Album that changed my life:
"Frozen in Time" by Obituary
In Wal-Mart yet again, I continued my search for more new metal, spurred on by my string of successes and not yet feeling the full sting of my failures (and there were plenty of misfires). I was browsing the racks and spotted a really cool looking album by a band called Obituary. I'd never heard of them, but the name sounded pretty metal and the cover art was cool so I decided to give it a shot. I was not disappointed. The vocals were strange and a little off-putting, but the overall sound was excellent. It was a different kind of heavy, one which I could not yet identify but would come to learn was good old fashioned straight death metal. And that was Obituary's contribution to my vocabulary. Through them, and my searches for similar bands, I learned of what I saw labelled as the "big 5" of Florida death metal: Obituary, Death, Morbid Angel, Deicide, and Cannibal Corpse. I might argue with one or two of those selections today, but the the point is that via Frozen in Time I was exposed to the world of American death metal. I learned then that not all good metal was from Europe, and not all the metal coming from the USA was as crappy as I had suspected after buying albums from groups like Chimaira and Dead to Fall.
It's funny how that cycle works. Originally I wasn't even all that aware of the fact there was music outside the US and UK. If you would have asked me, I would have said that of course there is, but it wasn't something I had consciously thought about. Then Rammstein came along, and their being from Germany was a curiosity to me. It wasn't until years later I learned about the Swedish metal scene, and the fact that most metal bands throughout the world use English lyrics. Then I started to discount American metal as I learned more about these bands, until finally I realized there's still plenty of great American metal, too.
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