If there's one Death Metal band that influenced loads of bands along with Death and Morbid Angel, it has to be Obituary. After an absence they suddenly returned on stage for a short tour last year, and this was never a reunion tour, as we found out in their dressingroom, backstage at the Dynamo Open Air festival.
Metalrage.com once again gets to speak to a living legend, the very cheerful and friendly Obituary guitarist Trevor Peres.




It's been 1991 since Obituary has played Dynamo, ofcourse I didn't see that show because I was barely a fetus back then, but does it feel like you're back?

Well to me it's cool we're finally gonna play Dynamo again, it's been long like you said. We always wanted to play before, it just never did happen. But yeah we're happy that we're playing the Dynamo.


You've been away for a while, untill you just appeared again and did the tour end of 2004..

Yeah that was our reunion type deal.. To let everyone know we're alive, you know..


Was that really a reunion? You were'nt broken up were you?

They called it the reunion-whatever thing. And we are reunited, so that is right in a way, but we weren't planning on doing this. It's all just fun, we're doing it because we love it, y'know.


You are doing this like, it seems, forever, since 1984 even. Back then the whole Death Metal genre didn't even exist. You were one of the pioneers. Nowadays every town has about ten Death Metal bands, it's a well known and accepted genre.

Yeah it's crazy, more people know the term Death Metal now than ever before, it's amazing. Even normal people at normal jobs know what Death Metal is, haha. They may not ever heard a Death Metal record, but they know the term. It's not an underground term anymore, it's out there.


And the genre, being around for so long, has brought a lot of different bands and styles to the genre. Some are unbelievebly succesful, like Nile for instance. Did the new generation, that you taught the way in a sence, influence your writing process for the new album?

Nah, we're doing the same. The same thing, the same formula. There's nothing new going on there. So if you're an old Obituary fan, you'll like the new shit. To me, our songs are always catchy. Whatever I write, it's got a hook that you can bang your head to, and that's what counts to me. I think each song is a progression on it's own, it might not be the newest sound out there, but it's a good new song, it makes you feel good right away, and that's all that matters to me. You could see it last year, when we played some stuff the fans had never heard before in their lives, and people were going nuts! So it's unprogressive, and progressive in a way, hehe.

I always liked the whole blast-beat thing, even that's not new at all, Napalm Death were doing it way before us. They we're the ones who started that shit of: (Trevor continues to imitate the sound of a Napalm Death blast beat), like Catastrophic (Trevor's other band -MR) does that. But it isn't for Obituary so I put it in Catastrophic. We do the fucking grind beats, the blasts you know like a fucking machine-gun: (more imitation of blastbeats followed to our amusement) But then it sounds like Obituary too, because I do a lot of breakdowns, the slow shit. And the riffing over the fast shit, is usually slow, so I'd be going (once again a perfect imitation of the sound of Death Metal comes out of Trevors mouth, this time with the bad-ass guitar pose he has mastered on stage). So it's a little different, it's new in a way..


You started as a highschool band somewhere in the stone-age, and at some point you "suddenly" had achieved a legendary status, and nowadays you've influenced thousands of people, and hundreds of thousands have a copy of one of your albums on the shelf. When did you first start to realise this?

That had to be when I started Catastrophic up. We started playing together in 2000 or so, and Obituary hadn't done anything at this point. And when we started touring in 2001, it was so strange to me. Obituary had been broken-up at that point. You see, all the bands Obituary had toured with were always our age, our generation. So when I came back with Catastrophic, with younger band-members, even though I was the oldest person on the tour, all the bands we were opening up for would be coming up to me, all these people would tell me how they had been influenced by Obituary.

To me that was just weird at first. I never had a clue how influencial we were. It made me nervous, it felt like these younger guys were blowing smoke up my ass. But some time you realise that it's cool, some people just like your shit, you know.

But even now I see it with the younger kids you know. We played this gig at Boston last week, with all these new sounds, the metalcore bands and shit. And every fucking one of them were coming up to me, going "dude, you rule" you know? These guys are all in their twenties, and they all love our shit. That's sick.


You never noticed before that period?

No not really, I mean, you know that people like you. People come out to the shows, they buy your t-shirts and stuff, we played 3.000 people venues. I'd be going to a bar in London and they'd be playing our songs. We knew that. But we never knew we where that influential, as far as making people want to write music, or that we were a legendary band or something. We knew that people liked us, and that was as far as it went for me. I just like playing music, and I love my music and that's cool.


That experience of meeting the younger musicians that were influenced by your music, was that part of the motivation for getting back on tour with Obituary?

It was inevitable, I think. We all were in different bands during the break, we all just love this music and it was something that was bound to happen anyway.


It seems almost a trend these days in metal for bands to reunite in older line-ups. Like Sabbath, Anthrax, Testament and so on. What's your take on this, is that a sign of the times concerning the stagnant creativity in metal these days, is it just nostalgia, what do you think?

Yeah even Laaz Rockit are playing Dynamo today, hahaha. I think it's just a cycle. And I think that goes for the earth in general, not just music or metal. Every twenty years or so, something from back then starts over again. Think about it, 1983 or 84, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost... 2004, 2005, it's back. People want to hear Death Metal again you know.


And then you've got the process starting all over again, with kids buying the latest generation metal albums, and being influenced by that.

Yeah! There are kids on this planet that are thirteen, fourteen, twelve years old, and like Obituary now, it's crazy. It's beautiful. And they will keep the thing going, you know. In twenty years time, people will want to hear Obituary, and I'll be sixty haha. I'll be going like "where's my cane, my back fucking hurts, I can't take another twenty years man", hahaha.


Last minute to tell us about the new album!

It's finished now, and it sounds like a little bit of everything we ever did. Stuff that sounds like straight off' Cause Of Death, some sounds like it's from The End Complete, some like Back From The Dead. There's a little bit of everything on there. It's a good array of what we've done through the years.

A couple of songs I wrote with Frank, and all the songs that sounded like the older stuff made us exited you know. Just because it's old haha. It was fun.
It didn't take too long to record, it was a pretty natural thing. When we did Back From The Dead it went pretty quick, but this time it was even easier. We practiced for a few months, and then we we're in the studio Donald (Tardy -MR) kicked out the drums in three days, I kicked out my guitars in a day, it was that simple.
It's bound to be released somewhere in July. They told me 12th, but it may backup a couple of weeks.