Issued in a jewel case, with foldout insert.
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.
Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
