As far as I can remember, Obituary's Cause of Death is the only album in my collection that I intentionally got rid of, and then bought again. Their World Demise album was one of my very first death metal albums and it was something of a revelation at the time. The fuzzy guitars, the vocals that sounded like a cross between growling and vomiting. I remember getting into it in middle school and coming in to tell my friend excitedly. His response was simple: "I didn't see that one coming". I think it was obvious that I was heading down the path of brutality.
I eventually picked up this album, since it was without question the most revered Obituary release, and supposedly a death metal classic. It didn't do much for me though. In the time between my purchase of World Demise and Cause of Death, I had become a more educated metal fan. I had discovered Opeth, late period Death, and Meshuggah. Obituary just seemed totally boring and simplistic. I think my general sentiment was this: Obituary has one of the greatest vocalists in death metal. Too bad it's wasted on such boring music.
Flash forward 9 years and I now consider this album one of the essential death metal releases, at least to the point of buying another copy. In some ways my perception of Cause of Death hasn't really changed that much. I still think the vocals are the most noteworthy thing about the sound, and I still think the music is fairly standard. It's just that my values have completely changed.
For a good six years, the crux of my musical taste evolved according to the notion that metal was a genre that could be just as respectable, artistic, and proficient as any other style of music. I made forays into other "adventurous" genres of music; I made parallels to other visceral styles. And somewhere in there I think that the pure feeling of glee at hearing a grown man puke into a microphone was beaten down.
In the last couple years I have apparently come full circle. In my current estimation, the immediacy of the drumming, the jagged distortion of the guitar, the primal screaming - these things define value in death metal far more than the intricate and analytical progressions of an album like Individual Thought Patterns. And in that regard Cause of Death has gained considerable ground. In a phase of life where I wanted metal to withstand the scrutiny of (popular) critical opinion, the vocals could hold no greater status than a superfluous, if amusing, ornament. But in the sense that death metal's value is derived from its raw intensity, what could be more crucial than throat ripping vocals?
It's not that I no longer believe in the capability of death metal to be ambitious in scope and musicality. But to downplay the aesthetic aspect of the music is to ignore the most blatant point of all: nobody listens to this stuff if they don't enjoy, on some level, the sound of musical chaos and aggression.
It’s a natural tendency to want others to respect your musical taste, and I wonder to what extent that drives many people to “grow out” of metal when the capacity to enjoy it never really left. But maybe what I’m talking about is really just the self-imposed repression of being an adult. My friend Vinay used to talk about this a lot. Most people never stop liking many of the things that kids enjoy, like running around outside. Adults only run around after assigning the behavior a constructive purpose and putting on clothes which signify that the behavior is non-threatening. How very un-metal.
That was off-topic, but the point is that I think I had to come to terms with the fact that my musical taste is completely unjustifiable to the majority of reasonable adults before I could fully re-immerse myself in the world of unapologetic, zero-crossover appeal death and black metal. And it’s significant because I truly believe that that’s the form of metal which has the most artistic significance (despite most critics thinking the opposite). As I’ve alluded to before in this blog, if the value of a work of metal is derived from its crossover elements, then the entire genre becomes the musical equivalent of the WWF – a soap opera with just enough gleaming muscle to achieve male legitimacy.
In retrospect, I think the point when I stopped caring about justifying my musical taste to others coincided pretty closely with the point when I began identifying myself much more with my work. In the first couple years of college, I know of at least one instance when I verbally referred to myself as a “metalhead who did engineering”. Needless to say I would never think that way now.
To summarize, Cause of Death is pretty good.
