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**Gorguts - Obscura**
★★★★☆

In the pantheon of extreme metal's most bewildering and brilliant moments, few albums have managed to simultaneously repel and mesmerise quite like Gorguts' third full-length offering. Released in 1998 through Olympic Recordings, *Obscura* arrived like a transmission from some parallel dimension where death metal had evolved along entirely different lines, abandoning the genre's traditional brutality-through-repetition approach for something far more unsettling: brutality through complete structural chaos.

The Quebec quartet's journey to this point had been relatively conventional by death metal standards. Their previous efforts, *Considered Dead* (1991) and *The Erosion of Sanity* (1993), established them as competent purveyors of the Floridian death metal template, complete with Chuck Schuldiner's production stamp on the former. But somewhere between 1993 and 1998, mastermind Luc Lemay underwent what can only be described as a complete artistic metamorphosis, emerging from a period of musical introspection with ideas that would make Ornette Coleman blush.

What Lemay and his collaborators – guitarist Steeve Hurdle, bassist Steve Cloutier, and the remarkably adaptable drummer Patrick Robert – unleashed was nothing short of revolutionary. *Obscura* doesn't merely push the boundaries of death metal; it relocates them to another postal code entirely. This is music that seems to exist in a state of perpetual collapse and reconstruction, where traditional song structures are dismantled mid-flight and reassembled according to some arcane logic that only becomes apparent after multiple, often punishing listens.

The album's opening salvo, "Obscura," serves as both mission statement and warning shot. Lemay's vocals, now evolved from standard death growls into something resembling the last gasps of a dying civilisation, weave through a musical landscape that shifts and mutates with unsettling frequency. Guitars don't merely play riffs; they seem to argue with each other in atonal dialects, creating harmonies that exist somewhere between mathematical precision and complete madness.

"Earthly Love" stands as perhaps the album's most accessible moment, though accessibility here is entirely relative. The track's central melody, if it can be called that, burrows into the brain with the persistence of a particularly philosophical parasite. Meanwhile, "The Carnal State" demonstrates the band's newfound ability to create atmosphere through absence as much as presence, with spaces and silences becoming as important as the notes themselves.

The album's centrepiece, "Nostalgia," stretches across nearly seven minutes of what can only be described as beautiful ugliness. Here, Gorguts achieve something remarkable: they make dissonance sing. The track's labyrinthine structure somehow coheres into something approaching emotional catharsis, proving that extreme music need not abandon feeling in favour of technical exercise.

What makes *Obscura* particularly remarkable is how it anticipates so much of what would come to define progressive extreme metal in the decades that followed. Bands like Ulcerate, Imperial Triumphant, and countless others owe a significant debt to Lemay's willingness to completely deconstruct the genre's established parameters. The album's influence extends beyond metal entirely, with experimental musicians and composers recognising its genuine innovation in the realm of organised sonic chaos.

Yet for all its forward-thinking audacity, *Obscura* remains firmly rooted in the death metal tradition. The aggression is undeniable, even when filtered through such unconventional means. This isn't academic music masquerading as metal; it's metal that happens to possess a PhD in musical theory.

The album's initial reception was, predictably, polarised. Many longtime fans found themselves adrift in Gorguts' new sonic territory, while others recognised immediately that they were witnessing something genuinely groundbreaking. Time has been kind to *Obscura*, with its reputation growing steadily as subsequent generations of musicians and listeners have caught up with Lemay's vision.

Today, *Obscura* stands as one of extreme metal's most uncompromising artistic statements, a reminder that innovation and brutality need not be mutually exclusive. It remains an album that demands patience, rewards persistence, and continues to reveal new layers of complexity with each encounter. In an era where extreme music often mistakes complexity for mere technicality, *Obscura* serves as a masterclass in how to genuinely advance an art form without losing its essential spirit. Bewil