Music review: Gorguts - Obscura (1998)

Damn, how am I going to review this? The associated memes have become more famous than the music itself, at this point: after the 50th time, you'll learn to ignore your ears bleeding and like it!, the Trout Mask Replica of metal, etc…

So let me tell you right now: the memes aren't wrong. Unless you have a minimum of experience with both old school death metal AND Stravinsky-like use of dissonance in music, you'll have a hard time enjoying it. And even then, it remains a tough and exacting pill to swallow.

There's a reason why so many people managed to get through to the reward though, something that differentiates it from the so-called "dissodeath" clones that abound nowadays: the infectious groove underneath the noisy complexity; very similar to Demilich's Nespithe on that point.

You can also find a lot of the franticness that made The Red in the Sky Is Ours so interesting.

What makes it so great compared to e.g. Crytopsy is that all that virtuosity and complexity isn't there to show off or even to overwhelm, they're purely slave to the sound they wanted to create. And it does sound as otherworldly and tortured as (I guess) they envisioned.

Said complexity is only a trap for the midwits, this is just a fantastically tight doomy death metal album with lots of strange flavour, not that different from their previous The Erosion of Sanity…

Not giving it 10 because I have a romanticist vision of music and this doesn't get much emotional response from me. And it's just a bit long considering its density.