’s no better compliment, for sure,” John says. “You know, you get some big bands: Slipknots of the world, Lamb Of God guys. And when you hear that you influence them? You don’t get a better compliment.” Donald concurs. “And now, the Power Trips and the 200 Stab Wounds type dudes, where it’s not super thrash, it’s not a million miles per hour, they’re coming back to the basics that Obituary has been doing forever. So what a compliment to see young bands not going in the direction of new metal all the time. Instead, they’re like old souls.”
Obituary are like a band of old souls who inhabit an ageless body. Their status and legacy as the band that made the all-timer Cause Of Death affords them the time to make albums how they want and grants them the opportunities to play big shows. All of that has been built on years of relentless work. But that work hasn’t extinguished the members’ obligation to their younger selves to make music that they enjoy. At their core, Obituary still want to make cool music.
In that sense, Obituary exist in all times. Dying Of Everything is the band now, shaped by all the accumulated experiences that occurred after Slowly We Rot’s release. But the Tardys are still the kids who fell in love with Venom and Hellhammer; who were inspired by seeing early Savatage; who rode their bikes past Ben Meyer’s garage, hoping to spy Nasty Savage practicing; who were driven to shows by their biggest fan, their dad, Jim Tardy. That’s all still there. Obituary in 1989? Want to make cool music. Obituary in 2022? Want to make cool music. Same as it ever was. And that’s why Obituary endure. The insatiable desire to make cool music, the reason why so many make metal in the first place, plays in any era.
There are downsides to that, I guess. Freaks like me will try to over-intellectualize your teenage dreams and show you PowerPoints. We’ll turn your juvenile ambitions into an ethos and ask you about decisions that don’t extend far beyond “because.” We’ll study your sounds and hear lyrics. That has to be tiring.
But metal isn’t about foresight. Metal is about swinging your sword because you want to swing a sword because where else in life can you swing a damn sword? Over 30 years ago, inspired by the bands they loved, Obituary swung their sword, and a section of death metal grew out of the ditch that it cut. In turn, the bands they inspired swung their swords, cutting new ditches, repeating the process. When you think about it like that, the only thing I can say is, you know, I guess the sword really is a plow.
True story. Halfway through the test, I heard this horrible siren, an ear-piercing alarm. I looked up, and saw that no one else seemed to hear it — everyone was still diligently working on their tests. “Oh, great, I got so hammered I’m losing it.” And then a teacher ran into the room and said there was a fire and we all had to leave the test area. Vindication! Sort of!