Band:	Benighted
Album:	Obscene Repressed
Style:	Brutal death metal, Grindcore
Release date:	April 10, 2020
A review by:	Troy Killjoy

01. Obscene Repressed
02. Nails
03. Brutus
04. The Starving Beast [feat. Grimo]
05. Smoke Through The Skull
06. Implore The Negative [feat. Jamey Jasta]
07. Muzzle
08. Casual Piece Of Meat
09. Scarecrow
10. Mom, I Love You The Wrong Way [feat. Jagger]
11. Undivided Dismemberment
12. Bound To Facial Plague
13. The Rope [deluxe bonus]
14. Get This [Slipknot cover] [deluxe bonus]

Take it from someone whose experience with Benighted has been overwhelmingly positive: Olivier Gabriel needs to make a dramatic return.

Reaching back through the years to the origins of this brutal death metal gratte-ciel, a noticeable stylistic alteration has taken place, resulting in some small rifts in the fan base as to whether or not Benighted have "lost it" or transformed into something more monolithic than ever before. Though subtle, the band's initial foundations have gone through somewhat of a change in terms of how groove and melody are processed within the blended confines of death metal's most relentless and intense sub-categories. While taste and intrigue are both beheld by the nature of subjectivity, there are some boundary-ridden attributes by which we can point to the evolutionary scale of this French quintet's discography naturally progressing into what we're now faced with today in Obscene Repressed.

Infectious grooves and a cornucopia of carefully crafted riffs have long been a staple of the band's sound, and the contagious underlying bro-core elements that permeate an otherwise straightforward assault of extremity have made their presence felt much less blatantly this time around, as Obscene Repressed continues with the more streamlined approach ushered in with Carnivore Sublime. Chainsaw guitars that hearken back to death metal legends of yore draw the focus to Benighted's brutal, rocking style with hints of that aforementioned combination of accessible level of catchy licks. The songwriting tends to place its emphasis more steadily in the realm of an outright onslaught, with which fans of the band's traditional origins will likely find difficult to identify. Not entirely gone, but momentarily missing, are those delectably devastating gut-punches of spastic rhythmic sections and playfulness. As Benighted have ventured further into the realms of conceptual and thematic releases, their sense of humor has seemingly dissipated, leaving a key aspect of their sound left to rot in the pile of irrelevant bands they now apparently desire to emulate.

Julien Truchan is as prominent as ever, shouting and growling and squealing and rasping his way through a barrage of conventional cacophony, but the backing instrumentation does him few favors. Aspects of deathcore snake their way into the ouroboros of buzzing riffs and pounding drums, but that still isn't enough to help diversify an album sorely in need of recapturing the lightning in a bottle from a decade prior. They still hit hard and heavy, undoubtedly, and if this were a debut album released by some unknown death metal entity coming up in the scene, it wouldn't be judged so harshly by a longtime fan who can recite entire songs in their head while ordering stock at work. For casual onlookers and newcomers, Obscene Repressed is as fine as any a contemporary death metal release. But there is a history here that becomes compulsory material germane to the recency bias of one absolutely smitten by previous works, and it's safe to say the evolutionary chart has been rendered in reverse as the years press on for this iconic outfit.