Obscura

The greatest influential albums don't always have the advantage of being released in the most appropriate place and time. To tell you the truth, the opposite happens much more often to such records, which they are appreciated many years later or are lost to the depths of releasing. Gorguts with their "Obscura" is one of those examples whose extremely groundbreaking character was noticed much later than after the album's premiere. However, you didn't have to look far for the reasons. Well, in 1998, few people were ready for such avant-garde twisted and extreme music as proposed here by Luc Lemay with a completely new line-up - clearly different from the sounds from "The Erosion Of Sanity", and from a general perspective, completely breaking with generally accepted standards in death metal. In fact, "Obscura" turned out to be a new quality in the terms of extreme music.

On the "Obscura", death metal was built on the basis of very experimental and advanced means. These changes resulted into an extremely large number of cacophonous technical patterns, atonal melodies and dissonant structures, as well as a huge increase in brutality and chaos from all instruments and...the appearance of an extremely reflective, but at the same time very oppressive atmosphere. Behind such a description there must necessarily be a unique, extraordinary and brilliant album in every inch, even though it may seem too different compared to the style of "The Erosion Of Sanity" (and also much more traditional "Considered Dead").

"Obscura" - in a sense - contains Luc Lemay's characteristic way of composing in relation to the previous album, but here it's presented in a very twisted and chaotic version. Well, the first track gives a foretaste of what crazy and extreme music will be like here. Of course, this does not mean that this song and the rest of the album are about artificial show-offs or embedding various motifs wherever possible. Such an avant-garde and twisted look at death metal, however, was not devoid of soul and captivating atmosphere. Examples of this include "Nostalgia", "Clouded" and "Illuminatus", which, despite their colossal and dreamy-spatial character, combine perfectly with crazy and full of chaos songs like "La Vie Est Prélude... (La Mort Orgasme)", "The Carnal State", "Sweet Silence", "Earthly Love" and "Faceless Ones". Besides, there are no songs on the "Obscura" that lack soul and atmosphere - all of them destroy with an innovative technical phrases.

Refreshing the lineup also turned out to be a surprisingly big advantage. In addition to Luc Lemay, the band also included Steve Cloutier (bass), Steeve Hurdle (guitar/vocals) and Patrick Robert (drums). With them, Gorguts' music gained even more forward bass parts (with a cool, metallic sound), more expanded drums (which Steve MacDonald also contributed it - drummer of Gorguts in 1993-1995 and 1998-2002), division into two vocals (one characteristically raucous and hysterical by Lemay, the other more haunted by Hurdle) and - of course - general ingenuity and uniqueness. By the way, the production has changed in an interesting way - it has become clearer and at the same time even denser and sultry.

So despite a five-year break, changes in the line-up and subsequent problems with finding a label, "Obscura" perfectly revealed the new, avant-garde face of Gorguts. The third album of Luc Lemay's band took extreme to absolute heights in the context of technical music and clearly showed that the death metal is full of possibilities in terms of originality. And to such an extent that "Obscura" has unrivaled to this day.

Originally on A bit of subjectivism...in metal

Although "Considered Dead" is one of my favorite death metal albums of all time and belongs in the same category as "Slowly We Rot" and "Scream Bloody Gore", this album is simply horrible and also one of the few death metal records I actually hate. Without further do, let’s dissect this stenchy abscess.

Virtually everything about this album is terrible. While it does retain Gorguts’ recognizable songwriting, it brutally dismembers it and buries everything good beneath the fetid pile of garbage. Let’s go through the components of the latter one by one.

The opening track, which is also the title one, is decent. The main riff is not very remarkable, but it’s okay. However, the next two already show there’s little to nothing good to be expected from the rest of the album. Mindless flow of notes, with literally everything out of place and literally nothing enjoyable. To set records straight, I do not need the riff to be three notes for it to be remarkable. I enjoy many technical death metal bands with complex melodies such as Inferi and, ironically, Obscura. However, "Obscura" does not sound like a symphony, but rather as if the guitarists were electrocuted. Then, we have the surprisingly okay "Nostalgia" (which also sounds repugnant, like all songs on the album, but at least has a good riff). After "The Art of Sombre Ecstasy", written roughly the same way as "Earthly Love" and "The Carnal State", the album strikes the listener with the most nauseating, most vile piece of music you can imagine in your worst nightmares also known as "Clouded". To say I hate this song would be an understatement. I was so pissed off by its immense boredom and length (since when is tech death playing the same riff for 9 minutes?) as well as by its despicable riffs, that I instantly decided to write this review. The rest of the album is pretty much equally aversive, so I won’t go into much detail regarding any individual songs.

The guitar tone. It’s bad. Not saying I can only listen to the raw tone of "Considered Dead", I enjoy quite a lot of bands with "thicker" and cleaner guitar sound (in fact, I mostly prefer those), but here it’s just bad. It is neither heavy nor melodic, but rather raw (in a bad way), bland and emotionless. But it’s not the main problem. I would probably tolerate the tone, had the guitar melodies been good. But, unfortunately, they’re not. I don’t know what happened to Lemay, I refuse to believe the author of "Rapturous Grief" is the same person who wrote "Hematological Allergy". The riffs are dull and unremarkable, the solos are uniform (which is especially sad considering the spectacular solos of the band’s debut). Everything is made even worse by the repulsive pinch harmonics (that are particularly abhorrent on "Illuminatus" and "Sweet Silence", both of which made me want to quit listening to this abomination immediately).

The vocals. They’re bad. Again, not sure what happened to Lemay, but his Schuldiner-Tardy vocal style is gone. Instead, we hear a grumpy man trying insanely hard to sound brutal and furious but failing. Besides that, they are not nicely incorporated in the music (like on the band's first two albums), but rather buried under the aforementioned awful guitars. Speaking of production, it’s generally laughable. The instruments can be easily distinguished from each other, but the way the drums’ ringing sound combines with the deafened bass and the blurry guitars is just terrible. What was the problem to make "Souls to Deny" sort of sound, which would be thick, powerful and not causing the listener’s ears to bleed out?

The album does have a few fine songs (to be more specific, "Obscura" and "Nostalgia"), but, aside from that, there is nothing positive I can say about it. The way it sounds instantly makes me want to turn it off, which happens to me very rarely. I will definitely label this album as comparable to "Graveyard Classics 2" in terms of its quality, which speaks for itself.

This review is probably gonna be controversial. Maybe even more controversial then that RIB review I did a year back (which is in dire need of a rewrite), but because of how indifferent I feel about this record, I've decided to stop what I'm doing so I can talk about this one.

Now, let me just say for the record that I do not hate Gorguts. As a matter of fact, their first two albums are what I consider to be classics in the old school death metal genre along with Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Morbid Angel, Entombed, and a whole lot of other bands. However, their next album "Obscura" was a change in direction for the band, as they went for a more technical and even avant-garde sound on here. Until a few weeks ago, however, I avoided this album not because I do not like technical death metal or even avant-garde music, but I didn't really think it would be worth my time. Recently, though, I decided to check this album out since it was a slow day and I had nothing productive to do. I put the CD in my player, pressed play, and... here's my thoughts...

The first track on the album is titled "Obscura", and it is a very weird track to say the least. The guitar riffs sound very out of tune, and they play these really weird riffs that try and sound complex, but feel tedious and tacky. The drums are good on the contrary, as the blastbeats sound very booming and maintain some structure, or whatever little structure there is. In fact, that's my biggest problem with this album. You hear all of these weird sounds being combined with some technical riffs, and they mix really poorly and sound like a jumbled mess. The title track is a pretty bad example of this, but other tracks also have the same issue, just with slightly less avant-garde parts. For example, the track "The Carnal State" does have some good technical riffs playing that sound nice, but around the two minute mark is where we hear those out of tune riffs that just puts me off. Combining technical riffs with some unconventional sounds might be decent on paper, and I do hear plenty of good ideas, but the way the band executes them here makes it all sound poorly mixed and awful.

However, if there's one good thing about this entire album, I'd go with the vocals. Luc Lemay's vocals on the previous two albums are amazing, and his vocals, along with that of the late Steeve Hurdle, still sound great. An excellent example of this would have to be in the track "Rapturous Grief". His vocals have these really agonized grunts and growls that persist throughout the album, and these emotional vocals are really fitting to the themes about death. While the instruments still have their weird moments as usual, they seemed to be toned down for this track, and the technical riffing feels much stronger when combined with these crazed vocals. However, there are times where the growling can feel a bit dull, like in "La vie est prélude... (La mort orgasme)", where the vocals don't feel as genuine and come off as a bit weak when compared with the harsh instruments. Otherwise, the vocals on this album overall are still as strong as ever.

But then we get to the lyrics. The songwriting on the previous two albums, especially on "The Erosion of Sanity", were amazing. Here, however, the band goes for more or less the same old with the lyrics, but something doesn't feel right. For example, in the track "Faceless Ones", this verse quotes:

The granted land forsaken,
I cross the threshold of the faceless ones
Lost in the twilight, confinement in emptiness
The granted flesh abandoned
I shall reborn as a faceless one
Darkly, splendid world, confinement in rapture

This verse dwells into an abnormal human species in the twilight that have no faces. I do like the story about the guy feeling hurt by turning into one of the creatures, and it does sound pretty cool for some sci-fi-themed death metal song similar to Blood Incantation. However, the problem isn't actually with the lyrics themselves, but with the instruments. Again, the combination with the weird tuning and the technical instruments does not do the lyrics any favors, and it actually weakens the story. Now, in a better song like in "Clouded", the more conventional, technical riffing and composition does make the lyrical themes stronger, since they blend well to the instruments. However, with the technical/avant-garde mix done poorly here, the lyrics here overall don't feel as strongly written as in the previous two records.

I've given this record plenty of spins in the past few weeks, but I still can't get into the hype of Obscura. Yes, there are some good cuts on here like Clouded or Rapturous Grief, but otherwise, this felt less like a technical marvel and more of an avant-garde catastrophe. Maybe I need to let the record sink in more before I really get it, but for now, this blend of ideas just doesn't cut it for me. If you wanna hear Gorguts at their best, I'd recommend you stick to Considered Dead or The Erosion of Sanity.

After hitting the scene and releasing a handful of records that distinguished themselves from the rest of the 90's death metal posse by focusing on the chaotic aspect of the genre, Gorguts capitalize on their mission to produce deconstructive death metal mayhem definitively in full resolution on the now infamous 'Obscura' at the turn of the millennium. Where the earlier releases merely opened the door to a potential world of abstract death metal chaos, this is the album that ultimately not only captured the elusive essence of the Gorguts musical concept but thrust it forward for all to discover in full bloom, with as much marvel as a certain fear of the unknown. The album undeniably comes across as curious, to say the least, if not entirely foreign as the self-titled first track immediately foretells of great eeriness and odd deceptive riffing to come.

The guitar work borders on the absurd, surely a dominant and intentionally sought out theme at the center of the music. Basically put, the riffs sound like a couple of inebriated jazz musicians stumbled across a hi-gain amp one night and said to hell with it and just jammed the sickest most twisted musical ideas they could come up with, but they're great musicians so it still came out with an odd coherence to it. This is as unconventional as guitars get, or terribly close to it. They'll blast into ultra heavy awkward grooves before feeling like slowing down and moving towards ponderous hateful bendy guitar discordance, then abruptly switch to strange syncopated rhythm patterns with seemingly untimely stops, a zany lightly distorted tapping while the rhythm goes berserk, and maybe a powerful stomp with unpredictable lead bits or natural harmonics popping up wildly.

It should be said the band doesn't hesitate to cross over into other genres right in the middle of the action, and not just into the jazz stuff but also some parts flat out borrow from alternative metal, the middle section on 'Nostalgia' for example with its wah-infused break backed by a heavy bass guitar presence and the ensuing down-tuned single note riff and groove. The bass is generally prominent and contributes its metallic percussive energy and rusty trebbly grinding tone to the mix. From a technical perspective, what they manage to do really well is implement common, recognizable methods of song-writing but twist them enough to make them feel broken and eerie. They'll use a 3/4 waltz and utilize its standard sweeping motion (1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3) but incorporate a musical phrase into it that sounds shattered and loose, almost wobbly, like it's barely holding together creating this constant slightly off effect. And all of that, everything described here so far works so well together, but the listener really needs to be ready for it. Like, seriously up for it.

