Rhythm Immortal

Florida death metal gods Obituary breathed new life (no pun intended) into the genre when they broke onto the scene in 1989 with their groundbreaking debut, Slowly We Rot. Donald Tardy's breakneck technical drumming and John Tardy's guttural, slithering vocals combined with brutally fast guitars for a sound not quite ever equaled in the death metal world before or since. The Complete Roadrunner Collection 1989-2005 gathers together Obituary's first six studio albums, including their stellar debut, 1992's landmark The End Complete, 1997's Back from the Dead, and more.

Long running Japanese metallers, Anthem, made a very solid splash into the international metal circles with this album. I remember hearing the title track many years ago on my college radio station of choice's metal show and being very impressed with it. Listening to this again over 20 years after the fact reveals that this album is holding up pretty well and features some excellent tunes…

This album, released in 1988, was the first album for the new lineup of the band. After the shock departure of (due to stress and pressure to perform mounting on) vocalist Eizo Sakamoto, the band looked set to either disband or take a nosedive in terms of popularity. They did neither. Vocalist Yukio Morikawa, who had previously auditioned when previous vocalist Sakamoto Eizo got the job after the band narrowing it down to these two, was called back to see what would have happened had he joined…

The year 1812 was a busy year for the well-known but deaf composer Ludwig van Beethoven. At last, Beethoven got the chance to meet that other famous German, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but Goethe’s personality proved a disappointed to Beethoven. The composer was carrying on a hectic love life: in 1812 he wrote his famous letter to an anonymous ‘Unsterbliche Geliebte’ (‘Immortal Beloved’). Moreover, he was getting involved in the life of his younger brother, who was infatuated with a housekeeper. Yet despite his activities, Beethoven found the time to compose several new works, among which his Seventh Symphony.