Had the pleasure of seeing this performed in its entirety last October in Portland. Partway through the song, some idiot who was standing too close to Luc managed to unplug some of the equipment, and without hesitation Colin bent down and got everything connected, and then... bam! The entire band started from the point they left off, not missing a beat. One of the best shows of my life, and I've seen my fair share of both underground and mainstream acts. *absolute pros*
Yeah, met and bought merch from Luc, a kind soul. As for the show, I thought they were wrapping things up and SURPRISE they played this crazy shit. I just held my purchases to my chest and was thankful for my experience of being there. I remembered telling Luc how much I thought the last two albums dominated the death metal scene. In his own humble way he admitted that they had. I love the first two albums, Obscura and From Wisdom were mindblowing but Colored Sands and Pleiades Dust violate metal music in general. Such innovative stuff
I was at that same show! I remember that dude, lol. I bought both Colored Sands and Pleiades on vinyl and had the band sign both. Got to talk with Luc and Patrice for a bit. Super nice dudes. Patrice said they were already working on new stuff, but obviously it’s taking some time to formulate 🤣
@@heyimgoingtoplaysomegames lol that’s awesome! Small world! I met Luc before the show, but didn’t get to meet the rest of the band. Such a nice dude! And yeah I remember Luc saying something about new material around that time. Hopefully we don’t have to wait another five years!
Colin Marston uploaded a bass playthrough of the whole thing on youtube. Check it out, there's some pretty badass stuff going on here that's not always easy to grasp in the final mix.
I am surprised that no one talks about the concept of the album, infamous pillage of Baghdad by Mongols in 13th century. This EP is not just a death metal album with sick riffs that you mindlessly headbang to but there is a firm storytelling behind it if you check the lyrics and additional explanations on the lyrics sheet. Music flows accordingly to the events that lyrics express (it gets more intense when battle breaks out and such) and EP gets to another level if you follow along. According to interview that I've read this EP was inspired heavily by works of Porcupine Tree, another band that put quite a lot of dedication into storytelling through lyrics & music combination.
The mongol invasions inspired the increased radicalization of Islam. Alot of the places they raised were centers of learning and muslims where much more open minded than christians at the time due to being literate in ancient philosophy. And many Muslims even saw the Quran as being partly man made and partly a product of its time. And that god was a transcendental being and all humanoid descriptions of his form in the hadiths is non literal. But people started to wonder what god would allow all this destruction and some people came to the conclusion that god was punishing them for straying from his commandments. Kind of like the Westboro baptist church today. And its these strains of Islam that salafists and Wahabbhists like ISIS follow today. The Saudi Royal family rose to prominence with the help of an agitator named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab who gave name to wahabbhism and was a more modern proponent of this sort of extremism and was considered a violent bigot even back then. He was denounced as such even by his brother. And this is the kind of person who helped the Saudi royal family of today to the throne.
@@adrianaslund8605 Very good points. Places that remained safe from the invasion still retained some advanced theologic thoughts I think. Ottoman Islam before the conquest of Egypt was very loose and did not apply strict laws of Quran. Mehmet the Conqueror had his portrait made for instance, which was a sin in most Islamic schools of the time. After the conquest of Egypt, Selim the Grim brought many Islamic scholars with him back to Istanbul and they started to influence Turkish governance which resuulted in abandonment of Bektashi mindset. Some consider due to that reason, Ottoman Empire was lacking in technology in the later centuries because it was considered a sin to use quffar's inventions.