There's a real vehemence and scorn to the sound. The low tuned writhing guitars and constantly dark riffing create an abyssal atmosphere that carries a troubling unspoken hopelessness, like the music lauds the fallen condition of mankind, not waiting for any form of redemption. The music just revels in the obscurity it came from and can only dwell in its lugubrious shrouding embrace and not elsewhere. It's got an apocalyptic momentum behind it, like retribution in full dramatic musical climax. Even the vocals, permanently aggrieved and poignant, often venture into the high screams and particularly sound like lamenting cries of distress ('The Carnal State' as the most extreme example) rather than standard death metal highs.

It almost feels like song-writer Lemay and the band are punishing themselves in delving deep into their torment and expressing their angst with extreme vividness, in a sonic spacial proximity that feels all too close and real for the listener. Song titles like 'The Carnal State' or ' La vie est prélude... (La mort orgasme)' directly translate that existential malaise; and that last title along with 'Rapturous Grief', 'Sweet Silence' (which ending isn't weird at all, by the way) or 'The Art of Sombre Ecstasy' work with anti-phrase and oxymoron stylistic devices, in sense, juxtaposing two opposing terms together just like the music itself seems to be a dramatically conflicting chaos at its core.

The music is not just merely awkward, it's deliberately grueling, even painful with how much it'll categorically refuse to cooperate with what the human ear would deem logical and sensible based on every situation the listener had heard prior. It is the discordant cousin of discordance itself, an extreme taken to the extreme as it is rare sounding and dubious even for the initiated death metaller. This quite honestly makes an Obituary sound like 90's cartoons intro music - I'm thinking T.M.N.Turtles specifically.

As far as criticism for this brilliant album, it is still an hour long and 12 full tracks that often venture past the 5min mark. That's a lot of material for any music, more so for any death metal, and even more so yet for this sort of a ridiculously intense experience. The tracks do well enough all things considered to keep the listener in suspense over what comes next, and there are loads of fresh riffs and musical ideas, but after a while the all-engulfing chaos that is this twisted music turns to somewhat of a status quo, at which point it's easy for the audience to lose a bit of their focus. It's particularly memorable for its overall body of work and its outrageous innovative imagination, but the listener probably will not remember each track entirely or perfectly.

This is what a listener could hope for when thinking of the potential of death metal in its solemn yet ambitious endeavor to be musically anti-musical and deconstructive. For music to be utterly chaotic and unhinged, whilst retaining the meaning from traditional composition; rather than being stupidly progressive and a bland, hollow show of technicality. Anyone can pick up a guitar, hone their skills over 4-5 years to write hyper technical songs. But it takes a particular kind of genius to write music that is as confusingly technical as it is intelligibly cohesive musically and deeply meaningful conceptually.

OK, I finally get around to listening to this record after 20+ years. "Obscura" was one of those albums that everyone praised when it came out. I bought a lot of records in 1998 so I am not sure why I passed on this one. Perhaps it was because I had "The Erosion of Sanity" already and didn't like it. Maybe it was because I was bored of death metal and getting more interested in the hardcore scene. My favourite style of hardcore at the time was dissonant, metallic and angular (influenced by pioneers like Rorschach, Coalesce, Neurosis and Acme). "Obscura" owes a lot to bands like these and my 20 year old self would have loved it.

My 40 year old self is less impressed. "Obscura" just sounds grating and unpleasant to these ears. The song structures are disjointed and complex with lots of unexpected changes, weird timings, chords and tones. This itself is not the problem. The problem is that the songs lack any momentum or direction. Even the most jarring avant-prog bands (e.g., Art Bears, Aksak Maboul) propel their songs forward with purpose. Most of "Obscura" meanders around into musical dead-ends. These songs go nowhere, and they also lack the aggression and anger that makes extreme metal fun to listen to.

Take "The Carnal State” for example. It starts with a plonky intro (very similar to Human Remains), then manages to catch a decent groove for about a minute, before derailing from about 1:32 onward. The riffs in this song are fine, but they are arranged in such a random order that they lose any meaning. “Nostalgia” follows a similar pattern, the first part is a creepy slow groove (similar to something from Deadguy’s “Fixation on a Coworker”), but then it just noodles around into a Soulfly/nu-metal section and then drifts off into boredom. The ten minute plod of “Clouded” is the worst offender, anyone familiar with prime Neurosis or early Swans can see this for what it is, a clone.

Most of the album flits and flops around with the grace of an elephant seal on a beach. The whole thing lasts an hour, which is far too long. The production is simultaneously good and bad. The clarity means you can hear everything, but this means you can hear the musical emptiness too. I will admit that “Earthly Love” is a good song. It keeps things simple with some chunky death metal riffs. The viola parts sound awesome too. An album full of stuff like this would be worth hearing.

The overall feeling I get from "Obscura" is one of boredom and revulsion. It is the sort of record that makes me want to clean my ears with a blast of "World Downfall". Most of the tricks on this album have been done before by other bands. I don't need "Obscura" in my life.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that death metal at its finest is some of the most sophisticated contemporary music going. Certainly the most sophisticated rock/metal music. At some point in the mid-1990s it just grew beyond its rock routes. Death metal musicians began to take an increasing interest in classical music, jazz, and electronica for inspiration alongside more conventional metal riff patterns. It seemed that for the first time death metal was capable of producing music that was mature and complex first, extreme second. Some thrash metal towards the late 1980s had arguably reached the same holy grail, but it still sounded like thrash metal (a subgenre of rock), blended with progressive influences.

Death metal’s approach was that much more complex and novel that it was elevated to a new level of musical legitimacy, and arguably a new subgenre of *non-rock* guitar music. Broadly speaking this took on two forms in the mid-1990s, the technical/mechanical, informed by jazz, modern classical, and electronica; and the neo-romantic, informed by 19th century classical music, dissonance, and opera. Gorguts' approach...is definitely the former.

Gorguts started life as something of Canada’s answer to Suffocation, albeit with a more neoclassical bent. Their debut ‘Considered Dead’ (1991) showed much promise, and follow up, 1993’s ‘The Erosion of Sanity’ streamlined their elegant take on technical and brutal death metal. Then five years passed…..and nothing happened. Then in 1998 everything happened. Their third LP ‘Obscura’ was released. And what a bloody tricky album it is to review. As with ‘Deathcult for Eternity’, ‘Obscura’ has precedents, this time in technical death metal such as Demilich and Atheist, but this really is a different beast entirely.

Helmsman Luc Lemay is an academic musician with an impressive understanding of various styles and techniques well outside western music, let alone metal itself. By the release of ‘Obscura’ this began to show. Aside from the classic games one can play with this album (guess the time signature. How many drummers are there? Is this in a key?), some interesting stylistic choices were made on ‘Obscura’, not least the cold, metallic production. The snare drum is tinny, the guitar tone is sharp and mechanical, the vocals are a hoarse rasp or high pitched shriek, given zero embellishments in the mastering process, with Lemay and guitarist Steeve Hurdle sharing vocal duties.

Add to that the incomprehensible chord patterns, the atonal or dissonant riffs, the abundance of guitar techniques that were simply not designed for this level of distortion; all create at times an almost unbearable degree of static, scratching, and abrasion. On top of all this is the album’s runtime, which kisses an hour in length, with little to no change in the dynamics and no let up in the sheer energetic intensity of the music. It all makes for a fucking slog of a record.

It seems this album was made with the intention of dividing opinions. The centre piece, a track called ‘Clouded’, which is no different to the rest of the album stylistically, but is played at a doomy pace. The slower tempo allows the listener to take a forensic look at how this music is put together. From each chord progression, to each riff’s progression and placement within each track, to every rhythmic and structural choice; all seem to be written with one philosophy in mind: whatever reward our brains give us for anticipating musical progressions when listening to more conventional music; do the opposite.

Obviously there’s a lot more at work behind these compositions, but this, combined with the production choices, implies that Lemay et al. were intent on creating a divisive work of art. I admire this in the same way that I would admire a Jackson Pollock. Its unpleasant to look at, it’s massive, it’s complicated, and it’s messy. Yet one cannot help but be impressed by it. But this only works if absorbed occasionally. So demanding an undertaking is it, that frequent and repeated listens leave me numb to its charms as a piece of abstract music.

I admire it as a scientist might, and I admire it for busting down new creative doors for extreme metal. Its influence may not have been felt immediately, but a certain crop of 21st century extreme metal certainly has strong antecedents in ‘Obscura’.

Originally published at Hate Meditations

Luc Lemay stated that death metal is the genre that offers the most creative freedom to an artist (or something among those lines). I do agree with this, yet it makes me wonder why so many death metal bands continue to be copycats of their idols. You are offered this wide spectrum of experimentation yet you continue to sound so, well, dull. Obscura is an album that annihilates this stereotype. I even dare to say it is more innovative than Demilich's Nespithe, which is another tech-death masterpiece. Gorguts completely changed the rules of metal. Actually, they ignored those rules and went their own creative way.

Now, when it comes to the guitars on this album, and more specifically, their tone, they are not something extraordinary. But that doesn't matter, because the way they are played is, for lack of a better word, chaotic. The riffs, if you could call them that, are dissonant and very hard to comprehend. Many of them are played in odd-time, which is fitting for the whole atmosphere of the album. Just try counting, I dare you, you will not be able to figure out the time signature of 85% of this album. And they are not played on only the bottom 3 strings, you have these piercing atonal structures performed on the top strings, with the title track containing a finger tapped passage that is the first thing you begin to love on this record. You also have shredding solos, which are either ordinary death metal solos, or very intricate and atypical ones, appearing when you least expect them. Then we come to the best part of this album, the drumming. Odd-time syncopated madness. They compliment the 'riffs' and bring another layer of chaos to the already destructive nature of Obscura. The bass I am slightly disappointed by. I expected it to stand out a bit more, the technique is good, it is performed and mixed well, but it just goes along with the guitars without doing anything crazy, contrary to the rest of this album. The vocals add to the insanity of the record, providing the listener with a feeling of horror, as if in a mental asylum (The Carnal State).

Overall, Obscura is arranged very well, it is quite noticable the musicians know what they're doing and are not just your generic death metal band doing "0000" and low-pitched growls. But at moments the songs feel sort of dull. Take for instance Clouded, a nine minute track with very little change throughout, the weakest link in the chain. The riffs at moments feel identical, but when fit into the bigger picture the beauty is perceived. Innovation is present almost everywhere, i.e. Earthly Love contains a dissonant viola played by Luc Lemay, a touch I find excellent and very fitting. The lyrics abstain from gore and guts, as the name of the band might imply, and focus on spirituality.

Obscura is not for the impatient. It will take you a solid amount of listens to just begin to comprehend the intensity of the album (it took me about 12 and I got a headache a few times). And in the end you will be fittingly rewarded with the understanding of chaos, the complex 'mess' that this record is. It is definetely not a flawless album, but for the most part it is a good listen. Gorguts have managed to change the game, destroying stereotypes and replacing them with sheer innovation. Balanced chaos.

This album is what death metal sounds like to those who don't know what it is. Obscura just is what it is, a maelstrom of sonic chaos, a kind of furthest-point mountain-peak of death metal, with nothing holding it back. Gorguts' previous albums were pretty traditional sounding tech death, and while they were fine for what they were, I can't even imagine what Obscura sounded like to people who were first hearing it with no context back in the 90s. I mean, fucking hell – this thing is insane even now.

Describing this album as sounding like pots and pans clashing together is hyperbolic – there are melodies on here, good ones even; but they're arranged in a way that is jarring to hear, and often repeated far longer than would be normal for a death metal album – it's atonal and grating in that way, and combined with the stark, mechanical guitar tone and Luc Lemay's hoarse, bellowing howls, it makes for a sound that's unsettling and chaotic. And that's why it's so good. This album is a haunting journey, one that ebbs and flows like the ocean, a natural kind of chaos – it seems to have existed before any other kind of sound, at times, like on its opus in the nine-minute “Clouded.”

