Few would describe Obituary’s catalog of festering riffage and grotesque, groove-heavy pummeling as an all-out laugh riot, but when it came time for the Tampa, Florida-formed death metal icons to make their 11th album, Dying of Everything, lead guitarist Ken Andrews’ quixotic approach to soloing had him cracking up behind the scenes.
“I always joke around,” he explains to Guitar World over Zoom from a tour stop in Georgia. “Obituary’s sound is Trevor [Peres]’s massive guitar, and I’m just the jerk-off making weird noises.”
Modest thoughts, considering how Andrews’ expertly disgusting, trem-quaked leads rattle the core throughout the new album, but he may have a point.
Founding rhythm guitarist Peres has a knack for anchoring the group’s tunes with an unwaveringly chunky, grave-sodden guitar tone – think the dank, dirgey drive of the title track to the band’s 1990 debut, Slowly We Rot, or the caveman crunch of Frozen in Time’s instrumental Redneck Stomp. With that kind of bedrock in place, Andrews – who joined the band ahead of 2014’s Inked in Blood – is offered a lot of wiggle room to wail out a zany lead.
Dying of Everything continues that tradition with By the Dawn, an otherwise bludgeoning death waltz that features some weird, whammy-riddled sections from Nasty Savage six-stringer David Austin, as well as a slippery, slide-based lead from Obituary’s shredder-in-residence. The latter manages to be a uniquely head-cocking moment that answers the once improbable question: what if Obituary went Delta blues?
“I was laughing so hard. Like, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to put a slide solo on an Obituary song,’” Andrews adds through a mile-wide smile. Inspiration for the greasy guitar lead struck the player in the middle of the night, Andrews scrambling around his Orlando home in search of an untouched Ernie Ball steel slide to demo ideas.
“I went into the garage. Usually, I can’t find anything in there, but I opened a drawer and a slide was there, still in the package. It’s kind of weird, because I never play slide. The first couple of takes I’m pushing it too hard, fretting out and everything.”
While Obituary aren’t afraid to throw caution to the wind every now and again, when it comes to old-school death metal, few bands have been blessed with a catalog as consistently brutal as theirs. Dying of Everything still dials into the band’s many strengths.
High-velocity opener Barely Alive is a vital piece of thrash-influenced mania, Peres suggesting the piece – a blur of single-note trilling and cymbal stops – took shape following Obituary’s 2018 leg of European dates on Slayer’s farewell tour. On the other side of things, the slow-mo putrescence of Peres and Andrews’ power-chording on Be Warned makes the track sound as if it were encrusted in the sludge of the Everglades.
Though album single The Wrong Time is likewise dripping in gory, descending death metal motifs, the track arguably marks another Obituary first: the catchy crossover hit. Compared to the rest of the record, the wide-open, major key chord work of The Wrong Time sports somewhat of a chipper melody, combining the band’s usual metal extremity with a pinch of pop appeal.
You could almost imagine the song sidling into a sports arena playlist, with a hyped-up crowd chanting along to lines from the fervently growly frontman John Tardy. “It is kind of commercial-sounding,” Peres concedes of the tune, “but it’s heavier than hell when you hear it full-form on stage. It's big!”
Whether melodic or menacing, Peres says he’d been stockpiling a whole dizzying array of frantically trilled and epically judded riffs for Dying of Everything since the group wrapped recording sessions for 2017’s self-titled Obituary release. “[I] basically had one track of maybe a hundred guitar rhythms, and I went through and cherry-picked,” he notes, adding of the process, “You could tell which things would go together.”
Though they’d slowly been working on an album in the background, when pandemic lockdowns began in earnest in the beginning of 2020, Obituary opted to go front-facing with a series of classics-loaded livestream performances. These were captured in their RedNeck Studio in Tampa, where the group have been tracking albums since 2007’s Xecutioner’s Song.
Concurrent to the online concerts, the band were re-upping the hardware in the studio. They retired a positively ancient computer tower-and-Pro Tools setup they’d been using for years to instead work with a newly-loaded Mac Mini (though Peres admits he brought the PC back to his place for demoing purposes).
Though Obituary technically wrapped sessions on Dying of Everything early in 2021, the quintet felt it would be best to hang onto the LP until they could properly support it with global touring.
Onstage, Andrews has switched to using amp profiles through a Kemper, but back at RedNeck he tracked his whammy-yankin’ leads through a trusted Peavey 6505 tube amp head. Peres, as he has since the band’s inception, pummels his rhythms while rolling all the tone off a humbuckered Strat (“It’s kind of anti-guitar EQ’ing”), and then powering that through a JCM800 and a well-worn ProCo RAT.
Peres has busted through a plenitude of the distortion pedals over the years – from original big boxes, to the slimline Lil’ Rats, to his current Rat 2. While it’s since become a defining presence in Obituary’s overall sound, Peres confesses he fell into his Rat-infested set-up while trying to recreate another guitarist’s sinister surge.
“Obviously, I tried to emulate what Celtic Frost sounded like – [that’s] probably the biggest influence,” Peres explains of the roots of his chunkiness. “The first time we ever played with Frost, at Sweden Rock Fest, I got to go on stage and watch them play. I looked over and he [Celtic Frost guitarist Tom G. Warrior] had an 800 and a ProCo Rat. It was too funny. Same thing! I was like, ‘I guess I hit it right on the head.’”
“Tone-wise, he’s got the Obituary sound. There’s no messing with that,” Andrews continues of Peres’ unimpeachable crunch. “As far as blending along with him, I think it’s cool because he has all the low-end, [and] scooped-out mids. With my stuff, whether it be a Kemper or a Peavey, I have the higher-end dialed in. When it’s mixed, it sounds pretty badass.”
Dying of Everything sounds just as vital as genre-codifying crushers like Slowly We Rot and Cause of Death (“I think it stands right up there with the classic stuff,” Peres says proudly). Nevertheless, the process of making an album through a deadly pandemic – along with various Obituary members having now crossed into their 50s – made the death metal lifers increasingly cognizant of their own mortality.
“I guess that’s why we play death metal – it makes you face that fear all the time,” Peres posits, adding, “You know, the older you get, the more you start realizing you’re not immortal. When you’re younger, you don’t think about it as much, because not many people are dying around you – [like] your friends and family. You take each day one at a time and enjoy every moment you can, because it can be taken from you like that.”
After much delay, Obituary are finally gearing up to tour Dying of Everything in 2023. Beyond this, the act are also nearing their 40th anniversary – this including the band’s early days as Executioner (and later Xecutioner). While it’s currently the right time for Obituary to be barreling through The Wrong Time, the death metal veterans have floated the idea to each other of reviving some formative thrashers for a future celebration.
“It’s funny… [bassist] Terry [Butler] has mentioned that,” Peres explains to us. “Like, ‘Man, it’d be awesome to do those!’ I think [Executioner] had another five songs when we did [1985’s Metal Up Your Ass EP]; we had one called I Laugh When People Die. We’ve thought about re-recording them with our sound today, [and with] John doing his vocals the way he does it now. It might be fun… I mean, it might be comical, too.”
For the guys in Obituary, the yuks just keep coming.
- Dying of Everything is out now via Relapse Records.
