PHOBOCOSM – FOREORDAINED

(Andy Synn reviews the new album from Phobocosm, out next week on Dark Descent Records)

With all the digital ink that’s been spilled about Death Metal this year you’d think that more of it would have been dedicated to Canada’s Phobocosm.

Then again, perhaps the band’s gloomier, doomier brand of oppressive, post-Immolation heaviness is just a little too dark, and a little too demanding, to receive the same sort of wider acclaim which has been lavished on many of their more popular peers.

But the fact that it demands a little more from its audience also means that Foreordained offers more rewards in the long run.

To reap these rewards, however, you’re going to have to dig a little, as Foreordained is one album whose crushing depths and massive density require your full focus in order to be properly, and fully, appreciated.

That’s not to say that the more casual listener won’t still get something out of the experience – penultimate track “Revival” is both surprisingly melodic (in a bleak, Ulcerate-esque way) and, at least by Phobocosm‘s usual standards, relatively streamlined and straightforward in terms of structure – but if ever there was a record designed to be a sinister slow-burn, it’s this one.

This may sound like an odd approach for a Death Metal band, especially one as humongously heavy as this one, but then Phobocosm have never been ones to take the easy road or the path of least resistance – they’re a band who want to properly earn your attention, one hundred percent, without having to resort to cheap tricks or tawdry tropes to get it.

Right from the start this is apparent in the way the almost drone-like, doom-laden introduction to “Premonition” slowly lurches, rather than rampages, out of the gate, swiftly (or not, as the case may be) making it clear that Foreordained isn’t going to make things easy for you – it’s going to go at its own pace, and do its own thing, whether you like it or not.

Of course, business soon picks up with the blasting drums and writhing, almost-but-not-quite-melodic, dissonance of the aptly-named “Primal Dread”, but the precedent has already been established, and while “Primal Dread” certainly throws some of the more prototypical Death Metal elements back into the mix, the way in which the song stacks successive layers of discordance and disharmony on top of one another as it goes, conjuring an increasingly unsettling and hypnotic vibe over the course of its towering ten-minute run-time, makes it far from typical when all is said and done.

The malevolent intellect behind the music is just as apparent during the disturbingly hooky “Everlasting Void” and the even-more-intense “Informorph” (both of which possess more than a few hints of Svart Crown‘s brooding brutality), as while there’s no question that Phobocosm are more than capable of blasting and bludgeoning their audience into submission (and aren’t afraid to do so when the moment calls for it), the real magic is in the way they wave together layer upon layer of claustrophobic atmosphere and dissonant anti-melody to create something just as heavy – if not even more so – as anything their more conservative peers might come up with.

Closing with the searing strains of “For An Aeon” – whose gloomy grandeur and insidious injections of melody could, in my opinion at least, give anything from the new Sulphur Aeon a run for their money – Foreordained may well end up being a little overlooked this year, coming out as it does at a time when a lot of publications are already drawing a line under things and turning their attentions towards what comes next, but it’s destined to be the sort of album that doesn’t so much dwell in obscurity as it does wait, patiently, to be discovered by those looking for something a little deeper, a little darker, and a little more demanding, than what the rest have to offer.