That song really is a marvel – it reiterates what I was saying. The squealing, sludgy guitar lines making up its last half are unpleasant when taken out of context and that one sequence drags on way too long. Objectively, it shouldn't work. But somehow it does – and really that's because the band had more of a vision than it initially might seem. “Clouded” is a tremendous song that gets into your bones. It flows very well; the whole album does. There's little point in bringing up each individual song and talking about their merits – the album can't really work on a song-based level. It works best taken in as the hurricane of howling death-screams, clanging, angular, chunky riffs and steel-barbed bass twanging that it is, a veritable force of nature.

Obscura is a perfect death metal album. This is the logical conclusion of the genre. Though there have been many excellent albums after this, by bands I like better than Gorguts, Obscura stands alone as the album that basically took the genre to its logical endpoint. Death metal really only ever was about its sonic bludgeoning and heavy, aggressive tone – it wasn't a genre that ever focused much on anything else, though some bands managed to experiment as will always happen. Obscura is the most brutal and insane and relentless thing you'll ever hear in the genre. It takes the sonic touchstone of death metal, its brutality and onslaught of riffs, and just does that until it is unbearable to listen to for most people. Most non-metal people will hear Cannibal Corpse and turn it off after twenty seconds and go back to easier to listen to music, and that's a point of pride for death metal fans – they like their music to be abrasive and aggressive as fuck. If an album can have that effect on metalheads, who basically have dick-measuring contests over how insane their music can get, it's something I want to hear, is all I'm saying.

I find this album endlessly interesting and fascinating far beyond anything else the band ever did. I have praised it here for being basically abrasive to the point of irritation, though it doesn't irritate me personally - just to clarify for those who might think I'm praising only some other higher, ephemeral value and not the music, too. I think this is a wondrous, singular journey and well worth hearing for any metal fan.

Before this album came out, death metal was stagnating. Picture the scene: 1998. Roadrunner, the great institution, had long since sold out and culled most of their artists as they approached the peaks of their careers. Suffocation was, or was about to be, no more. Death was making its final record, which wasn't even meant to be a Death record. Deicide's best days were behind them. Pestilence had split up years beforehand. Morbid Angel were redeeming themselves with the wonderfully twisted and atmospheric "Formulas", but the bitter commercial misstep of "Domination" was still fresh on the tongue. Obituary were busy being mediocre somewhere. The new brutal and slam trends were emerging, thanks to promising upstarts like Deeds of Flesh, but many of the genre's old guard were either going astray or going elsewhere. Enter Gorguts, with their first new full length since 1993.

Half a decade in the making, "Obscura" is an album that takes the commonly accepted formula for "death metal" and gleefully deconstructs it in the most abrasive way possible. It would be more appropriate to consider it a kind of free form jazz album with a death metal coat of paint, though it is by no means bereft of structure. Ready to go by '95, and astoundingly, mostly written already by the time The Erosion of Sanity had come out (how much more ahead of the game can you be?), this is a mind-melting exercise in musicality which has alienated and polarized listeners since the day it was released, as the greatest works often do. A new lineup was present for this recording. Alongside mainstay Luc Lemay was the late Steeve Hurdle (formerly of Purulence and later of Negativa, who sadly passed away in 2012), a musician who's ingenious and highly unorthodox approach to the guitar and voice would play a huge role in the shaping of "Obscura". Also on board were bass demon Steve Cloutier and accomplished Jazz session drummer Patrick Robert, later to be replaced by the (also unfortunately late, RIP 2002) Steve McDonald for live shows.

The album wastes no time bursting out of the gate with the thunderous, demented riffing of the title track. Discordant, jarring and highly atypical of death metal at the time, the listener is given the chance to walk away or delve deeper from the first second. That the record quite clearly doesn't give a fuck whether you like it or not is one of its most endearing qualities to me. No attempts to please anyone are made here. To describe the actual musical content here is quite challenging. "Earthly Love" features unorthodox violin playing. "Nostalgia" comes across like the band's take on doom metal, constructed of flowing mid-paced grooves that work remarkably well. The crushing, downward spiraling riff that opens "The Carnal State" is a highlight. My personal favourite has to be "La vie est prélude... (La mort orgasme)" with its dark themes, and utterly crushing overall effect. Overall the album's sound is filled with pain, suffering and anger viewed from a more thoughtful, but no less brutal, spiritual and intellectual vantage point. Its an incredibly powerful and cathartic listening experience. There is a pervasive feeling of tightly controlled chaos, like they're only just holding it together and it might come flying apart with abandon at any moment. From a musicianship and emotional standpoint, this is hugely impressive.

The production of "Obscura" is clear and powerful while retaining the right amount of dirt where needed, mainly in the grimy (and surprisingly not that high gain) guitar tone. The bass is thunderously loud and prominent in the mix. The drum sound is one of my personal favourites on any metal album, relentlessly brutal and percussive and his technique is astonishingly and highly original. Lemay's vocals are as tortured as ever, accompanied by Hurdle's bizarre inhaled technique which is really potent, the dual vocal thing is no gimmick. The album still sounds fresh today.

This was a hugely important album which gave a stagnating genre a shot in the arm when it really needed it. The influence of "Obscura" was far reaching, spawning such modern heroes of dissonant extreme metal like Ulcerate and Deathspell Omega, and giving the name (though not really the style) to one of modern techdeath's reigning giants. The original CD had long since become a much sought after collector's item, often going for silly money on online music marketplaces. Now given a much needed reissue in 2015 by Season of Mist, there is no excuse for metal fans to not own this highly challenging, but ultimately hugely rewarding work. With "Obscura", the legacy of Gorguts as innovators in death metal is assuredly intact.

Reviewing Gorguts' Obscura is difficult for me. I've taken several stabs at it over the years and always abandoned my efforts. Why? Mainly the feeling that this album doesn't quite match up to the overwhelming praise and/or criticism it has received over the years. Admittedly a polarizing record, still I can't help but feel that both sides are somewhat in the wrong about it.

To begin with, this is not, in any way, an original or innovative album. For listeners who were heavily ensconced in the mainstream death metal of the mid-to-late 90's perhaps but anyone with an ear to the underground would've heard these sounds (the off-time skronking guitar riffs, wobbly rhythms, and harsh dissonance) many times over in such bands as Human Remains, Deadguy, Candiria, and others. In Jason Netherton's excellent "Extremity Retained: Notes From The Death Metal Underground," Dave Witte details a memory of Luc Lemay attending a Human Remains gig that he later claimed totally informed his writing on this record. I'm not saying that Gorguts' Obscura is a straight-up Human Remains clone, though the similarities between this album and H.R.'s Using Sickness As A Hero is too jarring to dismiss entirely. In Gorguts favor, they are much better songwriters.

So while I don't think the worship of this record as a milestone of death metal innovation is warranted, I also don't agree with detractors who feel this album is either a) not death metal and/or b) mindless noise. To my ears, many of the riffs and structures here are extensions of what Gorguts were doing on The Erosion Of Sanity, though as unmoored or untethered as one can get from the original Florida template that Gorguts imitated so heavily on their debut. While The Erosion Of Sanity was a far more balanced attempt at experimentation via tradition formats, Obscura became a much needed corrective. Far removed from the many trends of the late '90s (an era awash in Suffo-clones and nu-groove blandness), Gorguts took the clean break route from their roots, which energized them as a band and bridged the gap between mainstream death metal and the avant-garde underground.

In this, I think they were moderately successful. Obscura as a release from a big name death metal band was indeed quite bizarre. Imagine Incantation releasing something like this and you get an idea of how this album must've affected listener's sensibilities. The album is awash in weirdness: any-and-all stitching of genre disparity is fair game here with lots of off-time noise rock freak-out riffs, skronking atonal leads, occasional anchoring chugs and grooves, some shoegazing drone encounters, lots of counter-point bass work, and a fuck-ton of blasting and double-bass, often out-of-synch rhythmically with the riffs and vocals. The vocals are a major sore point with me as Luc Lemay goes much higher in his register, abandoning the death growl almost entirely in favor of a more straining existential howl that I find somewhat painful to listen to (perhaps that's the point). Despite this, the lyrics are of a superb supernatural horror bordering on the apoetic. I just wish they were delivered with a deeper force akin to the first two records. And while the technical achievement is remarkable, the run time, at over an hour, causes the album to labor under its own arty pretentiousness. The songwriting, while strong on such immediate stunners as 'Nostalgia,' 'Subtle Body,' and the title track, starts to falter ponderously on such tracks as 'Rapturous Grief' and 'Illuminatus.' A shorter, tighter release would've been favorable as there is just too much strangeness here to digest in one sitting.

The production is excellent, clear and even, with all instruments achieving the separation necessary to display their obvious artistic merits. The lack of distortion on the guitars factors heavily into this ensemble accessibility. Had they slathered the typical death metal tone over the guitars, a lot of the musicianship would've been lost in the translation. That said, that same lack of distortion goes a long way towards the argument that this is barely death metal. It is, though awkwardly and inwardly an album whose outsize reputation actually diminishes its achievements. Obscura to me is Gorguts least rewarding or successful record despite a certain charm and quality that keeps me coming back to it.

We really don't need another Obscura review do we? Not really, but I've been meaning to write an actually decent review ever since my embarrassing debut as a music reviewer almost 3 years ago, so why not start with something that's taken me about a year to appreciate? As somebody with keen interest in breaking my own boundaries and dazzling myself with different aspects of music, something many others do, I have had an interest in this album for quite some time. But not of the usual kind, an interest mixed with revulsion and a general hatred, some sputtering urge to vomit as I look at the name of this album. It is an album many will revere, many will hate and many will just plain say: "What the fuck is this?" To these criticisms all I can say is that this album is...Obscura. that is literally how you can sum the album up with ease.

What do we think when we hear the word music? Do we think melody, beauty, harmony, or do we think dissonance, horror, malevolence, emotion, bleakness, atonality, discordance? When we hear the word Obscura, what do we think? Do we think; beauty, unimaginable creativity, timelessness, melody, intricacy, order? Or do we think; chaos, otherworldly, abstract, unease, scattered, malignancy, discomfort? All of these terms are pretentious, as is the album, but what isn't in music nowadays? Even some of the most dismally boring and utter tripe grade bands and artists are preparing their "magnum opus" day by day and trying to show they have something others don't. Most of us say fiddlesticks, fiddlesticks to the mooncalves. You're all delusional, and we'll stick with true innovation, as we jerk off into our favourite albums liner notes and sleeves, and vice versa.

We're all incapable of really accepting what music is, music is what we make of it, even noise is being considered music and...whilst I'm only just starting my foray into this genre with my recent appreciation for the band Swans, I definitely understand why somebody would listen to it, possibly out of want for pain, a masochistic endeavour of sorts, or even just trying to find some form of meditation out of blasting yourself with static. Who knows? Maybe some of the stranger harsh noise musicians are all part of this joke I've been left out on despite engaging in it with my less than intelligent aisles of entertainment, maybe I'm over-thinking everything. Whatever, it's just something we need to know; Music can be everything, and your opinion on music is basically the same thing except with a much less tangible grasp, as sad as it seems to say, everything that we're convinced isn't music probably is music.

Anyway, Gorguts are a near universally loved, respected and practically circle-jerked band, just like fucking Death themselves, yes, Death are fucking circle-jerked over and you cannot tell me they aren't. The amount of music forums I've been apart of where Death are literally ejaculated over day by day are beyond count and it goes to show, most of the time these bands are horrendously overshadowed by other bands doing more or less the same thing but better, or they're really that good and you've been repelled by a fan base, which you should never let happen. They're also more or less revered for the same reasons as Death, they started out as your typical death metal band, which for Death is at least logical because they essentially made the genre, but then went on to make musical efforts that pretty much changed everything, progressiveness was suddenly the new thing that must happen and a more intelligent and abstract side of death metal was born, only enhanced by Gorguts when they must've pulled an Event Horizon and attempted to go somewhere only to bring back so many fucking terrible things with them instead, the album is pretty much a musical equivalent of insanity, it's otherworldly and uncomfortable, and I fucking love it now.

