header_image

PHOBOCOSM   Everlasting Void   7" VINYL   (Dark Descent)    8.99



One of the shining lights of mutated heaviosity in the Canadian underground, Phobocosm birthed this two-song EP in the wake of their debut album, showcasing the growth and enhanced weirdness of their brand of warped doom-laden death metal that pretty much had anyone who dug their earlier discs slavering for more (which has still yet to manifest). Issued in a run of five hundred copies with cool murky marbled abstraction splattered across the sleeve by up n' comin' artist / designer Noircevr, Void bisects your head in just over eleven minutes via a killer new song called, wouldn't you know, "Everlasting Void ", and follow it with a righteously repugnant cover of Immolation's "Here in After" through which the band pays homage to one of their noted influences while also twisting that mid-90s classic into Phobocosm's specific aetheric slimeblast.

It's a fuckin' killer seven inch. That title track is a terror, instantaneously exploding into a slurred, stop-n-go crush of septic roars, gross bacterial ambience, and that particular way of welding straightforward old-school (as in early 90's) doom-death / death metal ultra-heaviness to flailing tentacles of dissonant textres, weird counter-intuitive riff structures, this unusually ever-present "ambient" element, and layer on layer of stacked riffs and leads that produce this grotesque, atypical massiveness that feels like some kind of ritual signal beamed out of a black hole. As with their previous releases (all of 'em recommended here at C-Blast), there seems to be something of a shared ungainly, ultra-heavy alien--ness with Phobocosm's deformed mass and the offbeat, squirming crush of bands like Chthe'ilist and Immolation.

Which brings you to their rabid version of "Here in After", delivered at pummeling speed and intensity with the original's bizarre tonalities, fucked up riffing, and pulverizing slow passages all intact, but with that extra polluted weirdness you'd expect.