Absolut a sad sad event of this evil forces to destroy wisdom and books. Alexandrias books and wisdom lost to evil..also that. Really sad events in humans lifespan. 😢
I. Thinker's Slumber 0:48 II. Wandering Times 4:04 III. Within the Rounded Walls 7:16 IV. Pearls of Translation 9:28 V. Compendiums 12:44 VI. Stranded Minds on the Shores of Doubt 18:03 VII. Besieged 21:13
@@colins7771 it was kind of dickish, but he has a point. the languages, phrasings and other elements of different types of classical music are very much foreign to metal, even for bands that draw classical influence. it isn't just harmonic minor passages and polychords
@@raulperez2308 The reference to classical music always makes me cringe. Luc certainly knows how to write both genres but they are not the same. Chords/scales/modes are universal. For this EP, because the extended length, I would guess it's its own form (maybe what OP thinks of of classical music). That's just a guess as I never studied classical forms.
@@BloodlineMedia Oh come on. You know that it's more than "departing a key signature". Accidentals in the right places make for that sound (yes, there is more; we could go into 12-tone tech, but that's a whole other conversation) and you know it, seeing as you know the composers. Don't be willfully oblivious.
21:09 saw them in London 2 months ago, Luc Lemay said that this crushing riff was inspired by his love of early 90s British doom bands like MDB and Paradise Lost. Obviously with his own spin on it!
taking advantage of top comment... I. Thinker's Slumber (0:00-4:05) II. Wandering Times (4:05-7:16) III. Within the Rounded Walls (7:16-9:29) IV. Pearls of Translation (9:29-12:44) V. Compendiums (12:44-18:04) VI. Stranded Minds on the Shores of Doubt (18:04-21:14) VII. Besieged (21:14-33:00)
This album following the story of the acquisition and translation of texts that filled the library in the city of Baghdad, causing it to become the greatest collection of knowledge in the world and then being burned in the Mongol invasion has left me very not okay. Literally an album about the burning of the library of Alexandria.
This is to metal what 20th Century classical music was to classical music historically: A culmination of "everything that came before" plus postmodernism.
I remember absolutely loving Obscura and most people around me not getting it. Now it seems Gorguts have been influencial far beyond what i would have ever expected.
the ep sounds like a continuation of the first half of colored sands , atmospheric ,chilled , and sophisticated structure , but y miss the caos ,and dismal brutality that the second half of colored sands had , it would be to much to ask for but i would love an ep with the concept of that second half , it totaly changed perception of music and sound
"Gorguts is a band that for a majority of its career has resembled an act that is at war with itself artistically. After a serviceable debut comprised of purely death metal notions and peaking with its most dense and progressive release in The Erosion of Sanity, the band chose to scale back its arrangements while imbuing its approach with a discordance that may have laterally trespassed its prior unsullied metal constructs but at the same time gave Gorguts an identity all their own. With regards to their contemporaries, you cannot currently say a band “sounds like Gorguts” without indirectly focusing on the sound created on Obscura, and the band’s own knowledge of that most likely has controlled their writing ever since - to the detriment of their overall intents in each record from then on… This struggle to mine their identity for compositional relevance culminated in the post-reunion release Colored Sands, which despite the guise of overall conviction through a grandiose concept album felt more like a midlife crisis for main songwriter Luc Lemay in that the tools utilized to create their most renowned efforts became the message itself- this is the band that popularized abrasive discordance in extreme metal, and they were going to give that to you. They were going to sound like Gorguts in a world where now they weren’t the only band available to do such, and in that superficial manner their post-reunion efforts have been successful, but the music overall had become far too abstract and one-dimensional to be wholly effective. Their current approach due to the lack of dynamic phrases removes the immediacy of their previous voicings and renders Gorguts’ sound as one of observers rather than participants, and Colored Sands fails due to attempting opaque music from abstract, transparent tropes. Audiences still were receptive to the change, seemingly loving what Lemay was trying to say rather than analyzing the method in which he said it. While Colored Sands was a disappointment overall, there were glimmers of hope in the record- the second half of the album had elements that reflected the confident immediacy the band used to wield, but you had to wade through the meandering first half to get there. Releasing a one song, 33 minute EP after could hint at either one of two things: the band had recaptured its artistic