The other thing about it is that it's not a "tech-death" record as you will imagine if you've not heard the more "avant-garde" of tech-death bands yet, you'll find no constant sweeps, no incessant noodling, no wankery that you've seen before, this album is written with riffs that in themselves aren't all that complicated or difficult to play, but the fucking rhythms dude, the rhythms are batshit insane and they are interesting to boot, as I said before, this band must've fallen out of the world to discover whatever plagued their mind to write this musical abomination, holy hell does it fucking work.

Things to note about this album however; the production is excellent, everything is clear and audible but it has a grimy and dark sound to it, which benefits the sound greatly, so do not fret about an apparent masterpiece only to be driven away by fucking terrible production like I have been thousands of times already. Additionally, when I refer to the "awfulness" I am not calling the album bad, you'd have to have not listened to anything I'd said earlier to not understand that, I am referring to how it sounds. Before I go into this proper, I will first off say that I am no stranger to avant-garde music, I loved Deathspell Omega before I even knew about Gorguts and I avidly suck the dicks of Current 93 and whatever madness John Zorn goes on to create, so if I had to be honest, I think Gorguts just hit a bunch of good notes for weirdness with me to make me shy away from this as long as I have.

Throughout the album, most notably on first listen, you'll find an awful lot of the riffs sound incredibly fucking awful, and as I said about awfulness, I do not mean awfulness of quality, I mean unpleasant, just to fucking make sure you understand what I'm saying here I must repeat that. On title track Obscura you're instantly treated to some weird ass 12-year-old-wailing-on-his-first-guitar styled riff that screams "awful" and this is what I mean, most of the album is built on this aesthetic of awfulness that makes it an interesting listen, through said awfulness there's a surprising amount of beauty to be found, such as one of the riffs on Earthly Love at around 1:20 where it actually lasts a reasonably long amount of time and is really enjoyable, it also comes back later on in the song, or the unnatural beauty of Sweet Silence which eventually culminates in a freaky fucking ending that will haunt you at night if you have trouble sleeping like I do.

Other moments treat you to a sense of crushing hopelessness rather than beauty, such as Nostalgia a trudging, vomitous mass of soul-crushing, dark-as-fuck bass driven affair that constructs the musical equivalent of watching all your hopes and dreams burning up around you. Or Clouded which is almost ten minutes of an existential crisis as you realise how pointless your life has been, and even more moments serve to just drive you insane. What the fuck is happening on Faceless Ones? The intro riff that comes back occasionally is so fucking cool, but holy shit it's musical insanity at its finest. Before that track La Vie Est Prelude... assures you plenty that they've still got about a million elements of sheer lunacy left to throw at you.

Believe me when I say it, this is no easy fucking listen, nor will it ever get easier until an exorbitant amount of time and dedication has been put into it. Or maybe you're just so beyond this stuff that you will love it on first listen. I'll admit, I absolutely despised this album at first, but then over about a year of returning to it I finally have the appreciation for it that I have today.

Normally, I don't review albums like this; the ones where I'm just like "Ehhh... this is ok." but Gorguts have such this major recognition for themselves akin to being acclaimed as ones of the most revolutionary death metal bands of the century, it's almost mandatory that I get my word or say out into the public for their critically acclaimed album Obscura. People tend to see this album as something incredibly unique and way ahead of its time. I was recommended Gorguts by a friend through Skype once. Huge hipster music nerd as he was and being aware I'm a fan of death metal, he gave me some of the strangest technical death metal he could possibly scavenge to get my head wrapped around.

At first when I listened to this album, I expected way more. I was pretty disappointed with the end result listening to this and already getting bored and wanting to turn it off after 4 or 5 tracks in. There I was already passing the first track and hearing nothing on this release that so captured my ears for more than an interval of 30 seconds at a time as they create the next very strange dangling sound with their guitars. It was mildly interesting because to me, it sounded like Cryptopsy's None So Vile album during a DXM trip.

The production, I will admit is something I enjoy the most about the whole thing. I personally really enjoy production like this, not overdone and not to the point where it sounds like it was recorded with a potato inside Varg Vikernes' basement. While the guitars themselves take up the lead as the whole pack of mildly interesting array that this album holds. The guitar work tends to usually get so strange that it's hard to disambiguate which is the guitars and which is the bass throughout listening. Sometimes you can catch it, but I personally would have approved this release much more if the bass was turned up a little to at least make it distinguishable with the rest of the guitars one hundred percent of the time. The bass is only clearly audiable during one of the album's final tracks, not that I'm going to go ahead and waste my time fetching the exact song just to reference what I can demonstrate what the bass sounds like in clear audibility. There's far too many tracks on this whole thing for me to precisely pintpoint the one that features a nifty bass riff at its intro, and that's one of the problems with this album too; it's far too long. Does anyone really want an hour long album of songs that sound almost exactly the same? I mean things get a tad interesting in tracks such as "Nostalgia", during its very awkward funk outburst but that's about the only memorable moment I have on this entire record.

The vocals (like everything else on here) are pretty weird. He doesn't really growl, he doesn't even really try to sound brutal with his voice at all which is usually the whole point of death metal singers. If anything, his vocals sound more suitable for a DSBM band. Now the last thing I can really talk about is the drums. While the kick drum loud enough in the mix, the rattle of the cymbals has a very live sound which is prominent for the unique mixing of this album. I can ultimately praise the mixing and production of Obscura much more than the musicianship itself. The band did successfully nail the mark on being weird. I mean even the album cover looks like it's Nintendo 64 box art. But what they didn't do was follow up to this weirdness with at least being interesting for their entire hour-long album.

I can say this: overall that the whole thing is not terrible, but could have used a lot of work. I only recommend this record either if you're a hipster or if you really, really love Cryptopsy and never used drugs before in your life.

‘Obscura’ is one of the most influential death metal albums ever created, no controversy there. This author lauds the release as a masterwork alongside the former distinction. What might be open for more discussion is whether or not the album is indeed ‘avant-garde’ death metal as it is known. In the case of death metal and its related genres, one of the traits that make an album or band forward thinking is how it stands up against newer material. Creating heavier/faster/etc music is what makes metal ‘avant’ in the straightforward sense. Many of the classics in one sub-genre or another still sound crushing and horrific ('Altars of Madness,' 'Slowly We Rot,' 'None So Vile' etc). Experimentation and 'otherness' (also signified by divided fan opinions) make up the other major pole of what determines a work's forward orientation (i.e. 'Into the Pandemonium,' 'Disharmonization,' 'Dawn of Dream'). Like any canon, they build for (better or worse) the course of artistic movements and the resulting culture. The record in question is probably best described as a combination of the two. Not too far afield to alienate extreme fans but also bizarre enough for listeners outside the genre to take notice. Perhaps the best illustration of this fine line is the tremendous breakdown that occurs during 'Nostalgia,' which blends subdued percussive work along with tightly wound lead guitar soloing. Normally palm muting, crash cymbals and pinch harmonics signify a DM break, but here the formula is turned inside out and has probably crushes a few kneecaps in a live setting.

A cursory listen to ‘Obscura’ will leave an impression, be it positive or negative. While this author is not musician and does not understand the intricate workings of mathematics and composition, hearing twangs, slapping, blasting, stop-starting, howling and breaking in this arrangement thrilling and inspiring. An album like this is by its nature multidisciplinary and panoramic. Density and depression are an inevitable result from the crazed combination of death metal, doom metal, sludge, free-jazz and general theatrics. And the most amazing of all is how listenable and melodic(!) the end product is. 'Clouded' is obvious centerpiece due to its almost Godflesh level of doom and gloom, but there are many other moments of high-drama and gravitas that also happen to come in many forms. The production is exemplary, giving space from the entire band to contribute to the work at hand. There isn't an album of this kind in the fact that all the members seem so valuable to the whole. No one is crowding anyone out, which is an ideal in and of itself. Music of this kind can make one feel misled and shamed by previous favorites and then led desperately in search for similar vitality and vitriol. But what makes a work unique is the fact that it is endangered by its own individuality. One is only one. It cannot be equaled, only replicated or expanded upon.

‘Obscura’ can also be summarized by its sleeve artwork. The only problem was that yours truly couldn’t make out the picture was of. Its basic shape is there, a figure seated in a meditative position. But what of its head? It wasn’t clear to these eyes even after a copy came into these hands. Smaller images online suggested a serpent head emerging from the figure. The stripe down the center of the ‘head’ reminds of Oakland Raiders’ helmets, or more accurately the plastic capsule versions that could be quartered from the grocery store’s gumball machines. Did the head have floppy ears? Horns? But the more I looked at I couldn’t figure it out. A Rorschach image? Something purposely ‘obscured?’ Or just ‘something?’

And then, I saw it. It was right there in front of me, and thus made me feel stupid. An old man’s face, bearded, eyes shut, confounded by harsh lighting and physical contours. Breaking down the image in relation to the music can be done rather quickly: like that sagacious figure, the band was searching for something 'obscured' by an absence of light. The inner artwork showcases the four men in similar meditative postures. They might be clearing their minds for the task at hand, or perhaps spilling their mental entrails like the character at the center of Demigod’s ‘Slumber of Sullen Eyes.’ But like said epiphany, the most profound questions can seem quite obvious when the right information is presented. The common thread is that distractions are being put aside for individualistic searching and conception. And the music speaks for itself in that matter, even if it might not be one's tastes.

The lyrics are closely tied to that same idea of searching and transcending said 'Carnal State' or 'Earthly Love.' Becoming 'Clouded' and a 'Faceless One' are made to be the end point of the spiritual struggle of the protagonists. Even it if begins to sound a bit New-Wave, the sincerity and attention to narrative in the words and music makes the work even more concrete. It is only right that the coda is entitled 'Sweet Silence,' as all distracting noise and violence would probably be banished from the higher level sought for. In short, the clamoring music itself is merely sound, and thus not of the ideal place it tells of. A sort of humble admission by the band perhaps? The track itself is not silent save for the lack of vocals, as it chronicles the transformation of the 'seeker' in a higher/different state. Twisting and turning, pulling apart and reorganizing and finally coming to an end over a dying scansion of distortion that marks the end of the physical experience.

Word. Amazing and visionary stuff. And catchy too.

Originally Published for Examiner.com (http://www.examiner.com/review/the-essentials-gorguts-s-obscura)

Avant-garde is a term that gets thrown around a lot with not a whole lot of value, With it's direct meaning of the truly inventive and experimental typically being broken down into a term for any band which throws about seventy three different genres together in a big pot, usually with some kind of cheesy symphonic involvement. While indeed, many bands have managed to progress into manners which are more fitting to the original term, all of them have their traits traceable to an earlier point; they may have adapted a new technique but not fully explored it yet, or carried a previous idea to the next level, but there aren't any which have completely designed a new sound from nothing and taken it into fruition at the same time... Except for Gorguts. Even many of the more convincingly groundbreaking acts have early steps into their paths, Deathspell Omega introduced their chaotic parts slowly over the course of several EPs and a super long album, Blut Aus Nord had Thorns as a starting point, Cardiacs can be seen as some kind of zany perversion of punk, prog rock, pop and carnival music, but Gorguts didn't do any of this. One day they were a rather technical OSDM band, the next they were something entirely different, fully developed and established. In this context, Obscura is the most groundbreaking and truly avant-garde metal album released in my life time, it is truly pure originality spawned from nothing, and that's why it's such a shame that it's awful.

This is exceptionally inventive, not so much pushing genre boundaries as completely disregarding them, outside of the excellent "Earthly Love", this really doesn't identify as death metal, there are no tremolo riffs, the leads are circus-like and dainty, there are no heavy chugs, it's compositionally intricate without the shredding fretboard speed that was building as the genre's preferred method of technicality, indeed riffs in general seem to be pushed aside for the endless pursuit for a satisfying strangeness. In general the twanging of guitars really doesn't sound like anything in particular; it's loose and twangy and unlike any sort of metal known to exist. The drums blast aggressively at times, but rarely in unison with a tempo shift in the music as a whole. Lemay has a hoarse howl that is certainly "extreme" but doesn't fit into any existing categories of death metal vocal, it's not a growl, it's not a shriek, it's not a Van Drunen, "I'm on fire" howl, it's just something snapping in Luc's mind and him throat whistling into the countryside. It's entirely different from anything else on every level.

