Gorguts - The Erosion of Sanity (1993)

This is where Gorguts began to get a little too technical for their own good. It's not quite the '99.000.00 riffs-per-second overkill fest' that many other "tech" death bands attempt to outdo each other with, but it's definitely not far off the mark. I will say that this is probably my favorite album by the band, but being that I've never been a Gorguts cheerleader, that's not saying much.

There's always been something about Gorguts that kept me from fully embracing their music. In the beginning I felt that they were nothing more than an Obituary/Death clone (which is the same reason why I never got into Morgoth so many years ago). There was never anything terribly intriguing going on within the confines of their debut and right when I thought that the band was starting to cook a little, they pull a fast one and put out the absolutely bonkers 'Obscura', an album that I'm convinced you have to be a retard to comprehend.

Here, you can see the band progressing as musicians and songwriters without going entirely over the deep end, though you may find yourself strained to decipher one song from the next. As boring and pedestrian as 'Considered Dead' may be, at the very least, each song possessed its own identity. Here, the songs tend to unintentionally bleed into one another, a pitfall that has claimed many a technical death metal band. Ironically, the one album that I tend to identify this one with is Suffocation's 'Breeding the Spawn', which was their sophomore release as well, not to mention that both bands had teaser tracks that were featured on the second 'At Death's Door' compilation released by Roadrunner. Both albums were released the same year (1993) and they both sported absolutely killer covers courtesy of Dan Seagrave with Suffocation's dominating hue an ice blue and Gorguts' a sort of orange-y dawn. Both albums also saw each band seemingly cast aside their hooks in favor of all out technicality (Suffocation more-so) and the end result on both ends is a not-so-memorable soup of ideas haphazardly strewn about. Hate to say it, but it's not that much of a surprise why these two got booted off of Roadrunners roster not long afterwards (though Suffocation did attempt to redeem themselves with one last offering to the label, 'Pierced from Within'). The difference between the two albums is that while I found 'Breeding the Spawn' to be a tremendous fucking letdown, 'The Erosion of Sanity' was an improvement, albeit a modest one.

All in all, though, 'The Erosion of Sanity' is a decent album. Pretty fucking good, even, and lately I've found myself drawn to it more and more (even if it's to help me go to sleep at night, which isn't a bad thing at all).