Phobocosm - The Gateway

This was released late last year and has been sitting in the review bottleneck and it is too decent to ignore. It’s fair to say that Phobocosm aren’t destined to become a household name, even for committed followers of underground heavy music. Not only are they unhurried in terms of releases with wide gaps between albums, but their musical delivery – a dissonant, cavernous iteration of death metal – is an extreme outlier even for that genre.  

Sepulchral, lightless and viscous, Gateway sounds like it is being played in an inverted subterranean cathedral. It is simultaneously claustrophobic and spacious with indistinct droning riffs and death metal vocals at the lowest feasible register. For comparisons, you might look to bands like Ulcerate or Immolation perhaps, but Gateway is arguably more monolithic. Bleak and utterly unforgiving, the record is a pastiche of a netherworld devoid of light or reprieve.

Generally, Phobocosm’s style incorporates regimented, lurching diesel engine riffing with swirls of slow tremolo. The opening track Deathless is emblematic of the record, with strident, marching monolithic riffs and swirling, bleak tremolo. Even during their slow, quasi-militaristic death march pacing, this band are indefatigably aggressive and viscously heavy.  They occasionally rev up the velocity with the likes of the juddering, driving horror of Sempiternal Penance. The record is compartmentalised with three instrumental interludes, each developing sequentially into the nightmarish climax of The Corridor III – The Descent.

The Gateway is intended as immersive listening experience and it inculcates an atmosphere of psychologically, crushing and inescapable dread. It’s a pitiless, vicious and hellish voidscape – and that requires a certain temperament for committed listens to endure the unforgiving bleakness and spiritual fatalism.

Bandcamp: https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/gateway