“This is punk rock as ****”, Guitarist Trevor Peres said himself in a flash of genius, not including his work in the band he was to slay us all with mere minutes later. He said this having surveyed the small and dim wooden interior of the President’s Rock Club of Quincy. Indeed, seeing one of the most legendary Florida death metal acts on a level floor where coming into contact with them was not only possible, but unavoidable if you even wanted to get your money’s worth, is fucking punk. How else would one describe the ability to mic-share with John Tardy if they so wished, as though they were a dingy basement street punk band unloading and reloading decrepit u-Hauls from one rat’s nest to another in suburbs across America rather than the household name in dark and evil music that oft bellows warlike from the stage, an altar of outlets and grander designs befitting their fame? I’m not even a huge fan of Obituary (being a grateful appreciator is the least one should do if they consider themselves into heavy music), and I’d be damned if I didn’t walk out feeling like I had seen history.

An odd choice for an opener was local hardcore punishers Floods, whose riffs carry some of the death/doom/sludge punch that would make their opening for Obituary not too unusual. But it still begs the question of why make it glaringly obvious where the genre lines begin and end with. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they put on a good set, and their Celtic Frost meets Weekend Nachos style is blisteringly heavy, but it’s just not the most captivating sound out there for a young band when Xibalba, The Acacia Strain, and New Lows, to mention just a few, are making the heavy metal-inflected hardcore sound a thing we can look at with some fondness. However, if they opened for Nails, it would be worlds more practical for their fan-base.

Next up were Soul Remnants, who played some trying-to-be-evil death/thrash/black metal that didn’t rub me well. They’re one of those local bands that lives in infamy in my mind only because they seem to open for almost every lacklustre extreme metal show that I have no plans of attending, and for good reason, I’ve now found.

Luckily Maryland’s Strong Intention blast(beat) that bad taste from my palette with their furious blend of grindcore, thrash, powerviolence, and sludge. There was virtually no pit during, which would have been sad had I not just been in total awe of Jesse, the drummer of this band’s capabilities. By Jove, if you’ve ever watched a drummer go as fast and precise as this man did, with fluid and seamless transitions between sections, betraying his humanity only through his beet-red countenance and profuse outpouring of perspiration, you would be similarly too transfixed to entertain the notion of moshery. It was like a moment at the symphony where you catch yourself eying the graceful and impassioned movements of a particular player, and are lost in daydreaming mists of their sheer technical ability. This guy was fucking good, and the rest of the band were no slobs either, if only a little stiff for the type of music they were playing, which I’m sure, if manifested into physical object, would easily exceed speeds upwards of 200 k/h. I realise my whole review has been about how this drummer was built to blast, essentially, and I have no regrets.

Obituary came almost without warning, as the grim reaper himself oft does, and set about their work in sonic canon-fire, leveling the pit with the classics ‘Chopped In Half’, ‘Turned Inside Out’, ‘Infected’, ‘I’m In Pain’, and ‘The End Complete’ with no embellishments, only brutality. Donald (Tardy) pounded away dutifully as I tried not to be knocked into Lee Harrison’s pedal-board by the eldritch pit of swarming drunken horrors, and John Tardy looked on with visible glee as the crowd tore at itself with fervor unexpected, showing no dissatisfaction with the unorthodox cozy face-to-face setup that’s almost totally foreign outside of a DIY venue. There are few shows that could top the uniqueness of a dive bar on the south shore of Massachusetts being the chosen venue for one of the pioneers of that slow-churning, vomit inducing, ichorous sweet death metal that sickos like myself have come to love and millions of concerned parents and educators have come to hate. Perhaps nothing short of Pig Destroyer playing a gazebo in a park somewhere will reach this level of ‘I’m dreaming’.

Obituary, Strong Intention, Soul Remnants & Floods

Live At the Presidents Rock Club,

Quincy, MA USA

Words: Sean Pierre-Antoine

Photos: Chris Small/CWS Photography