Buy this!
The Blackest Incarnation | Richmond, VA | 03/15/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This album rocks. the guitar work is impressive and the fretless bass is a great addition. this band knows how to write technical death metal tunes without ever boring the listener. This bands creativity, songwriting, and skill, reminds me a lot Death. I highly recommend this album to anyone into metal and not just people into technical death metal."
Fabulous Album!
Drum Blast | USA | 02/27/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"I recommend this album. The songs are melodic, I can actually hear chord progressions, which is not the norm for death. Stellar performances by all musicians. I can actually hear the bass playing notes, on a fretless even.
The vocals have a bit of Gorguts style to them, which is a good thing.
100 percent quality brutal melodic death metal. Does brutal MELODIC death metal make sense? Obscura does."
This is what I'm talking about!
Eric H | Chicagoland | 03/18/2010
(5 out of 5 stars)
"If you were to chart the prevalence and quality of Heavy Metal I assume it would resemble the stock market's own charting of the Dow Industrial average. Throughout the late seventies and eighties, it seemed to shoot for the stars in a seemingly-unending upward spiral. But then the bubble burst like the anus of someone forcing back a laxative, and the metal went away, to be replaced by it's retarded cousin once removed: grunge. Later on would see the rise of the even more retarded "Nu Metal" and "Rap Metal". Then along came metalcore and the Heavy Metal coffin seemed to have it's final nail nailed into the proper nail slot.
But then!: Metal seemed to return from it's vacation, albeit with some crucial elements missing like some sort of vietnam vet returning home with no lower portions. Yes, far be it for me to criticize the quality of metal today, but it just sucks, plain and simple. Whereas the eighties was bathing in a sea of Slayer, Testament, Iron Maiden, and so many names I could fill the 10,000 character limit, today metal is filled with the horrendous stylings of craptacular outfits like Job For a Cowboy, The Black Dahlia Murder, and Killswitch Engage. Continuing our analogy of metal to the stock market, there is an obvious and undeniable crisis in the quality of Metal in our current time.
But Then!: Along comes a band by the name of Obscura. A moniker derived from the unusual-yet-likable album Obscura by a band known as Gorguts (guess what they like on their pizza). Hailing from the same place as Kreator, Destruction, and a million other german metal bands: Germany! Obscura blends the progressiveness of, say Death's Symbolic with the ferocity of,...I'm gonna go with Morbid Angel's Blessed are the Sick, and it rises above the horrible, smelly masses and lifts both middle fingers in a show of, "F*** you! We have talent." That totally made-up quote conveniently leads me to my next point: Obscura actually has a bassist!
You see, some metal bands and nearly all metalcore bands do not have a bassist. Sure, they might have some flat-rimmed-hat wearing doofus pounding out obscenely-detuned root notes, but they do not have a true bassist, in the more real sense of the word. Obscura, on the other hand, has the six-string fretless virtuosity of Jeroen Paul Thesseling, a musician professionally trained to hit every microtone to make your head bang and your skin crawl. He is one of those very few - in league with Cliff Burton, Roger Patterson, and Steve DiGorgio - a metal bassist with talent!
But this album has everything I could ask for in a metal album: fast, aggressive, complex riffs combined with amazingly shreddy, yet melodic leads, eerily shrieky and guttural vocals, audible and complex basslines that give the very idea of mere root notes the finger, and an instrumental that WILL raise the hair on the back of your back, or wherever you have hair.
This is an album you cannot listen to only once. to give it proper justice, you must give it another go to really discover all it has to offer. And every time you do, you will hear a bassline you missed or a riff you hadn't heard yet. And this album will amaze you, time and time again - until the Earth is left as a burned piece of rock and the sun has shrunk to the size of the moon, leaving the solar system in total darkness only broken by the distant waivering of the cosmos' flickering stars own destruction - or you die, whichever comes first."
Track Listings (10) - Disc #1