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Rating: Lineup changes can sometimes be crucial in marking a band's evolutionary path, and this is precisely the case with Obscura. After a satisfying but not extraordinary debut album like "Retribution," Steffen Kummerer (guitar and vocals) decided to overhaul the lineup and chose a trio of reliable musicians, as he secured the talents of guitarist Christian Muenzner and drummer Hannes Grossmann (both former Necrophagist) and bassist Jeroen Paul Thesseling from Pestilence.
The shift was significant and led to a marked increase in technical skill, and the new work benefits from it, as it succeeds in best actualizing the complex structural ideas that had not yet fully materialized. The chosen expressive path leads to the shaping of a dynamic post-death, articulated and extreme heavy metal, and progressive with dark tones placed in weighty sonic contexts. It is clear that the German band consistently pushes the coefficient of execution difficulty to the limit, as one would expect, but it never feels like mere showmanship, also because the tracks are intense, well-defined, and still comprehensible, highlighting an underlying naturalness that makes them "human."
Not an easy listen, but certainly capable of satisfying even the most demanding among those who revel in the worlds of Cynic, Death, Pestilence, and Atheist, albeit with a more malignant approach.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
06 Desolate Spheres (04:01)
I close my eyes and the sun goes out
Hold a breath and all of the creatures fall dead
Cover my ears and the universe goes silent
Not a water drop
Not a heartbeat
Not a sound from a songbird in any of the 4 corners
I swallow the stars until they burn like coals through my eyes
My outline glows against the night sky like an eclipse of the sun
And sparks follow each of my movements like a shower of meteors
I light up the sky with the Aurora
Comets appear before dawn
He greets us at death in that quiet place that is faint in our memories
That place that has always been there but we can’t quite remember
When you cross that bridge to the other world, open the door and step through
Step through the stars, swim through the gate
Touch the very boundaries of the universe
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