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Obituary: 30 Years In and Still Rotting Slowly

An interview with John Tardy about being a death metal lifer.

If it existed, death metal’s introductory course would likely devote the majority of its pedagogical focus on Tampa’s own Obituary. At 30 years old and what will be nine full-lengths with next month’s Inked in Blood, the death metal band have only slightly deviated from the same bare-knuckled death metal approach that cemented that their status with 1989’s Slowly We Rot. In a metal criticism realm that too often blindly rewards convoluted noise walls in the guise of “genre bending,” Obituary have simply maintained and held to the notion that if the riff isn’t broke then don’t fucking fix it. In the years since Slowly We Rot, the band has bowed out gracefully once after becoming disinterested due to relentless touring.

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Gnashing their way back with 2005’s Frozen in Time, Obituary’s self-admitted meathead brand of death metal was welcomed with the likely well-decayed but open arms of their loyal fans and those who’d only recently discovered that Obituary’s placement in the annals of death metal’s history is just as integral as those so quickly listed when that discussion presents itself. With this month’s Inked in Blood sure to offer up the same ridiculousness by way of death metal riffs and lyrics, Obituary vocalist John Tardy seems more shocked than anyone else that the band’s story has unfolded the way it has. It’s immediately apparent, though, that the thick Florida accent on the other line would be doing this, regardless of the accolades or recognition. For Tardy, death metal is in fact a lifestyle, and it’s one that thankfully finds us in the good graces of a new Obituary record.

via Loudwire

Noisey: Looking back at Obituary’s career, coming from Slowly We Rot in ’89 to now with next month’s Inked in Blood, do you approach each album the same way or do you have a different strategy going in to each one?
John Tardy: I don’t know if strategy is the right word. It’s tough to compare your mindset at the age of 20, when we did Slowly We Rot, compared to now. We’ve obviously had a lot happening and done a lot of songwriting. There’s just so much differences there because so much time has gone between the albums. I don’t think we’ve approached it really differently. We’ve always been laid back. We don’t try real hard or think too much about what we’re doing. We just get together and hang out and just jam and what comes out is what comes out. Our life has become a lot easier since a few albums ago, we’ve got our own studio here at the house. Having your own studio to record in whenever you’d like, whether it be ten in the morning or ten at night. You can record for five minutes or three or four hours. We’re getting more and more familiar with our studio and working with that. It’s just been awesome. We did take a long time with this record. We’ve probably been working on this thing for close to three years now. We started three years ago and wrote a handful of the songs. We got pulled away doing some shows and doing this and that and by the time we got back into it, almost two years had gone by. We dove back in and wrote another handful of songs. I think that maybe helped. I think the album has some songs that sound quite a bit different from each other. You feel like you’re not running through the same song ten times on an album. I think that helped a little bit and also gave us time to really jam the songs. We played them live before we even recorded a couple of them. Anytime you can do that, I think it helps. It makes you relax and really think through the songs. There’s a lot of little things that went into the record that made it come out the way it did.

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You mentioned “easier.” Has the process gotten easier as you’ve gotten older; are you still able to tap into that primal nature from when you were nineteen?
Songwriting-wise, it’s easy. We really don’t struggle to write songs. We’ve never written a song that we didn’t record. We’ve been together so much. If Trevor just starts off with a rhythm, he almost immediately stops himself before Don or I can say hey, that’s not where we’re going; it gets erased off the board so fast. What’s not easy is the task of actually recording yourself. It really takes a lot of focus in the studio. Playing live—anyone can walk out in front of 30,000 people—you have so much adrenaline going, that’s the easy part. You walk into the study and I’m staring at my brother and a microphone and just sitting there—to try and find that emotion, especially with this style of music, to get that energy in a studio, to me, is the biggest challenge. The songwriting is pretty cool. We just allow ourselves to time for things to work. The songwriting’s been falling together pretty cool.

As a band widely considered as one of death metal’s pioneers, I’m curious as to how you’ve seen the genre evolve from those early Obituary days in 1984 to now?
You’re talking about 30 years’ worth of time that things have changed. One of the biggest things is the internet. When we were doing Slowly We Rot, we didn’t talk to anybody. You just record some tapes and that’s it. The world has changed so much as far as that goes. As far as the music, we got lucky. We were in the right place at the right time. At a very young age, we ran into the guys from Savatage and Nasty Savage that lived around here. We were really inspired by what those two heavy bands were doing. Once we heard the early Venom stuff and the early Frost stuff, it really opened our eyes to what we enjoyed doing, which was trying to do something as heavy as possible. You’re looking at a band that really hasn’t changed a lot over the years. We’re kinda stuck in our ways, and we like changing each album to make it sound a little different, but sticking with the Obituary sound that we’re comfortable with.

