“With two and a half decades under their belt and a generation of bands aping their sound, one wouldn’t be surprised to see Gorguts rest on their laurels for a while. But Gorguts’ time of rest is over, and Luc Lemay has made it abundantly clear that his pioneering death metal vision didn’t stop with From Wisdom to Hate.” No rest for the gutted.
“We live in a time where everything old is new again, and metal music is no exception. We have retro-stoner rock, retro-thrash, Scooby-Doobie Doom, and now… retro-tech-death? With the creation and success of Horrendous, many nimble-fingered, musically-acrobatic musicians are screaming bloody gore and exploring their more Human side to bring back a classic sound with all of the necessary upgrades to keep things somewhat fresh.” Tech-death like Death? That might just sell!
By now, you’ll have learned about/salivated over the prospect of Gorguts’ new EP, Pleiades’ Dust, which looms on my horizon like a shining oasis of pretense. If you’re unlucky enough not to have the privileges of an AMG staffer and still have to wait to listen to it, then boy do I have good news for you. The Obscuran prog death trend is still picking up steam and kicking up dust, now most pertinently in the form of New York two-piece Geryon. The side project of Krallice’s Nicholas McMaster and Lev Weinstein, Geryon are a band I’ve overlooked, but The Wound and the Bow struck me immediately.
![Ad Nauseam – Nihil Quam Vacuitas Ordinatum Est [Things You Might have Missed 2015]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Ad-Nauseam_Nihil-Quam-Vacuitas-Ordinatum-Est-768x768.jpg)
“Earlier this year, Grymm called Imperial Triumphant’s incredible sophomore effort Abyssal Gods “the best French black metal album in recent history” and lauded the half-Pyrrhon band as the new bringers of discomfort and disgust, mixing Obscura-influenced death metal with atmospheric black metal and the occasional ukulele. They’re not alone.” Using sickness as salvation.
“If Luc Lemay wrote a deathgrind album, the early demos would sound something like Okazaki Fragments. Earlier this year, the Calgary-based extreme metal outfit’s debut Abandoned blindsided me like a drive-by at Tim Horton’s by mixing rabid grindcore with the avant-garde tendencies of Gorguts and Pyrrhon in search of an ever more deformed and disgusting style of death metal. They found it.” Colour Kronos impressed.
“There are times where I suspect that this website exerts some sort of observer effect on the bands we review. AMG writers have had several interactions with musicians that likely influenced their output, and at least one band that seems to have reunited for no reason other than being in a 90’s Metal Weirdness column here. This brings me to international tech-death collective Serocs, whose album The Next was critiqued here a couple years ago.” Respect our authoritah!
“Grab your plush Cthulhu, throw away your textbooks on Euclidean geometry, pack a few snacks, and look reanimated, folks: the Dissonance Train to R’lyeh with a temporary stop in Obscura-ville is now boarding. If there are two things that seem to captivate plenty of minds in modern metal on the extreme side of the fence, they’re H.P. Lovecraft stories and how to translate the outer reaches of sanity into music via an incredible amount of dissonance.” Cthulhu 2016.
“Krallice is a band that often gets misunderstood. Forcibly shoved into a conveniently labeled drawer of “black metal,” the New York group was an easy target of both the trve black metal kvltists, condemning them for “mocking and desecrating the genre,” and the mainstream public, that couldn’t stand such “noisy wankery.” They’ve been cynically called “controversial,” “divisive,” “hipsters,“ and “ostentatious,” often being mentioned in the same breath with the likes of Deafheaven and Liturgy, with whom they have little in common.” Notice how New York is becoming the Mecca of interesting black metal?
“New York City is the new home of French black metal. No, I’m not entirely fucking with you. Hear me out… back in 2013, Madam X reviewed Goliath, Imperial Triumphant’s two-song EP, and it impressed quite a number of us here at the offices of Angry Metal Guy. All of that is a moot point, for as promising as Goliath was, nobody was prepared for the ingenuity, the murkiness, and the sheer WTF Factor that their sophomore full-length, Abyssal Gods, would bestow onto our jaded ears.” New York City always had a significant WTF Factor.
“One of the most interesting consequences of the old-school death metal revival is the chance to hear what we all missed the first time around via myriad re-releases of rotting relics buried by time and dust. Naturally there are weak links that should’ve stayed forgotten, but Quebecois death metal band Gorelust’s 1995 debut Reign of Lunacy deserved its ungentle exhumation.” Back from the dead and still French-Canadian.
