Phobocosm Archives - Page 2 of 2

PHOBOCOSM: “BRINGER OF DROUGHT”

Mar 302016

With their 2014 debut album Deprived, Montréal’s Phobocosm demonstrated a dawning talent for generating a poisonous, pitch-black atmosphere of dread, pain, and imminent destruction. With their new album, Bringer of Doubt, they have honed that talent, creating music that if anything is even more thoroughly and oppressively saturated with darkness and doom, yet is also even more memorable.

As before, the band have created death metal that’s leavened with elements of doom and dissonant black metal, and the resulting music is unerringly and unceasingly bleak and predatory. The opening track, “Engulfing Dust”, exemplifies the new album’s more prominent use of horrifying doom. It’s a staggering funereal lament that’s cold, desolate, and crushing. The song begins and ends with the sound of wind, rain, and finally distant thunder, and the melody first heard in the slow, sad chords at the start becomes a paean to pain. Continue reading »

PHOBOCOSM: “DEPRIVED”

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Sep 302014

(Austin Weber reviews the new album by Phobocosm from Montreal.)

A lot of modern death metal is shiny, flashy, and in addition, purely cutthroat. Well, the Montreal-based group Phobocosm are nothing like that. They are relentlessly ugly and unforgiving, often content to stew in misery at a slower pace, entrenched in massive, sickening riffs that churn bowels and cause minds to enter a state of hopeless insanity. If a cutthroat death metal record feels like a physical assault, then consider Phobocosm masters of taking that assault directly into your brain, feeding you clouded questions that don’t lead to any answers, submerging you in a sadness and longing that reeks of perversion. Deprived offers an evil and different take on the death metal sound. Yes, there is plenty of lively double-bass, and the album has its frenzied moments, but often this is a skulking, wounded beast — preaching a horror beyond gore, beyond death.

An eerie Immolation and Incantation influence is clear — from the riffs to the grooves to the structuring. However, Phobocosm are far from wholly a clone of either group. Besides those two points of reference, the music sometimes calls to mind the approach of Ulcerate, embracing and reflecting in atmospheric reverberations, sometimes by themselves and at other times mixed within the band’s full-throttle moments. The back and forth sway of the songs on Deprived is one of its greatest strengths, frequently manifesting a battle between faster and lurching tempos.

At still other moments on Deprived a black metal undercurrent is injected into the mix and further poisons the music’s already pitch-black feel. In this respect, the album is reminiscent of Deathspell Omega or Mitochondrion, though the blackened coloring occurs largely within a death metal framework overall. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PHOBOCOSM — “KNIVES IN THE SENATE HOUSE”

Premieres 4 Responses »

Aug 182014

Last spring I discovered the existence of a Montréal death metal cult named Phobocosm, who had just recently signed with Dark Descent for the release of their debut album, Deprived. In the spring, one song had been posted for streaming. Its name is “Solipsist”, and it’s a monster. The dreadful chiming chords that begin the song are like the bells that herald the final doom, and the rest of the song provides a reasonable approximation of that world-ending event. Today we’re lucky to bring you the premiere of a second track from Deprived. This new one is named “Knives In the Senate House”. It, too, is a monster.

The music creates an atmosphere of choking, poisonous miasma with bleak, ripping riffs that grind and vibrate as if emulating the super-heated process of radioactive decay. Huge bass and drum hammers punctuate the storming onslaught with concrete-splitting force, and a sinuous melody slithers through the toxic storm, giving the music character as well as a potent aura of dread and imminent destruction. The drum performance throughout the song is both acrobatic and brutally effective, and the deep, gargantuan vocals enhance the music’s message of utter catastrophe.

Phobocosm are practicing a very dark art, one that displays mastery in the creation of both oppressive atmospherics and sensations of physically compulsive power. Like “Solipsist”, “Knives In the Senate House” heralds the advent of an album that will be a must-listen experience by all true acolytes of lethal death rituals. Continue reading »

DEATH RITUALS: PHOBOCOSM, MIASMAL, KRIEGSMASCHINE

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Mar 252014

I haven’t had time to pull together a round-up of new discoveries in a couple of days, but I thought that before I get further behind I would at least call out four recent songs that are worth some attention Two of them are precursors to new albums due for release later this year and otwone come from an album that hit the streets in February.

PHOBOCOSM

Phobocosm are from Montreal and in recent days they were signed by the Dark Descent label for the release of their debut album, Deprived, which was mixed and mastered by Colin Marston (Gorguts, Dysrhythmia, Krallice). NCS scribe Austin Weber brought them to my attention, thinking their music would be up my alley, and man was he ever right.

Just a few days ago the band released the first song from Deprived for public consumption, and it’s a monster. The dreadful chiming chords that begin “Solipsist” are like the bells that herald the final doom, and the rest of the song provides a reasonable approximation of that event. Phobocosm marry crushing riffs and ever-changing drumbeats to bleak, needling tremolo melodies and a gargantuan voice that emanates from some deep pit in the earth. Continue reading »

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