I haven't done a metal post in a while. So why not go with a death metal classic like Obituary? Only great reasons exist for listening to music so brilliantly mindless and bone-crushingly violent. If there is a band that sounds like a backhoe digging up your great grandmother's grave so that the kids at the youth center can play catch with her bones, it's Obituary.

Obituary is one of the original Florida death metal bands with the likes of Death, Cynic, Deicide, and Cannibal Corpse (who totally suck!). The band's signature style comes from a combination of tuned down ultra-distorted guitars that sound like a Tiger tank outside of Stalingrad in 1942, a tendency towards very slow tempos, simple driving repetition, descending chord progressions, wailing whammy bar dives and strangely chromatic solos, and John Tardy's growl. I'd venture to say that Tardy (pictured at right) has perhaps the most distinctive growl in all of death metal. He has this fantastic ability (no doubt aided with some production) to fade in or out from a growl with fantastic control. A T-Rex would be envious.

The lyrics are generally unabashedly awful. Song titles paint the picture for the most part: "Insane," "Chopped in half," "Slowly We Rot," "Cause of Death," "Like the Dead," "The End Complete." They tend toward the horror genre of returning from the dead, dying, destruction, unleashed minions of evil, and the like. This is bad horror movies come to music in the great tradition of Black Sabbath, the Misfits, Venom, and Slayer but at slow tempos. From time to time though we get a sneak of sentimentality as on "Final Thoughts," a song that bemoans the death of a friend, presumably by suicide.

What I like about bands like Obituary, is that they give free reign to that part of me that is quite simply morbidly fascinated. What social commentary there might be embedded in a band fixated on teenage interpretations of H.P. Lovecraft and our reptilian fears. There really is just something primally appealing in it. Its seeming stupidity - its baseness, callousness, obsessive grotesquery - make it genius somehow.