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Obituary are not an easy band for choosing a first album to buy. The debut and sophomore often appear in death metal compilations on YouTube and "The End Complete" gets a lot of praise from some but not all. Just looking at the ratings here on MMA, I see some albums rated very highly and yet I recently read reviews that called those albums boring and unoriginal.
To help me make a call on my own about what album to buy, I went through some albums on YouTube (skimmed quickly about, really) and finally decided on one. That album told me the band had a lot of potential but failed to convince me that I had picked one of the better ones. That led to more searching and it brought me here to "Darkest Day".
In a nutshell, Obituary were one of the important early American death metal bands to hit the scene in the late eighties (they'd been around earlier under different monikers) with their debut "Slowly We Rot". Over the next two albums, they solidified their position as pioneers of death metal. After a few albums, though, they took six years off before coming back. Their output since then seems to be considered good but also many claim the music is a rehash of ideas with each new album, one reviewer going so far as to call them the AC/DC of death metal, serving up the same formula because that's what the fans expect from Obituary.
This album is not considered brilliant by many, although most reviews give it a moderately favourable rating. I am pleased with it myself, compared to my previous purchase; however I recognize its shortcomings.
Basically, older Obituary had songs or albums that really sounded like an American version of Celtic Frost, and I hear a lot of that on this album, too. Why, even in the second track, vocalist John Tardy gives a Tom Warrior "oogh!" just before a Frosterian riff kicks in. Much of the album does rely on not only riffs that easily tap into my Celtic Frost memory banks but a similar heavy guitar sound. Just quickly listen to the first few seconds of "Payback", "See Me Now", "Violent Dreams" and "Truth Be Told" and tell me you can't hear the Frost influence. Where the album comes back to being Obituary and not Celtic Frost is in the use of the drums in certain tracks and John Tardy's vocals. Actually, the biggest reason for me wanting too find another Obituary album after my first purchase was the vocals. It was not because I thought they were just so awesome. It was rather that I understood what was being attempted but I felt Tardy often sounded like a big wrestler crying in rage like a three-year-old boy. Thankfully, I get that impression hardly at all on this album.
The songs are mostly fairly slow for death metal but there's enough variety on this album to keep it interesting. The band can speed up from time to time. And while the music can seem to be quite one dimensional, there are moments within songs or opening riffs that prove the individualism of each song, in spite of the similarities between tracks.
This may not be the best Obituary album to get, but from what I have heard, getting a higher rated album is not going to make any drastic changes to my opinion of the band's output. A rather good album from a band that I don't expect to surprise me.