“Make sure the foundation on the fucking house is solid,” a dear friend texted me as an opener and preparation for checking out Montreal, Quebec’s Phobocosm. Good thing he did. Foreordained ended up in my Missed Connections column for 2023, which made me realize two things: I should have gotten acquainted with them much sooner, and that I should not pass up an opportunity to give them a review promptly when a new album drops. Enter, then, Gateway, both a new album from the quartet and an extension of Foreordained, an album that I already happen to love.
As it happens, if you liked Foreordained, you’ll *love* Gateway, because both albums were written and recorded in the same session. The lyrical and thematic genesis for this album actually grew directly from the track “Revival” off of Foreordained. “The song ‘Revival’ from Foreordained inspired the album’s theme, which is the fact that humans have been trying to live forever, or to unnaturally prolong life, since the dawn of time, often for reasons even more absurd than the pursuit of eternal life itself,” says Samuel Dufour, one of the band’s wizard guitarists. “We used this as the main theme and pushed the concept further, exploring the most repulsive forms of cruelty humans are capable of, even when using science as a means to prolong barbarity against their enemies.” If you know about Phobocosm’s music, this should come as no surprise. Brutal, punishing, oppressive and terrifying are some of the adjectives I would use to describe their particular brand of death metal. Musically, Gateway borrows ideas and material from every era of the band, even going back to their debut, making it both a mirror and a doorway for Phobocosm.
Opener “Deathless” is a perfect embodiment of what Phobocosm are all about. It’s a track that really sets the mood, and that mood is eerie, disturbing and a little sickening. “Deathless” takes its time getting to the point, where other death metal bands opt to go with an in-your-face assault to begin their albums; it takes almost three minutes for the vocals to kick in and for things to really get chugging, but I found myself hooked in and along for the ride right from the jump. Fortunately, the rest of the album takes no time getting off the ground, as you are drop-kicked right in the torso by the furious and frantic opening blasts of “Unbound,” a standout track on the album because it does such a good job of breaking up the plodding, churning sound Phobocosm are known for. The rest of the album is broken up into distinct sections through the use of interludes whose titles all reference the “Corridor.” While I could argue that three interludes is kind of a lot, they do work really nicely as thematic reference points, and being instrumental in nature, they also show off how sick (and I do mean that literally and in the 90’s slang sort of way) the guitars on this record weave in dissonance and atonality like a chef weaves in salt and pepper. That is to say, liberally. The riffs are thick like a brick shithouse, and you’re rarely left with a moment of peace and reflection before the next one comes lumbering in through the wall of your house, menacing and dripping with contempt.
Gateway’s title is rather fitting, as Phobocosm are using this as a point of transition in the musical trajectory of the band. “We view it as the closing of a chapter for the band,” explains Dufour. “Not that our future material will be completely different from our existing material, far from it, but we have decided to do things a little differently next time around by adding new elements that haven’t appeared in our music before, exploring different dynamics and experimenting with a new tuning.” BUT WHICH ONE? I guess only time will tell.
— Ian
Gateway is available now on Dark Descent Records. For more information on Phobocosm, visit their Facebook page.