Tag: obituary

Obituary at The Bellwether by Taylor Wong

Obituary At The Bellwether: 35 Years of Cause Of Death

Danny Baraz April 30, 2025

This past Saturday, April 26th, in the year of our Lord, 2025, Obituary, along with Nails brought their tour celebrating 35 years of Cause of Death to The Bellwether in Downtown Los Angeles. Tampa Florida’s Obituary released their second album, Cause of Death in 1990—35 years ago. I was a freshman in high school. I had never heard anything like it and I found out pretty quickly that NO ONE else had heard anything like it, either. My teenage feelings of suffering and despair and confusion and anger finally had a soundtrack. I was just getting into thrash metal and hardcore punk and picking up a guitar for the first time. My preferences leaned toward frenetic chaos with a high bpm. Fast and hard. But Obituary and Cause of Death showed me a new way—grinding, low tempo, heavy riffs that slowly dragged bodies across the floor. Sludgy breakdowns building to blast beat eargasms that changed my life forever. Slayer and others showed them the way but it was Cause of Death that had that mix of thrash and sludge that really got me off. That cassette lived in my Walkman for a good 3 months, uninterrupted. It formally introduced a

Hell or High Roller: Psycho Las Vegas 2021

Rob Shepyer August 26, 2021

There was a time when for me, going to Psycho Las Vegas meant budgeting only enough money to eat McDonalds for three days while I slept on a friend’s couch in some lawless Vegas neighborhood so far off the strip, Ubers wouldn’t dare travel to such unsavory corners. Now, in the post-pandemic world, I report on Psycho with new purpose. This year, I was staying in a Delano scenic suite high above the city and budgeted enough money to properly chase the American dream. Raoul Duke’s American dream in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a metaphor for the limits of human consciousness. With freedom as the central American covenant, what greater expression of patriotism is there than breaking free of reality’s chains by dosing yourself past every threshold? Now though, as I take that same trip as Duke in 2021, my search for the American Dream is a futile attempt to connect with a time long gone. You might assume I mean the world before the pandemic but I also mean that beautiful era in music history where rock and metal bands could draw crowds as far as the eye can see. How do we recover

The Road to Psycho Las Vegas

Rob Shepyer June 12, 2021

Later this month, I’ll attend my first indoor concert since March 2020. People will not be wearing masks or social distancing. I’ll have dipped my toes into the cultural soup I’ve swam in the majority of my adult life, relearning all the in’s-and-out’s of concert going. Stage-dives and mosh pits have been relegated to my long term memory banks awaiting to be unearthed. Although most metalheads will be breaking their concert fasts soon (if they haven’t already), Psycho Las Vegas is the spiritual grand re-opening of the metal scene in the wild American west. As the first large festival to take place since the beginning of the pandemic, Psycho is a test much like the ones Hunter S. Thompson indulged in with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Our senses may have been perverted, inverted, dulled and destroyed by lengthy quarantines but our imaginations are in better shape than ever and if I can imagine Psycho Las Vegas being the most insane heavy metal summit of my life, then I can will it into being. related content: A High And Beautiful Wave: Psycho Las Vegas 2019 Before the world shut down, Psycho’s 2020 lineup was one of the most anticipated slates of

OC Rots Slow: Obituary, Abbath, and Midnight at the Observatory

Rob Shepyer October 12, 2019

For the longest time, I was consumed with the debate on who should be considered the best death metal band of all time. The usual suspects always make the list of the death metal big four: Death, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, and then the last spot seems to fluctuate between a myriad of bands. Taking their current status in the scene in regard, I thought Possessed had surpassed Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel, earning them the top spot. They still sound incredible live and put on wild shows that nearly topple the venue. However, after their sold out show at Orange County’s Observatory, I’m sorry but the top of that list is a spot reserved only for Obituary. You can take the band’s history as a partial reason why, they’ve been “slowly rotting” for 3o years now but for me, it’s all about the sonic power and how they make me feel. Having seen all the competition, nothing compares to Obituary. related content: The Battle Of The Bays: Obituary & Exodus Clash At Teragram Ballroom This was one of most anticipated tours of the year for metalheads, with a stacked lineup that featured Devil Master on first. Having witnessed their

The Battle of The Bays: Obituary & Exodus Clash At Teragram Ballroom

Rob Shepyer October 12, 2017

Thrash is the father of every form of extreme metal on the heavy metal family tree. If it wasn’t for Slayer there would be no death metal or black metal. There have always been bands that have teetered on the border of death and thrash metal, german thrash bands like Kreator and Sodom brought death metal vocals and heaviness into thrash, while bands like Obituary brought thrash metal accessibility and groove into death metal. Perhaps that was always the secret to Obituary’s longevity, of all the original Florida death metal bands, beginning with Chuck Shuldiner’s Death then continued with Morbid Angel and Deicide, Obituary is the only band of the bunch still reigning. What separated Obituary’s music from these other bands is that they took a more accessible, groove and rhythm approach to death metal, it wasn’t a total noise fest of blast beats and guttural vocals. The band was always more seeped in their southern rock roots than the rest. Almost like how Weedeater is to stoner metal. related content: Weedeater And The Obsessed At The Regent: Blaze It Up, Fool The Florida death metal sound was born out of Tampa Bay in the Morrisound Recording studio but then