Gorguts

At the end of the Eighties, in Sherbrooke, in the Canadian province of Québec, Luc Lemay was a young man obsessed with death metal, a genre that, despite having been on the road for only a few years, kept mutating rapidly. Like many of his generation, Luc loved bands such as Death, Morbid Angel and Possessed, but even from his first attempts on guitar he showed a particular attitude: imitation wasn't enough for him, he wanted to understand how that music worked, how it could be made more extreme, denser, almost suffocating. What struck him about it was not just the energy, but also the dark atmosphere and the sense of an apocalypse just around the corner.

Feeling within himself the urge to create something of his own, in the summer of 1989 he teamed up with drummer Stéphane Provencher, but for things to really fall into place he also needed the contribution of Carlo Gozzi on bass and Gary Chouinard on guitar, who completed the first stable line-up of Gorguts, a name suggested by a friend of Provencher's and immediately welcomed by the band, since it fit perfectly with death metal's grim imagery.

In a short time, a couple of demos arrived along with some line-up changes (Éric Giguère and Sylvain Marcoux, replacing the departing Gozzi and Chouinard), but above all came the call from Roadrunner Records, with whom the band signed its first contract in February 1991. The following October, "Considered Dead" marked their debut on the long-playing format with about forty minutes of fierce, technical music, characterized by powerful yet at the same time elaborate guitar work. With their second record, "The Erosion Of Sanity", Gorguts established themselves even more firmly as one of the most interesting and creative names on the "technical" side of death metal. Amid dissonance and intricate rhythms, the Canadian band was now sailing confidently toward defining an increasingly personal sound, even as the influence of the genre's undisputed standard-bearers still lingered — Chuck Schuldiner's Death, and above all the more brutal Suffocation, whose "Effigy Of The Forgotten" (1991) was so fundamental for Lemay that he once said Gorguts' second album would never have seen the light of day without those grooves.

Too bad, though, that by that point — we're in 1993 — the long wave of death metal's success was running in clear reverse, so Roadrunner (which in truth had already shown little interest in promoting "The Erosion Of Sanity" and had other cards to play: Sepultura and Fear Factory, among others) decided to do without them.

Having reached a standstill, Gorguts began looking around, while Lemay never abandoned his own ambition (he would even go on to study violin at the conservatory!), but this time with the goal of aiming even higher. Their commitment to songwriting never wavered, so much so that by November 1994 ten new tracks had already been completed (the first was "Rapturous Grief", which took almost a month of work), while a couple more ("Nostalgia" and "Obscura") were added to the new songbook as the band scrambled tirelessly to find a new label willing to support them (Red Light and Hypnotic expressed interest, but nothing came of it).

In the meantime, the line-up had gone through further upheaval, with Giguère replaced by Steve Cloutier, while the spots left by Marcoux and Provencher were filled respectively by Steeve Hurdle and Steve MacDonald. With these new travel companions (the ones with whom he finalized all the new songs), Lemay set out some guidelines for experimenting with fresh solutions. Besides rejecting riffs played with lightning-fast picking, they decided to do away with the so-called "skank beat" (also known as "thrash beat" or "Slayer beat"), that rhythm, in short, essentially characterized by a fast tempo alternating kick and snare. "We then decided", Lemay recalls, "that we would use either slow, heavy riffs or blast beats, but that doesn't mean that just because there's a blast beat you have to play two hundred notes per second. And then there was another important thing: when we played riffs for each other in the rehearsal room, before starting to write another track, we couldn't watch the musician play them, so as not to judge the musical ideas by thinking: 'Oh, wow, that's impressive. It sounds very technical!'. Maybe it was just two chords, but very dissonant ones. What mattered was how they were arranged, even if they were the simplest thing to play. We wanted only our ears to judge the material being proposed. It's the same principle as classical music auditions: you usually play behind a curtain or a screen, so you can't see the performer and you really focus on phrasing and musicality. That was the approach we wanted to adopt in order to get fresh musical ideas. (…) The energy of the songwriting went in another direction: in the effort to make it dark, to create something special. It's like a very experimental drawing: you don't need a million lines to achieve something powerful. Sometimes you say: 'Wow, they nailed it with just a few pencil strokes'. That's where a craft, after many years — whether you're a painter, a sculptor or something else — finds its synthesis. But it takes a long time. I saw death metal songwriting the same way: I wanted to make it efficient, give it a certain direction. And to do that, you don't need to overdo it, because that's exactly where the difficulty lies".