foundation with brazen assurance, or they would succumb to the fallback of their superficialities while under-developing a proper musical statement. Unfortunately, it appears Gorguts has done the latter. Continuing the band’s love affair with historical narratives of cultures foreign to them, Pleiades’ Dust is lyrically centered around the loss of the House of Wisdom, a library in Baghdad containing much of the world’s knowledge prior to the 1200s Mongol invasion. A band can effectively write about concepts that are intrinsically bereft to the author should he/she take the listener there confidently, however if you approach a theme with a timid command the effort rings much more hollow than one composed of ideas properly imbued by the artist. A single track release is a confident idea, but once you realize just how meandering a lot of the material presented here is you find Gorguts resonates as a band dancing around ideas as if afraid to get their feet wet. Melodic themes surface and immediately yield to shrieking discordance that eventually results in ear fatigue, and when reintroduced, instead of properly advancing a narrative, they serve as mere bookmarks in a sea of blank pages. Some of this fatigue is due to the tonal reliance on a very specific dissonant chord. There is a musical technique called a pedal tone, where a tone remains constant as a bassline melodically shifts, or a bassline remains consistent as the rest of the phrase changes to present a progression in narrative through contrast. A common example in this is the fourth note of each arpeggio in the verse riff of Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium).” When utilized properly, you can advance a musical story in a microcosmic way within a riff and eventually build to a greater resolve at a song’s conclusion. Throughout Pleiades’ Dust however, the utilization of various forms of discordance throughout the record is eschewed for a reliance of the same pedal tone over and over, and instead of this technique advancing a narrative, it reduces the entire effort to an extremely limited tonal prison. There are brief reprieves from this, such as the beginning of seventh movement “Besieged,” which begins with what resembles a traditional doom riff, but in what feels like a group decision to abandon all hackneyed metal tropes, the riff leaps out of register to achieve discordance completely inorganically, as if it was decided it “wasn’t Gorguts enough.” This causes the often spellbinding musicianship to be more riddled with gimmickry than declarative essence, and leaves the listener wishing the band hadn’t musically painted itself into a corner. What would be a true progression for Gorguts at this point would be to abandon the abstract and minimize the discordance, because the continued layering of high-register guitar wailing becomes more musical wallpaper than desired catharsis through contrast. The extremity in such tonal abrasiveness has lost its effectiveness in the current incarnation of extreme metal, and the minimalist abstract passages that bookend the more aggressive parts aren’t fully realized due to lack of concrete melody to anchor any themes. After such a storied career, Gorguts would be best not trying to sound like Gorguts and instead present a record that is confident in execution, deliberate in the wielding of concrete textures, and challenging for the right reasons. Until then, the band will continue to operate as an act with a wealth of things to say, yet voiceless when forced to express it."
Lot of good bands from Canada they've gotten more technical over the years since considered dead didn't even know they were still together more doom these days then speed
I was a fan of Gorguts since the first album and loved the first 4 albums but Colored Sand and now this, they may as well just call themselves Deathspell Omega
@@No1WillMakeItOutAlive Get that Asparagus outta your ass and have some humor. Don't act like you're some intellectual! Go back to Reddit where all of you ignorant assholes belong!
@@Neuroneos Nah not really, it's more like Penderecki and Wyschnegradsky. Despite their reputations for dissonance, Obscura and an album like Fas sound very different from each other. The arrangements, voicings/phrasings and timbres are completely different, and just grouping them together because they are both dissonant (which is an extremely broad and generalized term that can refer to a million different things) isn't really accurate. It makes about as much sense as saying Bill Evans sounds similar to, or was directly inspired by Mozart, just because they were both "harmonious".
Yes but you must consider it within the context of Gorguts' discography. Most of their albums last around an hour, so it seems fitting that something only half as long as their usual material would be considered an EP.
For everything beautiful there is something equally as repugnant. The question exists then: Why? Is it truly all worth it? Is the ugliness too foul? The beauty too grand? I have only conjectures and philosophical mumbling. Fortunately we have Gorguts who gracefully dances between both.
