Have you ever been overwhelmed by a performance? The kind that causes your body to shake and there’s energy running up and down you? That happened to me when I saw Gorguts a couple years ago. At the 2023 Decibel Metal & Beer Fest, the Canadian death metal band played the entirety of their albums Considered Dead and Obscura. While the former is great, Obscura is on an entirely different level; as I was listening to the band’s surreal and dissonant arrangements, I felt as if I’d been transported to another world, completely losing sight of the fact that I was in a room with hundreds of other people. My eyes locked in on guitarist/vocalist Luc Lemay; How are they making these sounds? I thought to myself, Lemay and his bandmates unleashing a dizzying display of technicality. It was marvelous, one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, a concrete reminder that Obscura is a masterpiece of technical death metal.
The Quebecois outfit formed in the late ‘80s, coming in at the tail end of the decade’s North American death metal boom. After a couple demos, Gorguts released Considered Dead, which was a solid debut if still fairly typical for death metal. Gorguts eventually followed that up with 1993’s The Erosion of Sanity, which brought additional elements to the band’s sonic arsenal while still maintaining a relatively conventional death metal approach. Had Gorguts continued down this path, it seems unlikely they’d have had nearly the impact they ultimately did. Yet, after stepping away for five years following their sophomore release, Gorguts returned in 1998, reinvigorated and revamped with a new sound in the form of Obscura.
Outside of Lemay, Gorguts’ lineup had entirely turned over going into the creation of Obscura. The band’s founding guitarist and vocalist was joined by bassist Steve Cloutier, drummer Patrick Robert, and perhaps most significantly, the late Steeve Hurdle. Hurdle was not only the other guitarist for Gorguts but Lemay also accredits him for aiding in the direction of Obscura, saying (via Metal Insider), “Guitar wise he always wanted to push the limits further, which he succeeded very well for that. He would always look for new sounds and textures on guitar.”
While technical death metal has existed as long as death metal itself, a progressive alternative to the simple art of crushing, Obscura is a far different experience compared to anything Gorguts had done prior, or any other tech-death band for that matter. There’s very little in the way of conventional sounding riffs throughout the album. The opening self-titled track rips forth with abrasive ferocity, the guitars unfurling in a disorienting rhythm over a machine gun rattle of bass and drums. Though most of Obscura’s songs aren’t that long—most fall in the four-to-six-minute range—the band’s performances unravel to display an absurd technical depth.
At jarring speeds, Gorguts abruptly yet seamlessly shift the trajectory of a song’s given rhythm, breaking apart into polyrhythms, only to reconnect again. Imagine the album as a carnival ride; watching it work might seem puzzling, maybe even dangerous, yet the construction of the machinery is such that the madness you’re seeing is actually working smoothly. From the moment “Obscura” starts to the record’s end, the technical intensity never lets up.
Gorguts also push themselves into richer atmospheric territory with Obscura. Considered Dead and The Erosion of Sanity are heavy records, but Obscura sounds positively evil. “Nostalgia” is a prime example of the band leaning into this sort of atmosphere; kicking off with revs of distortion and an extra hard-hitting bass, it finds the guitars stirring up noisy effects until they ultimately shift into a catchy rhythm. “Catchy” might not be the word most would expect to read while describing this band or this album, considering the extreme abrasive nature of Obscura, but what Gorguts creates here is just that—pockets of duality where thrill meets menace.
Clocking in over nine minutes, “Clouded” thunders with roaring guitar tones and bass, creating an ever-looming air of tension. The instrumentation of “Rapturous Grief” sprawls in exhilarating fashion as the band play with dramatic tempo shifts. Disorientation is a not-so-subtle element of Obscura that, ironically, works to offer an engrossing listening experience.
Gorguts’ uniquely technical style is, much as I experienced firsthand, overwhelming. Yet it’s constructed in enough of a cohesive fashion that it’s able to draw the listener into a deeper state of consciousness. This is ideal for the record’s lyrical exploration of spirituality, which finds Lemay navigating an array of metaphysical and existential concepts. As the album comes to a dizzying close with “Faceless Ones” and “Sweet Silence,” it’s only natural to feel emotionally spent. Obscura is a demanding experience; great art sometimes asks the audience to give something of themselves, and for Obscura, one must be present among its cosmically captivating mayhem.
In a 2013 conversation with Worm Gear, Lemay said that Obscura is the “record that defined our sound,” and he’s not wrong there. Since Obscura, Gorguts have cemented themselves as one of death metal’s greats, with Obscura as one of the genre’s most important works. It’s a record of gargantuan technical brilliance that, every time I listen to it, I still ask myself: How are Gorguts doing this?
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