The closest links to existent death metal would be the angular churning of Immolation or the all round weirdness of Demilich, the former of which still hadn't gone as far as Close to a World Below at this point, so their pulsey rhythmic sensibility was not half as fully committed as this, and their tight riffing chops and traditional meaty vocal performance were worlds apart. Likewise Nespithe, despite featuring a similar weirdness for brutality tradeoff, was still far more grounded in the awkward melodic sensibilities of the Finnish death metal scene of the time. Gorguts' 1998 effort is simply three or four major steps away from these closest links with none of those intermediate steps taken, Obscura is like if evolution functioned on Pokemon rules, one day they were the fittest chicken in the coop, so they turned into an eagle. Since then the gaps have been somewhat filled in by the likes of Ulcerate, Portal and Mitochondrion, but at the time there really was nothing linking this directly to death metal as we knew it. And I'm not going to be all douchey and call this some kind of metal/jazz or noise, because it isn't, it's still some kind of death metal, just a death metal made out of purely unknown things. If I gave points for originality these would all be wonderful traits, but sadly I don't, so the awfulness of the output is what stands out beyond all the broken ground.

And no, this isn't awful because it's too demented, or too evil, or too extreme for me, not at all, I love the vast majority of the twisted bands that followed in Obscura's bold footsteps, no, the album is awful because it sounds utterly ridiculous and silly. The guitars twang in some kind of off time jovial bouncing rhythm which sounds like a merry-go-round for robots breaking down for an hour, the drums randomly blast and explode furiously underneath the zany twanging with no regards to actual tempo shifts, adding more mechanical failures to the already flailing carnival ride. It sounds horrible no doubt, but more damning is how laughably stupid it sounds.

Unlike most of the bands that followed the twisted, dissonant path they forged, like the previously mentioned Portal's and Mitochondrion's, Gorguts really failed to make their music very dark. Obviously, "being evil" isn't a required element for being good metal, although it doesn't hurt, it's just in Obscura's case they're playing with some very goofy elements, and laughter isn't really something I look for in my death metal, particularly twisted death metal. From the the stupid circus lead melody in the title track, to the hilariously derpy jangle that opens up "The Carnal State", to the airy break around 2 minutes into "Subtle Body", to the multitude of open pinch harmonic riffs which groove like a drunken nu metal band such as the end of "La Vie Est Prelude... ", the whole album is loaded with dissonant strangeness that is strikingly zany and laughable, which fails to carry any of the weight of violence or power these newer bands do. Despite the howling and random blast beats around them, the weird under-distorted sound of twanging steel strings keeps sounding funny in a terrible way. Sadly, despite the laughs that can be generated from the particularly bad moments, the still quite ugly form of the music and unjustly bloated length of the album keep this from being an enjoyable unintentional comedy album, so all you get is an embarrassingly goofy serious album instead.

The album has a couple of minor saving graces, "Earthly Love" is the closest to a real death metal track Obscuracized, and it's pretty awesome, giving all of the weirdness something genuinely imposing to piggyback on. "Nostalgia" has a recurring jangle melody at 1:15 which is quite cool, and a near identical one is used in "The Art of Sombre Ecstasy", on a similar note the generally absurd sounding dud "Illuminatus" has the only cool guitar solo on the album, and finally "Clouded" has an effectively morbid atmosphere in its doomy pace, and uses its twang to make a fairly unsettling mood, Sadly it's like nine minutes long and is boring by the fourth, which is fitting because it turns out being boring is a frequent issue for the album.

Despite all the uniqueness, outwardly strange and silly parts, and multitude of approaches, it really is quite shocking how Gorguts managed to make this album as utterly boring as it is. The obvious reasons are the length and tempo, the whole piece clocks in at a whopping hour in length over twelve tracks, which is enormous even for a good death metal release, and the tempo is uniformly midpaced. Despite the blast beats, the actual tempo never gets fast, with all of them used as contrasts with the still plodding music, so slow parts are the only real shift away from it. While, as I said, "Clouded" actually does it alright for the main part, most of the slow parts on the album are decidedly annoying. Songs like "Faceless Ones" and "Sweet Silence" chuck multitudes of annoying pinch harmonics into their slow parts, wrecking any sort of doomy or twisted atmosphere that could be created by the tempo shift, this approach of adding goofy touches is used whenever they bring the tempo down, rendering the darkest moments of the release silly.

In addition to this, the rather riffless approach of the album helps drag things out, along with the guitar tone. Yes, there are riffs here, but as per the required level of complete batshit insanity on offer here, they're unlike riffs as they are usually used, repeated passages of loose chords and harsh switches of tone are the norm, and for their weirdness they're not very memorable or throat grabbing. Despite not being hugely attention holding on their own merits, these awkward, dopey riffs are also held back by the awkward, dopey guitar tone. The tone here is rather undistorted, none of the notes come across as a large walls of noise, waves of distortion or fuzzed out murkiness or anything usually used in death metal, it's definitely tuned low enough to be a DM tone and all, it's just the guitar itself definitely sounds like a vibrating string. Again it's unique, but the way it twangs in it's metallic manner just keeps bringing me back to that carnival ride with grinding gears imagery I mentioned earlier. It really doesn't invite the listener into a musical world, instead putting out the image of a bunch of dudes hitting random strings on their instruments while sitting in the room with you, and that isn't a very exciting journey to be taken on for an hour.

At the end of the day, Obscura is an album that deserves all the praise for originality and breaking ground as it gets, but none for actual musical quality. They came out of nowhere and laid down an entire new framework of ideas that took other bands a decade to figure out how to restructure it into an enjoyable format, and any band with that level of creative ambition deserves a magnitude of respect, but the actual music offered up here doesn't deserve to be revered any more than a special needs circus.

(Subtitle: I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...)


For real, Obscura is the album that inspired this entire series in the first place. The reason for this is simple; as far as I've been able to tell, there is no other album in all of heavy metal that is both as well loved by the fandom and also as intensely reviled by me. I can understand near-universal worship of bands and albums I dislike most of the time, I really can. Hell, I rag on Helloween's most notable work all the time, but I know why people like it. I understand how and why it was so influential, even to bands that I enjoy. I get it, I really do. But for the life of me, Obscura still eludes me. What the fuck is it that makes this so goddamn revered? I really can't wrap my head around it. The only way I can rationalize it is by viewing it from the "I love weird things for the sake of weird things" crowd, but even then I still see this hailed by both old school death metal fanatics and snobby prog fans alike. Something about Gorguts's third album brings everybody together, and I'm not even exaggerating when I say I've spent roughly eight years listening to this album on and off trying to make sense of it all, and I just cannot for the life of me understand the appeal in this sonic trainwreck.

Some people are just suckers for dissonance, I can get that, it's why shit like Portal and Ulcerate are so popular in the underground. Hell, I'm a huge fan of SikTh and they're pretty notorious for sounding terrible on purpose since the guitarists don't know a lick of music theory and just kind of play whatever. But Gorguts here manages to be dissonant 100% of the time, there isn't one consonant chord or melody throughout the entire bloated runtime of Obscura. I'm as serious as a goddamned heart attack right now, for real. This manages to run over an hour without anything pleasing to the ear happening.

But BH! It's death metal! You can't expect death metal to be pleasing to the ear! I bet you're an In Flames fan!

Clearly I mean pleasing in a death metal sense. I like listening to Cannibal Corpse, I enjoy rocking out to Immolation, I could spin the first Krisiun album day and night, I have honestly nearly shat my pants during "Suspended in Tribulation" during a Suffocation show, I enjoy all of these classic bands not because they're melodic or pleasant, but because they don't sound like they just picked up their instruments for the first time the day prior to entering the studio. I don't give a fuck how "creative" or "avant garde" or "outside the box" this album is, the bottom line is that the opening riff to the title track sounds fucking terrible. That's not even first year guitar player level of skill, that's not even first day. That is somebody picking up their buddy's guitar when he leaves the room for a second and just wailing away on it without having a clue what he's doing. Every last riff sounds like this, they all sound like dissonant smashing and random bends with no real thought put behind them other than "Does this sound like shit? Yeah? Perfect!". The percussion section is equally nonsensical; complementing nothing by blasting at seemingly inopportune times, goofing around with bizarre jazz sensibilites, and just seemingly playing the entire album as a free time jazz exercise as opposed to anything even remotely structured.

And you know what? Maybe that's the real problem I have with the album. Maybe it's my distaste of intentionally structureless jazz that draws me away from it. Let me ponder that for a bit...

Oh, no wait, my mistake, that's absolute bullshit. It's not just the fact that the structure is bizarre or jazzy, it's that it isn't there at all, and as a result nothing sticks with you other than "Clouded", and that's solely because it stands out for being much slower than the rest of the album and a whopping ten goddamn minutes long. The songs all waft in and out of consciousness between epileptic fits of chaotic nonsense, noodling around with strange, dissonant wonkiness and grating harmonics for the better part of an hour, boring itself into your skull like an iron mosquito (note to self: pitch Iron Mosquito to Capcom for new Mega Man X game). Other than that one track, nothing else is memorable for any reason other than the fact that it sounds like a chalkboard grinding its teeth. This is seriously the most irritating music I've ever listened to, and this is taking into account shit like Neoandertals, Enmity, and that one random Buckethead impression that my buddy recorded that I post all the time. I listen to albums while I review them, and this has taken me a month to write this far simply because Obscura gives me such a cataclysmic headache. I know that saying any particular piece of music is "random" or "has no structure at all" and things of that sort almost always implies that the reviewer doesn't know what he/she's talking about and just can't fathom something unconventional, and I know how silly I must sound saying those same things about this album. Obviously it isn't random, Gorguts can perform these songs live, they were very deliberately written, but they suuuuuuuck.

Another thing I really need to get across is Luc Lemay's vocals. They are just... oh man, otherworldly bad. Strangely enough, on one hand, I feel like they fit the music perfectly, as they're really tortured and chaotic sounding, like there's absolutely no skill as a death metal vocalist present and he's just yelling at the top of his lungs. I'm not just saying that because I feel like there's zero skill involved in the instrumentals either (though that does also apply), but I feel like this style could work if the music was better, because it fits with the chaotic dissonance that the music revels in. Agonized howling like this works well with certain torture doom bands like Senthil who go for a similar atmosphere, but with an album so chock full of irritation like this, it's merely another pin in my back. It's all so non-stop and abrasive, and it works in all the wrong ways. He howls like a guy making fun of death metal, and the guitars just hammer away and impossibly dissonant and wretched sounding chords and seemingly randomly placed harmonic squeals, and the drums sound like they're being performed by an eight year old who is just having the time of his life hitting everything he can. This is a death metal version of The Shaggs, it sounds like a parody, and I will never understand how it attained such cult status for its "avant garde genius".

Honestly, Obscura will forever blow my mind. This must be how death metal sounds to people who hate death metal. And hell, even if I look at it from a different perspective, it doesn't help it. Let's not view it as death metal, but instead prog metal or avant garde, either way it sounds like crap. The music sounds bad, the guitars sound like a first grader just strumming and sliding his fingers up and down the neck, and the vocals are almost hilariously inept. This bewilders me because I've actually since gone back and listened to some of the band's older material (which I'd avoided for years because this album pisses me off so much), and they're a perfectly capable band. It's not like they're a bunch of Wesley Willis types that people latch on to for novelty (or just because they're so passionate about what they do that it's hard not to like), nor are they something like the aforementioned Shaggs or Complete where they are so transcendentally inept that they get dug up years later and passed around the internet for shiggles. They wrote some solid death metal back in the day, and then around 1998 apparently decided to go a different direction. That direction was downwards.

