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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genre defying tech death, March 23, 2006
Rarely do a band somehow manage to embody a genre whilst also defying it and giving it the finger. Gorguts kinda sound like Robert Fripp teamed up with some avant-garde musicians who have been listening to too much free jazz and decided to record a death metal album. Gorguts are death metal (or at least tech death). The growled/barked vocals are there, as are the heavy guitars, technical riffs and blast beats. Yet at the same time, there's no death metal out there that sounds like this.
Obscura is, for lack of a better word, disgusting. It's horrible to listen to. Aurally it's completely crushing. Aesthetically its dissonance sounds like metal being scratched. Conventional melody is nowhere to be heard. And it is inTENSE. The mood and atmosphere of this music is blistering the way death metal should be yet so rarely is. Obscura is just hedious. But it's like a car crash on the other side of the road. You know you're not meant to enjoy it, yet somehow you can't turn away. There's something so visceral about it that your curiousity gets the better of you. Everytime I listen to Obscura I keep trying to figure out why I like listening to it. All I know is that I do. The music gives me butterflies in my stomach and gives me the chills. I've never had that from a death metal album before, even ones I like more than this one (of which there are very few).
There is no tech death album like Obscura. Any openminded fan of heavy, dissonant and intense music needs this album.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Progressive Death Metal?, September 14, 2004
Man these guys went over the top on this release. Yeah its brutal alright but its constantly changing insane time signature overkill is daunting to say the least. I don't see how these guys kept it together, great musicianship at any rate, but not one of the most accessable albums I've ever heard. Sometimes a groove appears but most of this is like Captain Beefheart on steroids and meth during his Trout Mask Replica days. Friggin' insane, dark and ugly. Its savory but for special tastes. I have to give props to the drummer Patrick Robert, he is a fantastic musician. Just for keeping a beat in this nuttiness he alone gets 5 stars, not to mention the other guys. This album is dissonant, unusual (they use a violin on Earthly Love), original and fantastic.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Death Metal, March 8, 2002
If you're looking for a traditional Death Metal CD with "dry heave" vocals and ultra bass-frequency guitars, look elsewhere. Gorgut's first two albums were pretty good "traditional" Death Metal albums. With Obscura they've gone way beyond the boundaries of Death Metal or even Metal in general. This is not an album you can slam a six-pack and mosh to - it requires your full concentration...the music is unbelievably complex and dissonant - so much so that at first listening it sounds like a total mess (at least if you're not used to listening to free-form jazz). But, if you are persistant, it all starts to make horrible sense. Everything about this album is totally unique: In addition to Luc Lemay's more customary Deathmetal vocals, Steve Hurdel's hoarse shrieking style is truely frieghtening. The guitars are not anywhere near the low-end jackhammer of most other Deathmetal bands - These guys use all six strings and then some. The drums are beyond anything I've ever heard - time signatures mean nothing to these guys. Perhaps best of all, instead of the endless gore and brutality which compose most Deathmetal albums, the lyrics on Obscura actually deal with the experience of death. Obscura is definetly the deepest, heaviest, most technically brilliant and most frieghtening Death Metal album ever recorded.
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is Gorguts' 
