Gorguts
Considered Dead

THE REVIEW

I am truly disgusted and appalled: there isn't a single review of this album among all the pages on the web in Italian (nor of the subsequent “The Erosion Of Sanity,” which I will review as soon as possible). I don't know if this is due to ignorance or the undervaluation of these two works, I only know that it is a true shame. For those who don’t know, Gorguts is a Canadian band that debuted back in 1991 with this album and, like the various Cannibal Corpse or Suffocation, has invented and brought interesting evolutions to Brutal Death Metal. The band revolves around singer-guitarist Luc Lemay, who I could define without fear of being wrong as the Chuck Schuldiner of Brutal: that’s right, this man possesses immense compositional and performance ability which, more than in this work, emerges well in the subsequent ones.

The ten songs that make up this CD are very structured and complex and develop a considerable power: despite the sudden tempo changes that shift from accelerations (never exaggerated) to slowdowns being the first thing you notice, it cannot be said that the rhythmic section is the album's core. Alongside the excellent performance of the drummer, we indeed find stunning and engaging guitar riffs that lead to equally magnificent solos and follow the “melody” of the song: finally, another feature of this album is bass breaks which, besides highlighting the skill of the performer, have influenced many subsequent bands (first of all, the fellow countrymen Cryptopsy). The singer presents a fairly clean growling that brings him even closer to the aforementioned ex-singer of Death, a thing that makes everything more fluid and more easily assimilable. It can't be called a monolithic album as the songs are all perfectly distinguishable from one another and show, with their variety, the great fertility of ideas of these four guys. There are also two instrumental tracks (the intro “…And Then Comes Lividity” and “Waste Of Mortality,” lasting over four minutes). The album also boasts contributions from two “greats” of the genre: James Murphy of Obituary, who gives us a nice solo in “Inoculated Life,” and Chris Barnes of Cannibal Corpse, who duets with Lemay in several songs. The production is entrusted to the ever-present Scott Burns, who, however, avoids the usual hyper-compression work on the sound, filtering the guitars only slightly. The lyrics are, compared to the standards of the genre, “delicate”: while dealing with the usual themes of death, they do so with a certain lightness, not dwelling too much on the macabre details and relegating them (for once) to a clearly marginal role. Knowing both Cryptopsy and Gorguts well, I can say that the former, over their various works, have taken the ideas and insights that the latter published a few years earlier in their releases to the extreme; with this, I do not mean that they copied from the group in question, I simply mean that the fact that Gorguts have influenced and contributed to the development of monsters like Cryptopsy speaks volumes about the quality of their music.

Power, imagination, and skill are the ingredients of “Considered Dead”: ten tracks that flow smoothly and bring the album straight into the “Hall Of Fame” of Death Metal; a must-have, a pride for every self-respecting metalhead.