When the once highly regarded Obituary called it quits following 1997’s Back From The Dead, I think the entire underground death metal community shared a combined sigh of relief. Back From The Dead was simply one of the most boring death metal releases by a major death metal band at that point, and I don’t think many people shed a tear when the band decided to call it quits after reaching such a low point in their musical careers.

Over the next few years, several members decided to continue their musical careers; Donald Tardy moved on to play drums for the strangely successful Andrew W.K., Allen West moved on to play in Six Feet Under (only to quit the group a few years later) and Trevor Peres hooked up with former members of Pyrexia to form Catastrophic. In 2004, following a strong response at a surprising guest performance by a few former Obituary members at an Andrew W.K. gig, the group decided it was time to reform.

Wanting to make an immediate impact, the group pulled some strings and were able to convince legendary producer Scott Burns to return to engineer their latest full length effort, Frozen In Time, recorded at Morrisound Studios with Tom Morris handling the mastering. The end result is a heavy mid-paced chuggernaut with a sound that can only be described as pure Obituary. The first thing I noticed when listening to this effort is that the production is the best the band has ever had and is absolutely perfect for the style the group creates.

The album starts out with an instrumental track, "Redneck Stomp", and, unlike instrumentals on a lot of albums, it’s not a soft melodic wanky piece, it’s just pure, heavy, down-the-fuck-tuned catchy death metal. I admit to being a big fan of both Cause Of Death and The End Complete, and the sound of this opening track would fit in well with either of those albums.

The first song is "On The Floor", which is reminiscent of material found on either of the aforementioned releases; slightly more up-tempo and heavy with John Tardy’s patented haunting wail ripping throughout.

Following this is the first single from the album, "Insane", which, quite frankly is one of the weaker tracks on the album, and is generally a much slower track and tends to get rather boring pretty quickly.

This is followed by the heavily Celtic Frost/Hellhammer-inspired track "Blindsided", which, honestly is one of the catchier tunes on the album.

"Back Inside" was apparently written pretty quickly, and is just a brainless chugathon, and isn’t really worth listening to.

"Mindset" follows and sounds like it may have come straight from Six Feet Under’s Haunted debut, with its super slow, deliberate and heavy approach.

"Stand Alone" is another track with a Celtic Frost vibe to it, only with a bit more of a rock-like approach, sounding sort of like Obituary doing a Motorhead cover in the style of Celtic Frost.

"Slow Death" has a strange Sepultura vibe to it, with the drumming pattern and one or two riffs, but generally crawls along at a snail’s pace; however is still a decent track.

"Denied" is an old-school styled track, which is a bit of a yawner, unless you’re big into the style displayed on the group’s Slowly We Rot debut, only with much meatier production.

The final track, "Lockjaw" starts out with a Slayer-esque guitar wail and plods along slowly before picking up the pace and turning into a head banger’s wet dream.

The album, as a whole, is a lot stronger than I expected it to be, and is a huge step up from Back From The Dead. It does have several boring tracks and I doubt I’ll ever listen to the album again without skipping a few songs, but on the whole it matches up pretty well with the group’s last decent effort; World Demise.

Of all of the top death metal group’s to have split up for extended amounts of time and reformed, Obituary easily offer up the most solid come-back album. It’s not their best material, by any stretch, but the band doesn’t fall flat on their face. For fans of old school Obituary, this is a worthy addition to the collection, even the cover art reverts back to "old school" with an amazing piece of artwork done by, if I’m not mistaken, Andreas Marschall, famous for cover art for Immolation, Pestilence, as well as doing the cover art for both The End Complete and the group’s best-of Anthology album.

If you’ve never been a fan of Obituary, there’s nothing on this album that will change your mind and cause you to think otherwise, so don’t even bother. This is definitely not my favourite Obituary album, but it doesn’t suck either, it’s actually surprisingly decent… well, as far as Obituary albums go, anyway.

Written By: Teufel