In 1995, the band relocated to Montreal, losing McDonald within a few months. Finding a new drummer, and one who was also quite technical, wasn't easy. It took almost a year, but eventually Patrick Robert joined the ranks, bringing his jazz background with him and finally allowing Gorguts to set foot in a recording studio (Montreal's Victor) to record the new album entirely on their own. It was the summer of 1997, and helping them with production was their friend Pierre Rémillard, guitarist of fellow countrymen Obliveon, who had already worked on their very first demo. A few months later, Martti Payne of Olympic Recordings came forward, declaring himself ready to release what Gorguts had by then decided to call "Obscura".

Now, on the eve of its release (June 23, 1998), death metal had already gone through a surprising arc: from an extreme, "primitive" musical form, with clear thrash roots, it had gradually turned into an advanced laboratory of rhythmic, harmonic and timbral experimentation. In the early Nineties, death metal had undergone rapid geographic and stylistic expansion, taking hold in several European countries as well, including Sweden (where bands like Entombed and Dismember defined a rougher sound, characterized by the famous distortion obtained through the Boss HM-2 pedal), and the Netherlands, where Pestilence incorporated jazz elements and unusual harmonic solutions.

It was on the compositional level, however, that the genre made its decisive leap forward. With albums like "Human" (1991) and "Individual Thought Patterns" (1993), Death paved the way for a progressive sophistication of the genre's language: odd time signatures, less linear structures, introspective lyrics. Meanwhile, Atheist and Cynic hybridized death metal with jazz/fusion elements, working with fretless bass and an almost "scholarly" approach to arrangement. It was precisely this drive toward complexity that fully defined technical death metal.

Drawing on these experiences, "Obscura" looked the future of death metal squarely in the face, establishing itself as a record that still sounds alien today.

Clouded by the bliss obscura

'Obscura' was the last song we wrote. I think it's the one with the most awkward geometry, and the one that defined the color and tone of the whole record, because without this track, the album would have a different slant. It's the fulfillment of the language we were aiming for, and I think with it we truly made the music that, as musicians, we had in mind to make. I remember the first time we sat in the living room and hit 'play': when it ended, we looked at each other and said 'Holy shit! What the hell was that?'. We had surprised ourselves, and that was a very special moment.

Brutal, mathematical, scathing: the title track that opens the Gorguts masterpiece immediately shows what Lemay and co. had become in the meantime, namely a war machine in which the rhythm section chews up and spits out disorienting grooves that weave together an overarching syncopated madness in odd time signatures, while burning riffs blaze all around, dissonances evoking abstract harmonies, atonal solos played with the tapping technique, and pinch harmonics, one of Hurdle's signature moves. Having set aside the typical death-metal growl, Lemay and Hurdle himself resort to lacerating screams, conveying images that evoke a kind of mystical experience, drawing on the teachings of the Indian philosopher and mystic Osho (born Chandra Mohan Jain), who urges people to live with awareness, to cultivate individual freedom, and to celebrate life through meditation, boundless love, and detachment from social conditioning.

Osho's influence (which filtered into the band through Hurdle, a guy, as Lemay put it, "obsessed with spirituality") is further underscored by the quote featured in the album's liner notes, alongside some illustrations made by Lemay: "The journey is long and the path is pathless, and one must be alone. There is no map, nor anyone to act as a guide. But there is no alternative. It cannot be escaped, it cannot be avoided. The journey must be undertaken. The destination seems impossible, but the impulse to go on is intrinsic. The need runs deep in the soul."

Clouded by the bliss obscura

Covered by the frame of drama

Intra limpidus obscura

Limen ex nihilum… Opacitas

Trux omnillustrare…

Ex regnum de exsanguis

Lux absentia, funditus

Silenced, fragments of nostalgia

Laments, frailty of the mind

Bounded by the abyssal fence

Light cleanses the internal sense

As the lyrics of "Obscura" recall, on this journey man is "clouded by dark bliss," projecting himself onto the "threshold of nothingness," within the "opacity" of the "fierce all-illuminating," in search of that "light [that] purifies inner perception."

A viola, played by Lemay himself, briefly breaks, with its lopsided spell, the highly explosive weave of "Earthly Love," a track that, if anything, is even more atomized in its drive to push the collision between ferocity and reason to inhuman levels. Staying true to what Lemay had set out to do when writing the lyrics (a task he worked on together with Hurdle) - namely, tackling the duality between the (eternal) soul and the (mortal) body through the experience of extreme mental states, unknown and faceless entities ("Faceless Ones" is one of the song titles we'll look at shortly), dreamlike visions or depths of introspection - "Earthly Love" focuses on the "carnal addictions of the soul," on the "concrete shape of pain," with the awareness that earthly love, with its "carnal bliss," cannot be escaped, because it will remain, as Lemay screams, "inside me until my end."