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You guys have stuck with the formula and with this genre throughout the years, well before it was achieving the kind of critical acclaim and hip appeal that it’s gained over the last few years. What’s your perspective on the popularity that extreme music has gained in that time period?
I remember the first tour we did through Europe in ’90, ’91, we went over there for Cause of Death. It was huge back there. People were trippin’. When people put on Slowly We Rot for the first time, and it opens with “Internal Bleeding”: that was crazy at the time. Nowadays, these kids are just so fast and crazy and technical and all over the place, they are so much different than we are—in a good way, also. We’re just kinda cavemen with how we approach things. That first tour was great, and through the years, it’s kinda slowed down a little bit, but I think all music does that. All forms of music do that—country music gets popular, then something else comes along, it’s always kinda going up and down. It seems like in that last few years extreme music has been picking up again, especially for us. The shows have been great. The attention we’ve been getting is really cool. That’s kinda what keeps you going. The last thing I’m gonna do is try and tour if no one wants to come and see us, you know, I can get the picture kinda quick. We’ve just been fortunate. We’re not the kind of band that feels like we have to put an album out every year or every other year like clockwork. With World Demise, it was a handful of years before Back From the Dead came out, and then even longer after that before Frozen in Time came out. Once again, the last album we did, we did well, did a lot of touring for it, but the next thing you know four years have gone by and we haven’t done an album. This one felt about a year behind schedule which is not a big deal. It worked out good. I think it’s good to do. You’ve got to take that break from it and not over push yourself or overextend yourself.

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People aren’t discovering music in the same way we used to with tape trading, the underground, and where you really had to fucking dig to find these bands.
Yeah, you really did! You had to go out and get your mom to drive you to the record store. You had to go out and look for that album. You’d show up and it wasn’t there. You had to make her go back the next weekend. You open it up in the car and you’re looking at the vinyl and by the time you get home you’re dying for that thing! Now it’s like you just download it for free and don’t see the artwork or titles or anything. It’s just different.

Where did that all start for you? When you look back at the beginning when you first got into music, and not just heavy music, but when this incredible art spoke to you and compelled you to where you it was something you simply had to do, where was that for you? I had an older brother, he was always sitting in his room and smoking weed and jamming out so I would always come creeping in there to see what he was doing. At an early age, we just loved listening to music. Even to the point where we were picking up a broom to do the air guitar and jamming and jumping around. I don’t think it ever dawned on me that it was something that I wanted to do. For us, Donald started playing the snare drum at school and then we’d hear Nasty Savage and Savatage in their garage jamming while we were riding our bikes down the street. That just piqued our curiosity all to be. Donald, at this point in time, is jonesing for a drum set and he didn’t have one so he would go over to a friend’s house that had a drumset and start playing, which got Trevor into playing the guitar. He bought a guitar and didn’t know how to play it. They start jamming, and I am just sitting there and I start singing along with it. We had so much fun just coming home from school and going into the garage and jamming that we never really thought much about recording or trying to do an album or really doing anything besides having so much fun jamming. By the time we decided to go record a few songs in the studio, two of them landed on that compilation record and then Roadrunner heard it and came to us and said they wanted to do an album and needed a few more songs. So Slowly We Rot came out and it kinda started from there and I can’t believe we’re still doing it. It’s been crazy.

The longevity and staying power you guys have is such a rarity in any genre, it seems. What do you attribute that to?
It’s just one of those recipes. It’s spaghetti and meatballs. It’s not like you’re trying to recreate this fancy dish. A band is kind of like a recipe. You can’t spend all the money in the world to create it and just think it’s going to be good. It doesn’t work that way. It’s just one of those things where Donald, Trevor, and I have been together so long we’re similar and different in enough ways to make things interesting. We still have fun doing this stuff. We’re close enough where we can argue and fight about stuff but the next day, we’re right back where we were and we’re just going to continue what we’re doing. It definitely helps having your brother in the band. He comes over here almost every single day, he comes over here six or seven days a week. We’re always messing around doing something. That’s kinda how the Tardy Brothers record came out, we were just sitting here messing around in our new studio. We just sat and played and played and played. It’s just a recipe that doesn’t always work but for us it just keeps on tasting good.

What lies ahead for you guys after releasing what will be Obituary’s ninth full-length next month?
This whole thing has already started; I’m getting really excited and have been since we started this album. A lot of songs are really cool. It’s not just straight up death metal. “Visions in my Head” is one of those songs that has so many parts—so many ups and downs to it that it’s just kind of cool. I’m excited listening to it right now. We were in Europe for eight weeks doing all these big summer festivals over there. It’s amazing to see. We’ve been putting together a lot of classic playlists—songs from the first three albums, but we’re so excited about the new songs that we’ve been throwing those in as well. People are hearing the songs before the record’s out. I go to these shows and play the news songs and can see people singing along to them. They’ve heard the songs on YouTube and video clips they’ve taken. That’s getting really powerful and really inspiring to see that people already know the songs. We’re really excited. We have a tour coming up with Carcass in America right when the album comes out in October, and that goes right into the Death to All tour that we’re going to jump onto and then we have a handful of other festivals that we’re doing, Nicaragua, Pennsylvania, Mexico, several others, and then we’ve got a full European tour of our own that we will be doing at the beginning of the year. All of that is to push this new album and get it out there. After that, we’ll take a step back and see what happens from there.

Jonathan Dick is on Twitter - @Jonathan_K_Dick