Obscure Review

Hello everyone and welcome back, or welcome to the blog if this is your first time reading this, as currently, I find myself meeting a lot of new people on campus as of late, where I do, unfortunately, shamelessly plug my blog to any unsuspecting people who come across me; however, it is important not to shoot the messenger, the messenger of course being me, I’m just trying to spread the word.

GAUGE 16

If you know me and you have read some of my previous blogs then you would know that I have currently been really into technical death metal bands like Necrophagist, Blood Incantation and recently, Nile. I will write about Nile soon because I haven’t gotten too deep into their discography, but from what I’ve heard from them, I do really like their sound. Also, I saw a post from an Instagram account I follow that makes custom made guitars to order called Drum City Guitar Land, based in Colorado, where they made a seven-string flying V guitar with scalloped frets for the lead guitarist of the band Nile. Scalloped, meaning that the wood in between the two frets have a scooped, concave shape to them, as opposed to the traditional flat fretboard, which has its benefits and drawbacks to the playability.  

[from Dean Guitars]

I wanted to write about my journey to find another technical death metal album that scratches the same itch that the album Epitaph by Necrophagist does. So, what I did was I looked up their page on the metal encyclopedia and looked for the band that was most similar to them, and I found the band Obscura, which coincidentally, was named after Gorguts’ album.

[From Bandcamp]

The band Obscura is a technical death metal band from Landshut Germany, and I figured that I would go over their first album, Cosmogenesis (2009).

[From Bandcamp]

The first thing that I notice from most of the riffs off of Cosmogenesis is that it has a lot of (what I think is) open chords and more repetition in the rhythm section when comparing it to some of Necrophagists songs but in no way does that mean that this album lacks in technicality. Although one thing that I would say is that some of the solos that they have tend to sound more generic when you compare them to other technical death metal solos; so, in that way they lose my attention a little when they go from some more technical rhythms to a solo that's in my opinion lack the edge that death metal should have. Another problem that I have with this album in particular is that some of the riffs sound too bright or upbeat in my opinion like some of the riffs on the song “Orbital Elements” or “The Anticosmic Overload”. What I think is that some of their riffs follow brighter modes in their scales like Lyidian or Mixolydian, but this is purely me just talking out of my ass because I haven't taken the time to get too deep into music theory just yet as I have been putting that off… but I digress.

[From Nuclear Waste, record label website]

Some of the really good things that i like about Cosmogenesis is that the overall sound is more nontraditional compared to most death metal, and they also have a sick bass tone that has a lot of reverb and it's like you can feel the thick bass strings vibrating when you hear it cut through the guitars occasionally like in the start of their song “Choir of Spirits”, which probably has my favorite solo of this record on it alongside “Universe Momentum”. Another thing that they do is they have some clean vocals that are more backup whispers that add a mystifying element to some of the songs, but they can get a little corny sometimes in my opinion. There are also small parts that have cleantone guitars in them, which I find pretty cool because it sounds like they're using finger style to play the clean tones like how you would a classical guitar that just adds another dimension to the already complex songs. 

Overall, I'd give this album a 7/10, quite good!