Part of me can almost appreciate what Gorguts is going for here, I can tell they're trying to do something very different, they're trying to be much more dissonant than anything before them. They're going for some kind of weird, avant garde style insanity. Hell, maybe they're trying to tap into the musical representation of insanity itself. It's possible, but it doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, the product presented to us sounds like absolute horsedick. There is not one single aspect of Obscura that I can give praise to. It's a haphazard mess of seemingly intentionally irritating parts thrown together with apparently no regard for the interconnecting parts nor the big picture. The high pitched slides and squeals contrast with the dissonant banging in the same way a knifewound to the gut contrasts with a hatchet to the cranium. The vocals are one dimensional yowls and shrieks and simply add another layer of needless frustration onto an already compounded pile of headache fuel. How this ever became a cult classic is beyond me, because it sound like if I had just picked up instruments I'd never played before and wailed on them without any real idea how they worked. And it's weird because it's deliberate. It sounds like cacophonous shit on purpose, and that somehow makes it a brilliant masterpiece.

I didn't expect to give this a zero when I started writing, I really didn't. I expected a single digit score, yes, but not a zero. The more I listened, the worse it got. It just gets more irritating with repeated listens, and the layers peel away not to reveal hidden genius, but simply different frequencies of irritation I hadn't noticed before. There's nothing here to like, this is the absolute nadir of musicality. I don't care how expertly this was written, I don't care how deliberate and complex it is. Frankly, it sounds awful, goes on for far too long, and has nothing enjoyable to be found. You want weird, late 90s death metal? Listen to Starseed, otherwise hop off this album's dick and stop trying to find beauty inside the asshole of Shub Niggurath.


Originally written for Lair of the Bastard

It was inevitable that, having reached critical mass, death metal would have ventured into more experimental territory, crossing over into new and other/otherworldly realms of sound, but while today's market has seen an explosion of such feats, the 90s were largely a different story. I can now reach into a hat and draw out names like Ulcerate, Baring Teeth, Flourishing, Portal, as obvious examples, all more or less relevant as successors to the record I'm about to review, but in 1998, were there a lot of precedents? Demilich, Supuration, maybe some of Disharmonic Orchestra's material, but by and large the emphasis of the genre was to push the underlying precepts faster and harder, to twist the knobs of brutality to their limits, to shock and appall both the built-in audience and ensure those 'outside the circle' would never opt into it.

Canada's Gorguts was already on a firm path to cementing itself as a sold second stringer in this bloodsport, putting a slight twist on the Floridian fundamentals of Death, Morbid Angel and Obituary with a few nods to the Dutch and New York scenes, when they decided not to merely shake themselves from their yoke, but to neigh, whinny, and trample the fucking thing to pieces. Considered Dead and The Erosion of Sanity were both albums I'd considered quite good, if not entirely worthy of the worship retrospectively heaped upon them in later generations, but Obscura was truly the moment where, in my universe, Gorguts became 'a thing' unto itself. No longer a band that I'd simply recommend to those seeking out sounds similar to the superior works of their forebears, but a 'you HAVE to hear this' entity. Clearly, having already emptied the beer fridge on the right side of their collective brains, Gorguts were finally sampling from the right side, and this translated into a jarring, compelling, out of body, out of your freakin' mind experience which drew upon elements of jazz, funk, sludge, drone, and post-hardcore as relishes to its gruesome vocal theatrics and the strange, almost Lovecraftian occult poetry of its lyrics.

Where do I even start with this goddamned thing? I think one characteristic of Obscura which has always stood tall to my ears was that it gives off this unusual impression of being 'messy' or squamous sounding, when in fact it is so rigidly defined and precise in structure and execution. Death metal is but the framework from which its swerving, thrusting, jabbing and churning limbs emerge. Let's be honest: without the Gorguts logo on the cover, it might has well been another/new project for Luc Lemay and crew. There is a direct linearity to the vocals, perhaps, but here they've been fleshed out between Martin van Drunen-styled open growls and more creepy, blunt and tortured guttural howls that give the impression of some wounded beast tracking across a sucking swamp, its blood mingling with the stinking, nutrient-rich swill of its waters. Totally fucked when you contrast the timbre with the more fitful, yet depressing prose of the lyrics, and certainly more 'charismatic' than the performances on either of the earlier records, though I can indeed understand why they might turn off some listeners anticipating a more conservative gurgle.

But the vocals are, strangely, the LEAST unique component to this bludgeoning Escher as it lifts itself from the gallery wall and chases the artsy staff around intent on their consumption. The guitars here are out of this world! Hypnotic and dissonant leaden grooves saturated with creepy higher string patterns so often redolent of Eastern mystique; like having Immolation perform in unison with snake charmers. Scads of strings being stretched, warped, bounced, throttled, and bent into incalculable forms. Tapping rituals (like in "Obscura" itself) abound. You've still got the recurrent pinches and squeals so important to provide that 'cartoon' level of intensity amongst the brutal death metal regulars, but they very much fuck around with the conventions to provide a more 'popping' resonance, such as the intro to "Faceless Ones" or the mesmeric atonal spikes in the bridges of "Sweet Silence". The rhythm tone is a bit cleaner than usual, and combined with the discordant writing it brings to mind post-punk/noise rock units like Barkmarket, Zeni Geva or the Unsane, but fear not, because aesthetically, it's far heavier than the stock, underwhelming Morrisound production on the debut.

Another immensely important player here was bassist Steve Cloutier, whose tone is just as loud and present as the rhythm guitar. He anchors each groove with thick, poignant plucking that would rival any shitty nu metal outfit, and at times comes off like a jazzier, hammering Blacky (circa Voivod). The lines don't stray heavily from Lemay and Steeve Hurdle's pondiferous drudgery, but they're just so dense and well conceived that I could probably listen to the guy playing along to Patrick Robert's beats in "The Art of Sombre Ecstasy" or the phenomenal "Earthly Love", and still be as fully entertained as I am by several of the older Primus records. As for Robert: where was this guy hiding before, and where has he been since? Though it helps that the production of the bass drum and snare is so clear and concise, the guy can seamlessly thread blast beats or double kick fragments into various unusual time signatures and phrases, while keeping a sort of tribal vibe all along. If a university campus in the lost city of R'lyeh had its own hippie drum circle meeting at night with peace pipes to lament their psionic oppression at the hands of the Old Ones, this man would be it.

If I have one complaint about Obscura, it's simply that being clocked at an hour (with twelve tracks), the disc in summation seems overlong. A handful of the groove riffs dispersed throughout feel somewhat redundant to others, even if they aren't technically the same, and the better tempos and note progressions could have been condensed to the point that perhaps two tracks were cut off, tightening it to about 50 minutes of material. Also, the sputtering intensity of the viola used in "Earthly Love" is so brilliant that I rue the decision not to use it elsewhere throughout the track list. Alien guitar synths (as those on Pestilence's divisive Spheres) or proggy keyboards wouldn't have hurt the record in becoming even MORE unreal and otherworldly, at the risk of pissing off the purists who hate those sorts of dressings. Also, I really wish there were more whipping, wild lead sequences spat forth throughout (like that in "Subtle Body"), or perhaps some jazzier fusion guitar scriptures worked over the roiling rhythm chords. As far as Obscura goes outside the genre's comfort zone, there are moments I wish it went even further...

But apart from those quips, I would not hesitate to dub this one of the more interesting (and one of the best) death metal works of the later 90s, and the surreal, experimental lyrics are just icing on the cake, whether they be experimenting with Latin (the title track), spiritual chemistry, sorrow or undeath. The album isn't immediately inaccessible to the point that it turns away those who would listen to it, but its puzzle of barks and howls, repugnant bass/rhythm guitar twists and turns and tubes (like a sonic aorta), and magnanimously cluttered (on purpose) drumming has proved rewarding. Fifteen years later, I'm still getting something new out of this record across occasional listens, and it's Gorguts' crowning creation to date.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

Gorguts is a band that receives a lot of love and almost zero hate, especially on the metal-archives forum. They have pushed the envelope of death metal with each album they have made, never playing the same thing more then once. Sometimes this can be a positive thing. However for Gorguts this is the opposite. With Erosion of Sanity, listeners heard a fusion of technical musicianship with brilliant songwriting. Luc Lemany pushed you to the edge with pinch harmonics, piano/acoustic guitars and a copious dose of "odd" time signatures that kept a slight amount of groove. With Obscura the band has seemed to trade technical ability for songwriting ability completely abandoning the old school sound they once had.

There are two things I want in my death and thrash metal: Speed and riffs. Without those two basic things playing thrash or death metal is a moot point. With death metal, you don't always need to be fast, but if you are lacking in the riffs its pointless listening. This is what happened to Gorguts. They lost their ability to write a real riff and lost just about all their speed. The occasional blast beat/double bass section will appear on this album but blast beats and double bass doesn't necessarily determine the pulse at all but simply the amount of units you are playing.

With the lack of real riffs and an almost complete lack of speed what do we have left? Hard to say but its somewhere in-between shit and crap. Dissonant, abrasive guitar riffs that utilize harmonics way too much and lack character. Intricate bass lines that don't follow the guitars but don't seem to do anything. Chaotic and annoying drums that cannot even keep a beat for the listener to get in and some out of place vocals that get annoying after 5 songs.

There are some good moments on this album but they are so few and far between that remember how a single song goes is difficult. Earthly Love starts off fast and moves into a groovy dissonant mid-paced section that sounds amazing but then continues with the nonsense shortly after introducing terribly out of tune violins that sound extremely out of place. Nostalgia is a slower song that doesn't bombard the listener with an insane amount of shitty pick scrapes and has some good drumming that actually remains constant at various times. No song on here is great because there is always something that ruins it.

Gorguts used to be a band you could listen to and head bang to. Now when I listen to what they play I just bang my head against a wall. This isn't good, this isn't a masterpiece. Many prodigies in music end up fucking themselves over because they forget their roots. You might be able to shred on a guitar, but no one listens to music to hear solos they listen to hear songs its the solos that attract people to your songs not the other way around. I'm all for experimentation but this album lacks anything resembling death metal. Like groove metal or "post-thrash" is with thrash metal, this completely shits on the hard works of the early greats like Morbid Angel, Possessed, Death, etc. Quite a shame that people consider this a masterpiece when all I hear is a bunch of assholes trying to show how good they are at their instruments. Keep this shit out of death metal.

Before the release of Obscura, Gorguts were an ordinary death metal band, in my opinion. They were essentially a copy of Death, but not quite as good. That's not to say that they weren't a good band because their first two albums are still very good for what they are. However, Obscura seems to have come out of left field in the sense that it is not ordinary in any way. It sounds like nothing before, and even now, twelve years later, there is still nothing really like it. Even though they have influenced many tech-death bands (Ulcerate, Gigan, etc.), Gorguts' third album is still very much in a league of its own.

Obscura is, on first listen, probably the most bizarre thing a metal listener will ever hear. It is probably the single most bizarre sounding metal album. Odd rhythms and dissonance on this level might appeal more to listeners of free jazz and contemporary classical music than to the average death metal fan. The compositions are probably more similar to Rachmoninoff than to Morbid Angel. The drums are constantly changing up. The guitars and bass are filled with dissonant melodies, clashing chord progressions and pinch harmonics. The vocals are harsh. Very harsh. They are filled with torment and a sense of urgency. All these combine together and form an album that is very confusing at first, yet upon multiple listens begins to make more and more sense.

Obscura is not for people who want safe sounding music. It is for people looking to hear something different. It is made for music lovers who want a challenge. Listening to Obscura for me is about discovery. Each listen brings further understanding and enjoyment. I've listened to this album about 30 times, and still my appreciation for it increases with time.

In conclusion, Obscura's uniqueness and the challenge it presents to my ears make it one of my favorite metal albums ever created. The more I hear it, the more perfect I believe it to be. It is one of the very few albums I consider worthy of a perfect 100% rating. It is not only a masterpiece of death metal, but a masterpiece of art.

