OBSCURA

This album seems to get high praise across the prog community but I am still in 2 minds whether to be one of those who praise the work or someone who dismisses it as chaotic nonsense. I find it very tough to compare to other Tech/Extreme metal because after listening more than 10 times I still don't feel entertained by the music and this is the crux of the dilemma. There are positives to discuss here, most notably the emotional intensity of the music which is entirely focussed on the negative emotions of fear, anger and despair.

After listening many times I tried to start to make sense of the apparent chaos and found the best way to do that was to isolate and essentially try to ignore the vocals which are among the harshest and most dissonant vocals ever. That dissonance is not limited to the vocals and in fact is the predominant theme across all the instrumentation. Having said that, when you listen carefully you can hear the "riffs" which are generally very complex, extremely dissonant and are manifested across all the instrumentation, not limited to lead guitar. The age old prog tradition of repeating a riff 4 times before switching to the next dominates this work and as such shows a very low level of creativity as far as musical structure is concerned. This leaves you wondering whether the whole thing is some kind of musical joke!

In fact the musical structure is no different from standard metal except that the vocals never seem to create either verse or chorus - meaning that it is just a message that is screamed roughly in time with some loud dissonant music. As you listen to the individual instruments, it becomes clear that the only musician displaying any exceptional talent is the drummer. Guitar work and base are no more impressive than standard rhythm guitar - almost as if the band are hiding their lack of ability by creating a form of organized chaos that has never been heard before. You might consider the vocalist as somewhat talented because of the extreme version of growling vocals used but in the end if there is no entertainment value in a piece of music then what is the point in listening to it?

Overall this music feels extremely chaotic at first whereas in fact it is really very formulaic but does not contain much of any entertaining moments. The excessive use of dissonance, the screaming vocals and the shear noise levels all serve the same purpose - to cover up the fact that there isn't much to this stuff and there is very little to enjoy. To be fair to Gorguts, this is a very original sound so I do recommend prog fans give it a fair crack and who knows whether you will find something to like; to do that it will require multiple listens but I fear that most will not feel like pressing play on more than one occasion and I wouldn't be surprised to hear of people throwing the CD out after the first 1 or 2 "songs"! I wrote at the beginning of this review that I was in 2 minds but it would appear that as I wrote this I made my choice.

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