Every Record I Own - Day 501: Gorguts Colored Sands
There was so much exciting new metal released in 2019 that I had a difficult time keeping up with all of it. That enthusiasm isn’t necessarily a normal thing for me. Some years it seems like the entire metal community is on some different wavelength than I am and there is very little that grabs my attention. Such was the case in 2013, when I could count my personal metal highlights on one hand. But even if there wasn’t an abundance of heavy stuff that piqued my interest, the albums that grabbed my attention that year became obsessions. If my streaming data is correct, my most played song of 2013 was Gorguts’ “Forgotten Arrows.”
Don’t be fooled by the name: Gorguts isn’t some knucklehead goregrind band. While the French-Canadian outfit came onto the scene in the early ‘90s as a straight-up death metal band, they quickly evolved into more technical and forward-thinking territories. The band suffered through bad record deals, the waning popularity of the genre in the mid-’90s, line-up changes, and the suicide of drummer Steve MacDonald, the last of which formally ended Gorguts sometime in the early ‘00s. Sole original member Luc Lemay moved to the Quebec countryside and disappeared from public view.
And then ten years later Lemay showed back up with an all new line-up and a new record. This wasn’t some half-assed reunion or cash grab---Colored Sands is a complex, technically dazzling, and conceptually thorough update on Gorguts’ dizzying brand of death metal. And while the album is the antithesis of the current OSDM scene’s caveman approach, Lemay’s ambitious songwriting and knotty guitar lines never veer into virtuoso show-pony excess. It’s a warped and at times overwhelming record, but the overall vibe of the album suggests a kind of deliberately orchestrated madness rather than just vacant speed and hollow dissonance.
Even after six years, Colored Sands can be a lot to take in. But much like current death cosmonauts Blood Incantation, Lemay’s onslaught contains such a bounty of ideas and information that it’s a lasting joy to try and untangle, decipher, and process everything you’re hearing.
