Obscura-Cosmogenesis

Germany, the heavy metal capital of the world. Home of the biggest and highest attended metal festival in the world, the Wacken Open Air festival and home of some of the genre’s biggest legends such as Destruction, Kreator, Accept, Heaven Shall Burn, Helloween, Necrophagist, Sodom, and more recently, Obscura. Being a huge technical death fan, these guys are very high on my list, and not only that, they’re coming to Seattle this Friday where I will hopefully see them if I can get a ride. For those of you who are still new to the tech death world, Obscura is way up there with Atheist, The Faceless, Decapitated, and The Black Dahlia Murder. It’s surprising how quickly bands gain high status in such a short amount of time. Sometimes it gets to the point where they go on headlining tours having other seemingly bigger name bands opening for them. For example, The Faceless is about to release their third album, and to support that album, they’re going on a headlining tour with DevilDriver and Dying Fetus opening for them! I’m most surprised about DevilDriver, because I saw a show headlined by them where Suffocation was one of the opening acts!! Now that I’m done rambling on, let’s turn our focus back to Cosmogenesis.

I’ve only been listening to Obscura since last summer, so I would imagine that there are a lot of you out there that are way more familiar with the band than I am. I have though, listened to this album countless times to the point where I’ve practically memorized all of the songs and most of the lyrics. Obscura relates to tech death band Decapitated because of one thing, most of the technicality lies within the drums and the bass. I noticed that on YouTube, their drummer had posted a couple of videos of him just soloing endlessly, and it fucking blew me away. He has one of the best blast-beats I’ve ever heard. The whole band overall is very tight and together, they work together as a team to make the best out of the random notes that they put together (ha!).

Now here’s something you probably didn’t know about me: I play bass, and not just any bass, I play a fretless bass. That’s right, a fucking fretless bass. And Obscura’s bassist plays a 5-string fretless bass that I would die for, and he plays it so good and is obviously so connected to it that I think he’d have my head removed if I did so much as touch it. But that aside, I’m pretty sure he’s a really cool guy, just like every other awkward metal bassist out there.

Their vocalist has a really unique growl. It’s not like Corpsegrinder’s growl, where it’s deep but with a high-pitched sort of whistling sound. It’s more like he’s trying to go deep, but he’s unintentionally growling two octaves higher than he wants. But don’t think I’m ripping on him, because I love the sound of his vocals. Their lyrical themes fit in the science fiction area right with bands like Dystrophic, The Faceless, Decrepit Birth, Rings of Saturn, Atheist, and many others within the realms of technical death metal. I just recently noticed that my favorite lyrics typically lie in this science fiction themed area.

For those of you that have read this far and still don’t understand what my opinion on this band is, THIS BAND IS AMAZING AND WILL GO FAR. There is one thing that I wish this band would do differently, and that is to get progressive and do something new, because this whole science fiction themed technical death metal is starting to become a little too common. So I feel that Obscura is among the group of mature and intelligent bands that will move on and progress before they get caught up in the flow and become sheep. This album gets 19/20.