The echo of the geometric, arty deathgrind of Human Remains (a band that Lemay, especially in light of the little-known but extraordinary "Using Sickness As A Hero," the third EP by the band from Hazlet, New Jersey, would come to love more and more) stretches like a menacing shadow over the intro of "The Carnal State," a track that, while musically proceeding through spasms and virulent jabs, thematically builds a bridge to "Earthly Love," showing that the "clear and pure stillness of ecstasy" will only be possible once our passage through this world ends with the body's return to the earth, to the dust that we essentially are. While life goes on, though, this awareness most often spills over into states of acute depression or, at any rate, a nostalgia so oppressive that it excludes the Whole, and so "the very fact of being/ no longer has meaning." What man then experiences, Lemay and Hurdle sing again in "Nostalgia," overwhelmed by a burning passion, is "rêverie," a daydream that is the only bulwark against "existence [that] crumbles." Though less punishing than usual, on "Nostalgia" Gorguts' music gains in narrative power, foregrounding lyrical turns like never before.

In some ways, the same thing happens on the following "The Art Of Sombre Ecstasy," which moves now upward, now downward, and evokes the Sukshma Sharira, or "subtle body," an energetic dimension invisible to the eye but perceptible through the practice of yoga and meditation. Made up of subtle energy, prana (life force), the Sukshma Sharira extends beyond the boundaries of the physical body. Within it lie the chakras, the energy centers, and the nadis, the channels through which prana flows.

Unexpectedly, "Clouded" (the longest track on the album, clocking in at nine and a half minutes, written by Hurdle alone) veers into death/doom territory, with Lemay ready to deliver one of his most moving performances, agonizing in a sea of pain, that pain which "creates life" and from which one can only break free when we part "from this clouded earth," a truth that is reaffirmed shortly after by "Rapturous Grief," in which Lemay reminds himself that "transparency" and "timeless dormancy" will be his eternal home once the soul abandons the body that imprisons it.

As my soul rises, transparency I reach…

Far from this world, I’ll be

Lost within darkness

Timeless dormancy is

Where now I shall dwell

Cast beyond mortals

The faceless ones, I meet

The faceless ones are cleansing me

“Astral body, soul that travels, serene death, luminosity and serenity, the concept of flesh and soul”: these, once again in Lemay's words, are the themes dominating the renewed collision of dissonance, atonality and chaotic-geometric structures that enclose “Subtle Body”, where “La vie est prélude… (La mort orgasme)”, also drawing on bizarre and vaguely android-like folk-metal touches (!), elevates doubt to the primary source of human pain and despair (“How can they love this life so miserable? (…) How can they trust this God so feeble?”).

“Illuminatus” keeps up the pressure, delivering one of the album's most stupefying moments, with riffs like whirring gusts, exhausting progressions, a brief but scorching solo carved from lava, and over a minute and a half of outro like a slow, disturbing agony poised between the evanescent “consistency of dreams” and “life mystified through beatific light”.

The torment of this music, which can be felt in full even in the closing instrumental track “Sweet Silence”, is the torment of the flesh before the mirage of mystical light. From this point of view, the figure seated in meditation on the cover art is deeply tied to themes of inner searching and, above all, of that darkness (think of the album's title!) which is the true source of light — that light which, like the “lux caliginosa” spoken of by mystics, alludes to the experience of the Divine not as visible light, but as a blinding darkness which, transcending all capacity for rational understanding, can only blind and offend the human intellect.

When it hit record store shelves, “Obscura” immediately struck the vast majority of critics as a staggering leap in quality. There were, however, those who were left baffled by music that, in their view, was far too strange, if not outright unlistenable. All perfectly normal when dealing with works that break new ground. Either way, while “Considered Dead” and “The Erosion Of Sanity” still inhabited the perimeter of death metal, even as they tried to make it creak, with their third album Gorguts essentially ended up negating it altogether. Where once there were complex but recognizable riffs, now there remained only wild shards — but a madness calculated down to the smallest detail.

Proceeding like an organism that rejects its own form, endlessly correcting itself to the point of erasing itself, “Obscura” ends up generating a sense of systematic instability, in which precariousness is elevated to a guiding principle. Hurdle's arrival was, in this sense, fundamental, as Lemay recalled in an interview given to Metal Insider a few years ago: “Guitar-wise, Steeve always wanted to push past the limits, and he succeeded brilliantly. He was constantly searching for new sounds and new textures on the guitar”. It was again the former Purulence guitarist (who passed away in 2012 at just 41 years old) who pushed his bandmates toward the elaboration of a kind of musical chaos capable of disorienting the listener both emotionally and intellectually. And so it was that Gorguts left the old guard of death metal behind, paving the way for a host of bands who, in the years to come, would continue down those paths of dissonance, more or less structured chaos, and fiercely existential brutality, in search of an ever more terrifying, experimental and fascinating sound.

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29/03/2026