My top 5 albums of 2011!

Well the end of the year is pretty much here and while I have been busy lately I have just got to get at the very least a top 5 out. To me this was an all around good year in metal, there were some bands who I expected to release good albums that failed to please, and some underground bands who surprised me. So in no particular order:

Abysmal Dawn - Leveling the Plane of Existence

Borderline technical death metal with a nice groove to it. I still can quit listening to In Service Of Time.

Obscura - Omnivium

I was so looking forward to these guys' album this year and they didn't disappoint at all. While they borrow heavily from Death, Gorguts and a few other progressive/technical death metal bands they also have a sound that is Obscura that no one else plays.

Exhumed - All Guts, No Glory

I never gave these fellas much thought but AGNG was a happy surprise this year. Catchy grinding death metal at its best.

Wormrot - Noise

This very short EP is like an extension of their epic album Dirge released earlier this year. Wormrot are grindcore all stars in my book.

Immolation - Providence

Scion A/V proved they are actually interested in releasing good extreme music and this (and the Wormrot EP) is all the proof you need. Crushing catchy death metal with a nice heavy production, just what the doctor ordered!

Not too bad of a year!

Once the holidays are over I will probably start posting more often once more.

Review: Obscura - Omnivium

Band: Obscura
Album: Omnivium
Year: 2011
Genre: Technical/Progressive Death Metal

I had heard only a handful of songs by Obscura before deciding to buy Omnivium. I was pulled in by how much the band sounded like some of my favorite American death metal bands of the early 90s, specifically Cynic and Death. In Omnivium they kept only elements of their previous sound and its safe to say I did not get what I was expecting.

The bass while still pretty audible plays much less of a role than on say Cosmogenesis. This kind of bummed me out because it was in my eyes a pivotal part of Obscura’s sound that I really liked. It’s still there though and you still can here it much more than usual by comparison to other bands. Listen to Septuagint and you can pick it out pretty easily.

Septuagint is actually a really cool song to start the album with too. There is a little acoustic intro then the song rockets away for the next 7 minutes. There are tons of harmonized leads here which draw comparison to other bands like Nueraxis and Quo Vadis who play a technical form of melodic death metal.

The drumming is really great but it’s the tone of the snare that seems to really mar the album for me. It sounds like Hannes Grossmann is hitting a piece of plastic. To me it sounds so weak and in no way at all organic and hardly like a drum at all. This is really a shame because Hannes’ drumming on Omnivium is great. He has hit that mark between being technical but not so overly technical that his drumming seems to be going everywhere and nowhere at once. Like say the drumming on the Arsis album We Are The Nightmare, jeeze.

There are still a lot of riffs on this album and my favorites have to be on Ocean Gateways, Septuagint, and Celestial Spheres. Most of Ocean Gateways is a slower meandering affair with little flares of speed at certain times while Septuagint is all about speed and Celestial Spheres finds a medium between the two. And the instrumental A Transcendental Serenade is a really fun listen where the band sort of lets loose.

Vocally there are a few different variations here. There is a deep death growl, a higher pitch scream. And a vocoder! This obviously draws similarity to Cynic’s Focus but I have to say the way it is done here is more subtle than Paul did on Focus. Both the more extreme vocals are ok and nothing out of the ordinary for the genre but the use of the vocoder adds a little something for those of us who enjoyed Focus but felt it was used a bit too much.

So Obscura in my eyes are successful in my eyes with Omnivium. They wear their influences a bit less on their sleeves but you can still tell where they are coming from and they have sort of given it more spin of their own so they are less of a clone. The vocals are ok and the vocoder is a nice touch as well. The songs are easy to enjoy to the ears of someone not really attuned to technical death metal which makes this a winner.

Score: 8/10
Standout Track: Ocean Gateways, Celestial Spheres, Septuagint

Obscura and Technical Death Metal

These guys just might be the new kings of tech death if you ask me. Like ive said before most tech death is too mechanical and robotic with not enough emotion. The old trio of Death, Cynic, and Atheist really had their shit together. And Obscura almost sounds like what would happen if you made a band heavily influenced by all those bands.



Listen to that song and tell me you dont hear the Death worship in there? The fretless bass is also really sweet and something I really enjoy. But the guitars themselves have the guys practically channeling Human era Death.

If only more Tech Death was like this...

New Music

So I went to Hastings today and got some new music. I got 3 albums by themselves.

Between the Buried And Me - The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues
Obscura - Omnivium
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Option Paralysis

And I got two cd set like thingies. The first is a Napalm Death set released by Earache Records of the band's last 3 releases on the label. So it comes with the albums Inside the Torn Apart, Words From the Exit Wound, and the EP Breed To Breathe.

Then the second thing I bought was an Opeth release that includes their first 3 albums. This one is called The Candlelight Years and has the albums Orchid, Morningrise, and My Arms Your Hearse.

So in all about 9 albums/EPs for around 70 bucks. Not too bad! I love the new Obscura and have been looking forward to BtBaM's new stuff along with Dillinger. I've been pretty interested in checking out Opeth's progressive death metal and since Mike Akerfeldt did guest vocals/guitar on quite a bit of Edge of Sanity's stuff I though I'd check it out. Most people seem to hold the band in pretty high regard anyways.

And Napalm Death...well its Napalm Death! I'm a big fan of Scum but never really listened any further than From Enslavement to Obliteration besides randomly downloading Smear Campaign.

Some of the stuff I had in my hands but decided not to get were:

Carcass - Necroticism (I want a physical copy of this!)
Carcass - Reek of Putrefaction (not as interested in their Goregrind stuff but still would like to have it)
Still Remains - Of Love and Lunacy
Shadows Fall - Threads of Life
Shadows Fall - Fallout From the War

I also came really close to getting the new Hate Eternal album.