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PHOBOCOSM "Gateway"
PHOBOCOSM "Gateway"
By Dr. Abner Mality
You won't find any grass growing under PHOBOCOSM's feet. Their last full length "Foreordained" was out a little over a year ago and is still fresh in my mind. Does "Gateway" bring any new wrinkles to this Montreal band's gloom-drenched death metal?
There's no major changes but I would say "Gateway" is not as "mechanical" as "Foreordained" was and lacks the industrial undercurrent of the previous album. This is hardly a joyride, though, and is relentlessly dark and cold, much like winters in Quebec must be. The doom quotient is upped here, although there's enough spurts of aggression to keep the band from being tagged as death-doom. But the general pace is slower.
IMMOLATION remains the primary influence. On "Unbound" and "Sempiternal Penance", the sound is so close to the New Yorkers that the songs could almost be IMMOLATION out-takes with a different vocalist. There are surely worse bands to pattern your songwriting after. The album is a mix of longer tracks with vocals interspersed with briefer, slightly more melodic instrumentals named "Corridors". The Corridors are all between 2:30 and 3:00 in length, so they're not just brief snippets. All have a glacial kind of hazy melody. The album's epic is "Beyond The Threshold of Flesh", which is a very grueling, remorseless attack of dark death metal. The vocals of E.B., again similar to Ross from IMMOLATION, are especially cavernous here.
I can't say PHOBOCOSM have advanced hugely here, but they haven't fallen back either. If you crave death metal as lightless as a midnight sewer, "Gateway" is for you.
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