Band:	Gorguts
Album:	The Erosion Of Sanity
Style:	Technical death metal
Release date:	January 1993
Guest review by:	Cynic Metalhead

01. With Their Flesh, He'll Create
02. Condemned To Obscurity
03. The Erosion Of Sanity
04. Orphans Of Sickness
05. Hideous Infirmity
06. A Path Beyond Premonition
07. Odors Of Existence
08. Dormant Misery
09. A Path Beyond Premonition [demo] [reissue bonus]
10. Dissecting The Adopted [demo] [reissue bonus]

I was in awe listening to the brilliant debut album Considered Dead from Gorguts, an apex predator of old school technical death metal from Canada. Two years after the release of the debut album, Gorguts came back with The Erosion Of Sanity. In this brief period, Luc Lemay and his bandmates intentionally outdid the conventional approach, choosing a more complex path by diving into the murky depths of extreme metal. From the outset, The Erosion Of Sanity is dominated by much more technical, brutal death metal grinding straight from Suffocation, but it also introduces a maze of original and twisted structures. The album's density is darker, rawer, and far more enigmatic, and gives a glaring reflection in each track of the sound of unconventional death metal.

The guitars on The Erosion Of Sanity sounds impeccable; squealing pinched harmonics reverberate in the title track, adding dynamic layers to the chaos; meanwhile, the drums are shifting effortlessly from ridiculously fast blast beats to crushing mid-paced rhythms within seconds. Meanwhile, the bass attempts to deviate from the norm of death metal's usual phenomena of merely shadowing the guitars, like in "With Their Flesh, He'll Create". It goes without saying that Gorguts's bassist must be the most criminally underrated in death metal, and it shows his deftness on this album. "Orphans Of Sickness" presents a M16 assault of chord-based riffing, pushing the band's technical ability upfront, while "Dormant Misery" takes a different route; it opens with an acoustic passage before it cuts and plods into brutality.

"Hideous Infirmity" startled with slick riffs, giving us with one of the most creative beats on the album. Luc Lemay's tortured howls, as heard on the band's debut, remain the focal point of his delivery, with guttural grunts and shrieks that tear through each track. "A Path Beyond Premonition", with tormented howls by Luc and a lot of classy solos (performed by both Lemay and Marcoux), is filled with overwhelming atmosphere and a very high dose of intensity. Not a whole lot has changed on Luc's delivery from the debut album; his grunts and shrieks still sound meandering and haunting, giving grim shade to it. The drums sound bleak; there are plenty of sections here where he uses blast beats, and they do not work nearly as well as they should have. The muddy drum mixing does not help matters much either.

Though I wouldn't call myself a fan of what typically is offered in death metal, the early '90s is where the genre peaked, and The Erosion Of Sanity is living proof. The album wonderfully strikes a perfect balance between technical precision and sheer brutality, making it a standout example of what made death metal in that era so compelling. While it might not demonstrate Gorguts at their most boundary-pushing or genre-defying, it's still a damn good album, and probably one of the strongest death albums to come out of Canada in the 90s.

Highlights: "A Path Beyond Premonition", "Orphans Of Sickness"