Primary Emotions/Themes: Everything you have ever known about music is wrong, this is unlike any other album that has ever been recorded
Thoughts: What is happening? What are those notes? My brain is not equipped to handle this. I've never heard anything like this before. Is this even good? Is this bad? I don't know.
All this and more has been going through my head for two decades plus revolving Gorguts' third album. Obscura is one of the most complex and challenging metal albums to ever be written, and even now twenty five plus years later it still has never been duplicated by anyone... not even the band themselves.
What makes Obscura so... obscure? It starts and ends with the riffs. From the very first instant of the album we hear that the band is exploring a completely different wavelength of music. The riff involves notes that do. not. belong. together. It's painful to listen to, it sounds like nails on a chalk board... but the board is the guitars frets instead.
The title track sounds like some child picked up a guitar and dropped it repeatedly and that was the riff. It sounds poorly constructed and completely chaotic at first glance, but upon deeper inspection its the exact opposite. The riffs are so meticulously designed that it must have taken ages to create.
Every song on here feels off on a fundamental level. A visceral reaction that something is wrong. The notes clash with each other in such a way that it feels alien. This does not fit into music theory... this is anti-music theory. Not in the goregrind/power violence way either... this is taking music an deconstructing all of the rules and carefully rebuilding those rules into something completely different.
Normally I would try to compare this to something else as a reference, but here I don't have that option. There is nothing else that sounds like this. Nothing that I'm aware of at least. This is technically death metal, but in reality its deep into the realm of the avant-garde. This has more in common with John Cage's or John Zorn's music than it does most metal. Much like the releases from those other musical geniuses, I don't know if I like this or hate it... but I do respect the hell out of it.
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