Bringer of Drought

Thirsty and miserable
dB rating: 8/10

Release Date: May 13th, 2016
Label: Dark Descent

With staffing changes at dB comes other changes—the much maligned focus group. Wait a minute, it’s not like Mountain Dew is paying for a room full of heshers to pound the effervescent toxic yellow piss while blasting the new Abbath. It’s more about lazy dB writers who grab unsuspecting kult-looking prospects and blindside them with headphones spewing underground sounds. Then said scribes watch, wait and transcribe furiously. For this session, we found that when playing the apocalypse-summoning sounds of Montreal’s Phobocosm, four out of five kult-looking randos had the following reactions: Lips were licked, eyes rolled back in the head, foam frothed down the chin and words were grunted and moaned in what—when played backward—was discerned to be “holy fucking shit!” Yes, “holy fucking shit” was our reaction, too, when these slowly slithering monolithic riffs wormed through our brain like Immolation playing on the wrong speed. Then there’s all those goddamned beautiful/ugly vortex-churning frantic moments that take flight only to suddenly drop things back to creepy crawl-y speeds. So dark, so heavy and so up the alley of black/death freaks baptized in Portal, Malthusian, Abyssal, Antediluvian, and especially fellow Montrealers and soon-to-be Phobocosm tour mates, Mitochondrion. This sophomore LP may only be four tunes, but each merciless track is simultaneously expansive and suffocating in its bleak yet trance-inducing approach. Phobocosm have their hammer aimed at the seventh seal. Open your earholes and get cracking.

—Shawn Bosler
This review taken from the July 2016 issue.