Gorguts - Colored Sands
I remember the first time I ever heard Gorguts, back when the Death Metal wave was beginning to build and the scene was still breaking out from under the shadow of extreme Thrash (Slayer/Exodus/Possessed) and becoming enough of a phenomenon that even MTV couldn’t keep their stuff off of the air. Death, Obituary, Morbid Angel, Deicide and others were getting huge and every band on this side of the Atlantic Ocean wanted to sound like they were from Tampa. Gorguts was the first that I remember where so many genre stereotypes came together on one LP. Their music was initially much more listenable, and while it wasn’t the most innovative, their debut album, 1991’s Considered Dead, was still pretty good. It was more “meat and potatoes” Death Metal back then. Things changed, and their style became increasingly Progressive/Technical. Everyone knows my distaste for such things because I want Death Metal to kick my ass. It’s nice that these guys know how to play their instruments, but Death Metal is more about feeling than complex structures. The main problem that Technical and Progressive bands have is that they tend to focus on things that other musicians might find interesting rather than creating music that the regular fans of Death Metal want to listen to. Such is the case here. The songs are overly complicated, the riffing is anti-memorable and everything sounds like a giant ball of convoluted noise. Songs like “Colored Sands” are atonal and the structures are so fucked up that the individual musicians sound as if they’re all playing parts to different songs at the same time. I imagine there’s a reason for that, but this LP was torture for me to sit through. Even the songs that didn’t sound so fucked up were difficult to listen to because of the hyper-technical playing. The only track I actually liked was “The Battle of Chamdo,” which was a Classical music interlude. Everything else was pretty much unlistenable as far as I’m concerned.
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