Gorguts – Colored Sands (Season Of Mist)

Gorguts – Colored Sands (Season Of Mist)

Regardless of subgenre, most metal in 2013 cleaves to one of two disparate camps: on one side, there’s the old guard, happy to exist within established genre boundaries. This group includes long-running legacy acts and the youngsters who worship them (not a bad thing by any means). And then there are the restless innovators, the ones who indulge every progressive tendency in the quest for new sounds and endless expansion, letting genre tags fall where they may (also see our No. 1 pick). In 2013 we see both camps operating at full strength, but with little interaction between the two — besides when they all show up at Maryland Deathfest for a weekend bender. Gorguts occupy a unique slot in both worlds, as one of the early ’90s Roadrunner death metal bands (back when the name Gorguts made sense), who still get tapped for throwback events like last year’s Death To All tour, and simultaneously as the definitive originator of the experimental movement. Their 1998 noise opus Obscura reinvented the game, inspiring a generation of bands like Portal, Ulcerate, Deathspell Omega, and Krallice to shred their way to the outer rim while never failing to fuck with expectations. Sole remaining member Luc Lemay has always been the driving force of the band, but here he surrounds himself with a dream team of young-blood collaborators, like Colin Marston of Krallice (and, like, every other band), Kevin Hufnagel of Dysrhythmia, and drummer John Longstreth of Origin. The results are predictably awesome, but they’re more than that: Colored Sands dives into the specific tonality made popular by bands like Ulcerate — a dissonant style of riffing originally distilled and extrapolated from Obscura in the first place — then funnels it back into a new type of arrangement. Lemay has mentioned listening to a lot of Opeth while writing these songs, and you can hear a different kind of guiding principle pushing these songs forward, almost to the point of accessibility. Mindfuck brutality has come full circle. Imagine what they do next. –Aaron [LISTEN]