If you put on death metal for a sixty year-old, I can almost guarantee this is what he'll hear: just this wall of frightening, unintelligible growls, ungodly loud guitar "noises" and drums that just seem to be blasting along as fast as possible with no obvious connection to the plot. Loud noise for noise's sake. Basically, the way a sixty year-old feels when his asshole grandson blasts Gorgoroth with the bedroom door open is kinda the way you feel the first time you hear Obscura. Nothing makes any sense. You keep listening for a consistent riff, a reliable rhythm of some kind, but the music just twists away from your mind every few seconds. It takes a really battle-tested listener to find Obscura pleasurable in the conventional metal sense; you can't really engage with this music the way you would most technically-proficient death metal bands, where you could at least memorize all the crazy time changes so you could genuinely rock out to it. (By the way, I hate the term 'technical death', so I'm going to awkwardly avoid its usage.) To do that with Obscura, you have to listen to it really closely, which can be a tremendously brutal experience. You're following the ghost idea of "song" right into a psychic meatgrinder.

My mind recoils at trying to parse out what is going on in the maddest peaks of closing track Sweet Silence, which surely ranks with the most overwhelming musical experiences I can easily recall. Things don't really get to happen while this record is playing. People don't come around to hang out, or complement you on your taste. You can't just listen to this record casually, not while this lurching cacophony squats over you. So instead of letting myself be exhausted by it, I surrender to Obscura. I close my eyes and just let the record be noise going on around me. By doing this, I admittedly run a 1 in 20ish risk of ending up like the levitating yogi on the cover, but it seems the safest course. By the time I get through opening pair Obscura and Earthly Love I find myself totally immersed in the experience of simply hearing it happen. Possibly because I listen to it this way, I don't find it as hard on the ears as I do other brutal death acts like Lykathea Aflame. The lack of repetition and rhythmic consistency means that my mind doesn't feel so badly bludgeoned by the steady diet of blastbeats and tremolo-picking.

There are a few rare stretches of more sustained compositional directness, like the rather headbangable crunch of Subtle Body and the powerhouse riffing of Nostalgia. There's also The Carnal State, which sounds faintly like something off of Death's Symbolic, except played backwards. These sequences serve to bring the utter oddness of the other tracks into sharper relief. Guitarists Luc Lemay and Steeve Hurdle author a sound that is abominably heavy, matched only by the likes of Esoteric. It's not just that the guitars are extremely down-tuned. The tone they got here makes every chord struck sound like a growl, except the solos, which are more like metal shrieking against metal. On the near-ten minute dirge-to-end-all-dirges Clouded, you feel like you're trudging slowly through a steel foundry while God yells at you. They share a link like few others in the genre; what they do here has rightly been compared to dissonant classical composers and free jazz players, but much as they may draw from those sources, the sheer, electrified power they wield makes it feel completely different. With the increasing proficiency of 'bedroom' metal musicians, there are probably dozens and dozens of bands with the chops to play this stuff. But I don't know of many who would have the vision and artistic confidence to release a record as uncompromisingly different and difficult as Obscura.

Lemay's growl is immense. The man runs almost every play in the death vocal playbook, throwing out advanced moves like the belch, the gurgle, the Cookie Monster, the pseudo-demon, the sea lion, the 'my throat is filling with blood' scream... it's all here, and more often than not it's absolutely convincing. It must be said that he doesn't really give you much to work with if you're trying to understand the record's overarching concept ('So, when you say "RRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHRrrrAAA," is that a reference to post-structuralist discourse?') , which I judge from the song titles to be a sort of meditation on sex and death. But then, given the album's title, are you surprised you have to make guesses?

In any case, Gorguts' Obscura remains one of the most singularly unique and absorbing metal records in my collection. Some kind of genre apex by some measure or other, for sure. I feel dazed.

Widely considered to be one of the most enduring examples of experimental metal, 'Obscura' is an album that has already sparked plenty of discussion long before the writing of this review. Released in 1998, it has since influenced a wave of left-leaning bands in death metal, each seeking to bring the genre to the next level, much like Gorguts did here. Make no mistake; 'Obscura' is a fairly tough cookie to chew at first, even for someone already well-exposed to a variety of extreme metal. As jarring and weird as death metal gets, Gorguts' music here is well worth being considered a classic, although it took me quite a few listens to finally agree with that statement.

As a baseline, death metal is typically about heavy riffs, furious drumming, and a harsh vocal style of growling that typically obscures the lyrics. Gorguts is clearly a death metal act and shares each of these traits, but it is the wealth of additional elements to the music of Gorguts that makes the music stand out. Although a band with the name Gorguts would not tend to inspire thoughts of jazz or neoclassical music, there are sounds of both woven deep into what the band does. Gorguts' sense of dynamic ebbs and flows much like a jazz group, and the dissonant harmonies between the bass and guitars sometimes brings to mind a number of 20th century composers. Although the hour length of the album seems all the more vast due to the jarring and dissonant nature of the music, there is not a moment where the quality lets up, although for music like this, a slightly shorter experience may have been a little more effective.

Death metal vocalists tend to sound quite similar, and while Luc Lemay still employs a familiar style of growls and raspy barks, there is a ferocity to his voice that is rarely heard in death metal. Instead of going the route of low,virtually inaudible gutturals, Lemay's delivery is rooted in bringing the demons out of his throat; and his voice sounds very strained throughout, although in a good way. That being said, Lemay's vocals are the weakest element of 'Obscura', although that is more a cause of the jaw-dropping musicianship, rather than a fault of the vocals. The odd and atypical ways the guitar is used on this album create some very strange and quirky sounds, as is evidenced within the first ten seconds of the record. It sounds like death metal riffs are being channeled through a wah-wah pedal, but whatever it is, the strange guitar style is both one of the album's greatest strengths, and a big reason why Gorguts is met with controversy. This is not the sort of death metal that will even please most death metal fans; the out-of-tune sound of the riffs is a little uncomfortable at first, but the quality sinks it after some listens have come and gone.

'Obscura' was never an album I disliked perse, but it was at first a pretty difficult album to crack. Although I would not consider myself any stranger to avant-garde metal or experimental music in general, the complexity of the music here demands many listens to truly be experienced. It still could have been a little shorter, but 'Obscura' is undoubtedly a masterpiece of death metal.

Fuck, I’m finally attempting this. This might genuinely be the most difficult album to review, due in part to the fact that it sounds like nothing ever made. No album prior to or after the release of this monumental beast of an album has even made an attempt to recreate whatever this “thing” is. In fact, that’s probably the best way to describe this–as a “thing.” Really, there’s no term that can accurately describe the odd sounds and instrumental contortions produced by Gorguts.

After releasing two excellent death metal albums on Roadrunner, Considered Dead and The Erosion of Sanity, Gorguts changed labels (and Roadrunner stopped releasing good death metal…) and dropped this gem onto the world. Obscura is not simply music, but an experience. Actually, it’s quite the painful experience. But it’s a very rewarding painful experience! The initial pain is really just our own reaction to such otherworldly, abstract, and unknown noise. At first, it really is offputting. Frankly, that’s how Obscura is supposed to be.

Calling this merely atonal and dissonant would be an understatement. From the first seconds of ‘Obscura,’ we are subjected to a tri-faceted assault on our ears, and I mean that in the most literal sense. The bass, drums, and guitars all literally blast out of nowhere, all playing parts that don’t even seem to match upon first listen. But once you finally get past them, then you have to deal with Luc Lemay’s utterly dry and raspy harsh vocals. These are simply some of the most painful and anguished screams ever put to record, and frankly, they fit the atmosphere that this “thing” has created very well. While I’m talking about ‘Obscura,’ of note is how the seemingly random instrumental doodling that starts at 1:26 is simply masterful! At first, I was distracted by the guitar playing, but beyond that, there is an insanely awesome drum section beneath that ultimately plays the most important role in making this section sound so random upon first listen.

But as random as it may sound, this chaotic madness actually seems to have a lot of structure to it, and that structure is what separates this masterpiece from random noise. Just listen to the section of ‘Earthly Love’ starting at around 1:21. It’s actually rather catchy, with the groove mostly being provided by the guitars. That groovy-ness actually leads to an accentuation of the abnormal drum playing going on simultaneously. This is probably the second “catchiest” song on the album next to ‘Nostalgia’, although it’s really not hard to be considered catchy with the rest of the songs here being so “uncatchy,” for lack of a better word. Of course, the creepy-as-fuck violin section in the middle of this song just adds another dimension of mystique to this song and to Obscura as a whole.

Of all the awesome songs on this album, one deserves special mentioning–’Clouded.’ To describe this succinctly, I would call it the manifestation of pain in musical form. These will be the slowest nine minutes and thirty seconds of your life, and easily the most painful on your ears. Gorguts makes it clear from the start that this will be slow and painful, and the most painful of all the elements here is Luc Lemay’s vocals. They’re just fucking perfect! It’s obvious what atmosphere they’re trying to create with this song, and Lemay’s vocals are the perfect touch on top of the already-grating guitar and bass playing in the background. Then, the melody that starts at 4:14 kicks in, and we’re given a bit of relief from Luc’s vocals. This melody evolves into another chord progression, which eventually leads back into the same melody. This plodding is just incredible! Never have I loved a plodding song so much, but Gorguts make their intentions obvious and create a behemoth of a track that moves so slowly, yet still remains interesting while doing so. And not coincidentally enough, ‘Clouded’ is followed by the fast and short ‘Subtle Body.’ Don’t think that was unintentional, because that setup just makes ‘Subtle Body’ seem that much more intense.

This is, simply put, one of the best and most unique albums ever made. The riffs are mind-bending. The composition is avant-garde to say the least (and I hate using the term “avant-garde,” but if it ever is applicable, here is the place for it). The sounds are just so inhuman, yet so beautiful. The melodies are incredibly somber and haunting. If there ever was an album to represent the creative and musical peak of metal, this is it.

Written for http://thenumberoftheblog.com/

This album changed my view of music and by extension, my life. I remember the moment I first put it in my CD player, back at the beginning of 1999, and I haven't been the same since. I "got it" instantly, in a way I felt that I had always been searching for it.

This is the only album to take the jazz-fusion thing beyond Atheist and Cynic. That no other band has managed to really incorporate ideas from this album into their music (a few have tried; Sickening Horror have been the most successful), even after 10 years, is a testament to how groundbreaking it still is. In a way, the approach that Gorguts took should not be all that unusual--experimenting with dissonance has been going on in jazz and classical music for almost 100 years--but sadly, it is still all too rare. Probably says more about the conservative state of metal than anything else.

This album blew me away so much at first that it took me years to see that it does have some precedents in the metal world--if you take Voivod's dissonant tendencies and push them a little further, and superimpose them on the slithering, lurching riffs of Morbid Angel, I think you would have a fairly good approximation of a lot of the material on here. The jazz-death of Atheist and Cynic were also obviously a source of inspiration. But Gorguts takes these ingredients and morphs them into something totally their own. It reminds me most of atonal classical music, even more than jazz. Luc Lemay is a big fan of the composer Penderecki, so I guess this makes sense. They frequently make use of what would be called "extended techniques" in the classical world, manipulating their instruments in unconventional ways to get some truly mind-blowing sounds.

One of the things I love about this album is that despite the complexity, it maintains a sinister atmosphere of almost psychotic desperation throughout. The vocals, especially those by Steeve Hurdle, are most responsible for this, I think. The bass is pretty key, too, and has a squishy, colorful tone to it that I haven't heard anywhere else. The drums are unsurpassed, and despite liberal use of the double bass, ultimately like something out of free jazz. All the instruments have equal emphasis, although the guitar riffs obviously have the most immediate impact, sounding like something from an alien world. Complex atonal chords jangle and collide at odd angles, with both guitars rarely in unison, more often going off on their own extended journeys through musical space. Yet it does not sound like a mess, and comes together somehow into a cohesive whole. Pure genius.

