Review Summary: It's a dark day indeed...
Obituary’s mark in the death metal scene is hardly deniable. From the band’s heavy beginnings in
Slowly We Rot, to the famous recording of
Cause of Death, to the amazingly proficient
The End Complete, to the raw and senseless pissing rage-fest of
World Demise, their influence is hard to deny. Most people will tell you that
World Demise was the last great effort by this band, and
Back From the Dead was an immediate brick wall for the members, and the group would hardly recover in years to come. At least however in the days of
Frozen in Time the band could still put down some pretty creative riffs, which is more than I can say for most of the band’s modern albums;
Darkest Day taking the cake for most the most unmemorable, uninspiring, and droning snooze-fest in the band’s catalog.
The album as a whole represents the sound of a band who are simply going through the motions, and inputting no value into the music whatsoever. The album screams mediocrity so explicitly, it’s almost difficult to even finish listening to it, especially when you take into account the group’s more prominent efforts, and take a look on the band’s evolution, if you could even call it that.
Darkest Day is yet another nail in the coffin for a band who’ve already taken so many steps backwards, they’ve been basically irrelevant for the past decade.
The biggest problem with this album is that during the entire thing the band is still trying to be brutal, and be pissed, and just scream when the simple reality is that the members who worked on this album are all way past their prime. Due to this, it basically sounds like 30-40 year olds trying to be energized and angry 20 year olds. The album almost has a “core” feel to it, and a really sloppy one at that. The vocalist is the most apparent aspect of this. If you listen to his vocals on
The End Complete, then jam this, you’ll see plainly how years of shredding vocal chords and a massive break from the band have made his appearance far less convincing. John Tardy’s vocals have remained fairly constant throughout the band’s career, but for this album, they’re bland, pale, and all out disappointing.
The instrumentation here is probably the biggest sign that the band has run all out of ideas. The drums are so mind-numbingly boring, and the guitar work is just droned out and dull, and the horrible production value just makes all of this sound washed out, like all the band’s former talent has just been bleached away and we’re left with an album that essentially does nothing. Its relevance, its influence, its credibility, its respectability? All of these get a score of 0 for the simple fact that this band has basically been dead for years and the members are still trying to cash in on what little drops of brutality and proficiency lie in the bottom of their rusty musical septic tanks.
It’s not that the album is the worst thing ever put out in death metal, it’s just that its relevancy factor is so low.
Darkest Day is just a completely useless album offering up nothing remotely exciting, let alone new. I could appreciate
Back From the Dead and
Frozen in Time to a certain extent, which is more credit than a lot of fans are willing to give this band; but after that this band just sinks, and chances are they’ll never rise back up, so it really would just be for the best if they called it quits, and gave up the opportunity to make one final album that’s actually good to close out their history….as it’ll probably never be.
