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GORGUTS   From Wisdom To Hate (2019 Reissue)   CD   (Punishment 18 Records)    17.99



This Italian import of the latest From Wisdom To Hate CD reissue took long enough to make it over here to the USA, but I finally nabbed some. Released by the reissue-heavy Punishment 18 Records, which I've fast become fond of: for whatever weird reason that the big metal labels are letting their catalog go completely out of print on physical media, Punishment 18 and its companion label MDD Records are doing the lord's work by releasing some great, high-quality reissues of avant-metal necessities like Solefald's In Harmonia Universali, Eyehategod's Dopesick, several Orphaned Land albums, and even Gorguts' other classic, Obscura.

The packaging is a foldout twelve-panel poster cover, and includes Luc Lemay's previous liner notes for Hate from the 2014 reissues.

Here's my older write-up for the disc:

This is the fourth and last album that Gorguts put out before the band went on an indefinite hiatus in 2001 that just let up this past year when the French Canadian metallers reconvened with a new lineup that included members of Dysrhythmia and Behold The Arctopus, and was the follow-up to their career-defining masterpiece Obscura, still one of the most challenging, avant-garde death metal albums of all time. Everyone wondered how Gorguts could follow up the bizarre, ultra-dissonant alien death metal of that album, and in response the band came back with something that was part Obscura, and part old school Gorguts, dialing down some of the over-the-top skronk and atonal riff weirdness while reinstating some of the sound of their technical early 90's albums The Erosion of Sanity and Considered Dead; the result is not as challenging and far-out as the previous album, but it's still a fantastic combination of their avant-garde skronk and crushing death metal riffage.

From Wisdom To Hate is loaded with convoluted time signatures, those trademark discordant guitar chords and off-kilter dissonance, the scrapes and squeals and bizarre riff structures. The songs are assembled in strange, complex arrangements that are generally far outside of what you'd expect out of typical death metal. Angular interlaced riffs often shift and repeat over and over, like on the mind-warping atonal deathblast of opener "Inverted", and the jarring, doom-laden insanity of "Behave Through Mythos". Compared to Obscura, however, the vocals are less extreme, with frontman / mastermind Luc Lemay delivering a deeper, more guttural vocal style compared to the psychotic wheezing screams that he emitted on the previous record.

Also of note is the lengthy "The Quest For Equilibrium", which combines some great eerie keyboards and echoing gongs that produce a strange sort of modern-classical ambience that leads into one of the album's more doom-laden moments; that sort of nod to modern composition is something that we'd hear even more of after the band started releasing newer music on Season Of Mist. Overall, though, it's a slightly more straightforward and song-focused album than its predecessor, and an essential disc for Gorguts fans (and anyone into extreme tech/prog death).


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