Gorguts – Wandering Times – Single Review

Source // static.sterogum.com

When Gorguts left their fairly run of the mill death metal style behind – as exemplified on 1991’s Considered Dead and 1993’s The Erosion of Sanity – and embraced a free-form, free-thinking progressive Jazz mentality on 1998’s Obscura the world shuddered at what was unearthed and Gorguts, 3 year disbandment aside, never looked back.

2013’s Colored Sands was a tour de force, spoken in a virtually unrecognisable musical dialect known only to mastermind Luc Lemay and one that was unencumbered by tradition and completely transcendent in it’s chaotically dissonant complexity. “Wandering Times”, taken from the soon to be released new album Pleiades’ Dust, continues on this path; toying with death metal’s building blocks, reshaping them amidst discordant guitar leads and harmonic wails while other, equally foreign, atonal noises push and shove against changing tempos and whiplash-inducing time signatures. 

The industrialised clatter at the 3 and a half minute mark is shockingly random and proves as illogical as the pure dissonant rage that surrounds it. As expected, there’s no groove to get behind, no simple riff to get that head-banging, this technical madness is bound by no logical means of ‘normal’ musical expression and is brilliantly bewildering because of it. The only reliable element of “Wandering Times” is Luc Lemay’s now trademarked anguished roar.

No one sounded like Gorguts in 1998 and no one sounds like Gorguts in 2016. On this evidence, the new album will rewrite the rulebook once again. 8/10