It amazes me how detailed many death metal albums are. You catch things the second and third time around that you may not have picked up the first time. Such is the basic premise of Obscura, but it's much more than that. It's a listening experience. Obscura feels like an hour-long journey, where everything you thought was a mystery is suddenly revealed to you. The music takes you to places no human eye has seen, where worlds collapse unto themselves and collide on other worlds. This album is not an easy listen, at least not for me. But I find beauty in this, because it makes the experience that much more rewarding. Gorguts managed to create an album that draws the listener in and refuses to let go.

Luc Lemay and co. are real skilled at what they do, and Obscura is a testament to that. The guitar players know their way around the fretboard, using odd, unconventional melodies. The bassist doesn't add depth here, he plays with a fury, showcasing the power of an instrument largely forgotten in metal. The drums are just as big a part of each movement, acting as a separate entity instead of being the backbone of the music and driving the guitars forward. That's of particular interest here. The drums sound like guitar riffs translated into percussion lines. Stephane Provencher doesn't play in this album, but according to the band, he wrote all the drum pieces. And what a job he did. The drumming snakes and whirls around as much as the guitars and bass do. All the instruments are clearly heard in the massive sounding mix. Everything combines to create a crushing, suffocating atmosphere that whisks you away from one place to another, with no regard for your sanity. Even the slow, doomy sections and songs feel like mountains of matter creating immense pressure. It's as if the band wanted to wear down the listener mentally and physically with sheer sonic power. Luc's vocals are definitely the weak point, however, I feel they fit the music quite well, and aren't really distracting to me. It seems that's the case with a lot of people, and that's unfortunate. For those listeners who like the whole package, Obscura can provide an incredible listen, from start to finish. It's a triumph of musicianship and sonic manipulation. Not many bands can stake a claim to such an impressive sounding record, so Gorguts has something to hang their hats on. Definitely an album to seek out and experience.

I don't really know where to start with this album.

First and foremost, I want to say that in the case of Gorguts, the answer to 'What's in a name?' is - 'absolutely nothing'. Unless you're referring to the name of the album, in which case - 'absolutely everything'.

It's death metal.. sort of. It's brutal, unrelenting, unfriendly, and extreme. In fact, I'm pretty sure this goes beyond extreme. However, it's also so unorthodox, strange, unique, and chaotic that it would make more sense to look at it as an extremely heavy form of experimental free jazz than it would to look at it as another member among the ranks of conventional death metal albums that exist out there (which coincidentally include Gorguts' other albums).

Generally speaking, I'm not a stranger to extreme and technical metal, but I had trouble figuring out what kind of audience, exactly, this creation was intended for. It's far too harsh to attract those who are only familiar with heavy music in a general sense, yet at the same time it's so hard to associate anything on this album with any form of established metal that even die-hard metalheads would probably keep their distance. Obscura destroys any and all metal clichés that I can think of.. everything is pushed to the limits - the brutality, the technicality, the construction (and deconstruction) of highly discordant progressions.. it all comes together to form some kind of otherworldly chaos fusion theory.

The guitars emit some seriously low, highly dissonant tones in obfuscated patterns that may sometimes resemble something you might be able to call a riff.. and when the riffs do come down, they could probably pass for the soundtrack to oblivion. The guitars in general produce some downright twisted, alien, and atonal sounds. The morphing metarhythms produced by the drummer sort of wander around on their own plane of existence, ignoring any sense of a natural tempo.. though calling anything on Obscura "natural" is pushing it. Everything is oh so deliberate. Dizzyingly odd intervals, extremely irregular sort-of-there-but-not-really beats, constantly shifting meters, a strange sense of counterpoint, and a destructive lack of harmony. On top of that, the vocals sound like somebody is literally tearing their mind into pieces in front of the microphone.. probably the most violent, agonizing, and painful vocals I've ever heard. It's hard to not wonder just what in the world is going on as you listen to this for the first time. Are these guys insane? You'll probably think so your first time through the album (and depending on your level of exposure and tolerance for music like this, perhaps your second time through as well, and your third, and fourth, and.. well, assuming you even get that far).

That's the thing, though.. I don't believe music like "this" exists outside of Obscura. At least, I've never heard it. This is completely new and unique to me. While there are many avant-garde metal bands out there who create schizophrenic genre trips with elaborate arrangements, all of them, well.. to be straightforward.. they all seem very gimmicky and trivial when compared to the enigmatic intensity of Obscura.

Another nice thing about this album is that, unlike many tech/death albums, this one isn't 30 minutes long. It's a bit over an hour, which could be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. Also, despite the band's name, they don't have much to do with either gore or guts. In fact, their lyrics - while not wrapped in indecipherable poetry - are generally intelligent.

The worst thing about this album is the way it makes you look at everything else. Obscura is one of those albums that redefines the way a fundamental aspect of music works, it's an album that redefines and warps your very conception of the art form. In fact, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who wouldn't even call this music, but an hour of random noises.. though I personally think that an hour of random noises would sound more natural and pleasing than the surreal intensity that constitutes this album. It makes everything else looks overly tame, and all that stuff that you thought was so great and esoteric seems.. normal.

Writing this review was actually sort of an odd undertaking, since there's absolutely nothing out there to draw comparisons to (oddly enough, the most common line that I have seen drawn from this album is to Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica"). None of the tech, death, or avant-garde that I have heard could have prepared me for this. Obscura defies the very genre it embodies, while at the same time bending it to its own twisted will.

I'll finish by saying that anybody who's into death metal should listen to this album at least once, if not own it. Everybody else, well.. open your mind, fasten your seatbelt, and be prepared for some of the strangest, deepest, and most difficult music you will ever hear.

..

On a more amusing note, I read a comment on another site claiming that this album sounds like a bunch of guys throwing their instruments down a staircase and recording it. Though in some indirect way that may be an accurate summary, all I can say is that despite what it sounds like, it is still music, and upon repeated listens the jarring contradiction of it all should begin to make sense.. no matter how ugly it may seem at first (and ugly it is).

-5 points due to the initial "What the fuck is happening to my brain!?" feeling this album will, without fail, induce.

This album is a culmination of all things surreal, frightening, disturbing and menacing that go through the human mind put through instruments and sounds that can't be described until you listen for yourself. There's no other band like Gorguts, there's no other album like Obscura. You get an all-star underground line-up, and a few of my most favorite artists of all time. You get Luc Lemay, a guitar hero of mine that never gets the recognition he deserves for his inventful approach of his instrument, Steeve Hurdle who is a guitar hero of mine for those same reasons, and Steve Cloutier, the most underrated bassist in the genre. You also get some of the most interesting drumming that mends well with this album provided by Patrick Robert.

The music in this album is created through "organized chaos" so to speak. There's so many paths you can take when listening to this album, the drums speak for themselves, the bass, the guitars, and sometimes even a violin which adds a terrifyingly eerie atmosphere to some of the songs (namely Earthly Love). Each song on this album is a stand-out track, it's pure metal perfection and receives endless praise from me and needs to be experienced by those looking to expand their technical death metal boundaries.

Hopefully the new creation we'll see in Negativa with Luc Lemay and Steeve Hurdle will showcase the darkness heard in this album.

As a final note, I must stress that if you don't "get" this album the first time, don't give up on it. Give it 4-5 spins before you make an opinion. Get this now.

Now, I'm a fan of technical metal, or just technical music in general. I've heard quite a lot to make one's head spin. One day, it was suggested that I check out Gorguts' album "Obscura". The person recommending me this album stated it was "the most technical album ever". Curiosity struck me, and soon enough I found myself listening to it.

"What in god's name?!" was my initial reaction. That's one sick guitar tone coming out. "I've heard technical stuff before like Spiral Architect, but not like this, never like this!" My head was spinning. It was difficult to grasp. But I was intrigued by the sheer obsceneness of what my ears were hearing.

So it finishes, and I was puzzled. I left it alone for a couple weeks. I find it again and decide to give it another listen. "Hey, I didn't hear this before!" I started noticing things I didn't hear before in the music. And it kept on happening. Time after time, I'd keep finding new parts in the songs that went unnoticed to my ears before. The wall of noise being created at first was slowly being deteriorated and I was actually hearing music. After some time, I decided "It'd be pretty cool if I tried out one of these songs on guitar."

So I find a tab for Nostalgia. Why is this important? Because at this point, I started hearing the melodies in the music. The melodies hidden deep down in the music. At the same time, I was being baffled by the sheer technicality of the song. What the hell are they doing? The drums have insanely complex patterns. The guitars bounce off one another, sometimes clashing, sometimes complimenting. And the bass was equally as bizarre. These guys are god damn musical geniuses! But it made little sense to me. The odd time signatures were almost too much. But then you start to understand, just like everything else in their music.

After countless other listens, I can safely say this is easily the most technical metal album I've ever heard and owned. And unique. Oh is it ever unique. Aside from the obvious differences in the music, Luc Lemay doesn't have your generic death metal growl. I'd describe it as a low pitched, dry scream. Very recognizable, and difficult to emulate, as is the rest of this album. These are true musicians who are above all their peers in and out of the genre. Hell, imagine if these guys decided to make jazz!

This CD is worth every penny you buy it for. Like I said, at first there's a pretty good chance you'll be confused, but put some time into it. It will start making sense. If you claim to like death metal or tech metal, this is definitely an essential album.

Marty Friedman and Jason Becker may have copyrighted the name first, but this record is sheer cacophony in the highest sense. So when some savvy journalist coined the term “extreme metal” and latched it to the likes of Mayhem, Cannibal Corpse, etc. they probably never imagined that something this punishing could actually be captured on a circular piece of plastic. “Obscura” goes to the extreme in every aspect; creating an unbridled intensity that will no doubt turn away many prospective fans. It’s for this steep learning curve that I must detract a few points from my overall score. However, when the entry difficulty is brushed aside, “Obscura” is quite simply chaotic perfection.

To properly understand “Obscura” one must devote their undying attention to the music while preferably taking it all in on stereo headphones. Undoubtedly, there will be times when the listener will naturally question himself and say, “What the fuck am I listening to?” But out of sheer curiosity the album will lure the listener back for subsequent spins, and slowly but surely the clouds will part as a fresh ray of discovery shines through his newly enlightened eyes. This demanding yet rewarding experience is comparable to studying advanced Algebra, only much more satisfying. As such, this CD is not recommended for people who are afraid to have their musical perceptions challenged. In fact, I have one friend who is primarily a fan of traditional heavy metal and power metal that absolutely detests “Obscura” and will not let me play it while his ears are in the discernable vicinity. And even though I had an idea of what to expect I was still quite baffled when I first slapped the disc into my computer, as it all sounded like monotonous noise, and for a while I struggled to make it through to the whole album in one sitting. “Obscura” contains no respite, as it’s just an hour-long assault on its audience’s mind and sanity. Even the lone slow track on here (“Clouded”) is an absolutely grueling and agonizing experience that takes the best parts of Morbid Angel’s “God of Emptiness,” ditches the silly spoken word segments, and creates a savage, brooding mood that perfectly captures the aura of death. That brings me to my next point: although every aspect of “Obscura” is utterly unique, there is still a discernable influence from Morbid Angel’s B and C albums. From the atonal, seemingly backward riffing style, to the cat-like quickness displayed in the intricate drumming patterns, the five year gap between “The Erosion of Sanity” and “Obscura” was clearly time well spent; as the group most likely practiced their respective instruments and studied some of these classic yet abnormal metal releases.

I applaud Gorguts’ effort to transcend the boundaries of death metal, as even in today’s scene there is too much similarity and a general lack of innovation. The guitar riffs (bass included) are absolutely bizarre, sometimes producing spine-shivering effects similar to fingernails scraping across a chalkboard, but at other times becoming hypnotically melodic, and usually occurring simultaneously during the same song (see “Earthly Love”). It’s a shame that their drummer Steve MacDonald chose to end his life in the fall of 2002, because this album and “From Wisdom to Hate” undeniably prove that he was one of the best skin-beaters in all of metal. Steve possessed both the sheer speed of Pete “Commando” Sandoval and the bizarre timing of Bobby Jarzombek; combining the two aspects to create a distinctive approach that to this day remains unmatched, a description that suitably sums up this record and all the musicians who helped create it. If nothing else, "Obscura" is an album that will make any metal head appreciate the value of "sweet silence."