Review Summary: "I have chosen you to preach this evangel"
There are no shortage of prog/tech death bands who wear their Gorguts affection on their sleeves. After contributing to the technical death metal boom of the early 90s with
The Erosion of Sanity, Gorguts decided to turn left and go down a much darker and haunting path with
Obscura. The album defied death metal conventions by taking the muscularity of the genre and twisting the knife on itself, making every riff feel like it’s screaming out in anguish. As a result, the album cemented Gorguts as a holy figure to be worshiped by future technical metal bands. Just mentioning the band serves as a signifier to others that you’re a connoisseur of alienating and complex music. Hell, there’s even a band named after their ’98 opus that has managed to surpass them in commercial success. But while many bands have shown a clear reverence for the material, very few have managed to recapture the tragic soul of
Obscura. Pyrrhon are one of those few bands. With their release of
Abscess Time, not only do Pyrrhon live up to the Gorguts comparisons, but they manage to expand the horizons of progressive metal as a whole.
The album kicks off with the deliberately paced title track. Usually a death metal album comes out of the gate swinging as fast as it can. Here, the band opts to lurch forward, making sure every note, every syllable choked out by vocalist (and former writer for Stereogum’s metal column The Black Market) Doug Moore is clearly audible. The band then shifts gears for “Down at Liberty Ashes”, one of the most energetic and lively death metal jams I’ve heard in a while. Pyrrhon thrive in dissonance, but there’s always a rhythmic bounce to their songwriting that remains exhilarating and even moshable. Hell, I bet these guys would kill on a Hate5Six performance, however unlikely that may be. The band overall sounds loose, which is unsurprising given the amount of improvised material at play.
From then on the album sprawls out into multiple different directions, spanning song lengths that last from one to eight minutes. “The Lean Years” and “Another Day in Paradise” continue the trend of convulsing and elaborate death metal. “Teuchnikskreis” dives headfirst into grindcore. “The Cost of Living”, the longest song on the album, floats like a dead body across a river. “Solastalgia” is a King Crimson blow from hell. “Cornered Animal” starts off frantic but keels over, as if it’s cowering in fear as Moore screams “I’LL MAKE YOU PAY”. There’s even some fleeting moments of black humor with its use of samples. This could come off as overwhelming and haphazard, and I’ll admit that it’s strange that the second half is significantly shorter than the first, but the band use the album’s disjointed nature to its advantage. While this has the riffs of tech death, it captures the sound of 90s noise rock. It features the skronking guitar, throbbing bass, and the ultra-tight snare of bands like The Jesus Lizard, Helmet, and Unsane. This is most apparent in “State of Nature”, which could’ve been written by any of those three bands. Furthering the Gorguts comparisons, the entire production was handled by experimental metal stalwart and recording wizard Colin Marston. While other producers would’ve made the material sound sharp and pristine, Marston keeps things raw and fleshy to make all of its contorted riffs really writhe. As a result,
Abscess Time manages to feel cohesive even as it’s going out of its way to be as disruptive and chaotic as possible. It should also be said that Doug Moore’s vocals are equally as diverse as the music, from death metal growls to pig squeals to blood-curdling screams. On songs like the title track, “Cornered Animal”, and “State of Nature”, the band knows when to leave space for Moore’s vocals to sound as ear-piercing as possible. You can almost hear the spit gush out of his mouth with every scream.
Where
Abscess Time’s true soul lies is in its lyrics. If you couldn’t tell from the title “Human Capital”, the album is about the dehumanizing nature of capitalism and wage labor. It depicts a present where bodies are thrown in to toil for their betters and are easily discarded at a moment’s notice, of pining for the prosperity of the past that you never really had, and of a future eradicated by incessant consumption. Phrases like “holds a mirror to our current age” and “a damning portrait of 2020” get thrown ad nauseam. I understand why though; the worse our world gets, the more people want to see their struggles reflected in art. With that in mind, I don’t think any album could represent 2020 more than
Abscess Time. How could you top it? On an immediate level, nothing captures the ugliness and bruised rage of our current moment quite like this. That’s what separates Pyrrhon from all the other Gorguts worshiping bands out there. While other tech death bands use complexity to sound mechanical, Pyrrhon use it to sound wounded and, counterintuitively, human. Whenever I listen to
Obscura, I get a mental image of a powerful and burly beast desperately struggling to stand up on its own legs, unable to support its own weight. Not only does
Abscess Time recapture that feeling, it expands upon it and gives it a real life counterpart.
