Style: Technical death metal, melodic death metal (Harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Necrophagist, Beyond Creation, Cryptopsy, Decapitated
Country: Germany
Release date: 7 February 2025
The Ship of Theseus, while an endlessly fascinating and thought-provoking thought experiment, is done to death in the context of personnel changes in long-standing bands: is DGM really DGM without the titular Diego, Gianfranco, and Maurizio? And don’t even get started on Yes, who has a completely new lineup from the original and even has members that are younger than the band itself. Fear not, though, for tech death hall-of-famers Obscura are here to put a fresh (and much easier to answer) spin on this philosophical quandary with their latest release, A Sonication: what if the ship was unceremoniously replaced in one fell swoop by a captain who stole building materials after firing the shipwrights mid-project? Does the ship even sail? Would anyone even be interested in its goods? Let’s take a brief tour of this accursed vessel.
For those enmeshed in the world of technical death metal, Obscura need little introduction: they have been at the forefront of furious Necrophagist-style riffage since their 2006 debut, Retribution. Obscura‘s sound is centered around aggressive guitarwork punctuated by melodic stabs, high-range raspy harsh vocals, and a generous heaping of fretless bass, coalescing in a larger-than-life cosmic aura that simultaneously exudes unease and intrigue. A Sonication utilizes many of these same principles, single “Evenfall” beginning with an ethereal fretless bass solo leading into cinematic guitarwork. Their previous release, A Valediction, marked a strong shift in focus to melodic death metal, and A Sonication continues to wholeheartedly embrace this direction on tracks like “Beyond the Seventh Sun” and “The Sun Eater”.
However, much of that is of little interest in the case of A Sonication. Hopelessly mired in drama, the album stencils an outline of a band entrenched in rash lineup overhauls and accusations of plagiarism1 directed at vocalist Steffen Kummerer. Internal band struggles can be inconsequential to the material produced (see: the entirety of Fleetwood Mac’s discography), but in this case, its effect is unignorable and makes the entire experience feel dirty. Most immediately, the mastering sounds muddy and shot to hell, despite having the exact same producer as A Valediction: passages from “Silver Linings” and the title track in particular are wont to fall into a buzzy, messy haze without reason or warning. To add insult to injury, the songwriting quality is the most inconsistent of Obscura’s career, any given track going from killer tech death to absolute nothing-burger riffage faster than you can say ‘Cosmogenesis’.2
Nowhere are A Sonication’s issues more apparent than on instrumental “Beyond the Seventh Sun”: its picked acoustic guitar and brooding fretless bass intro establishes a pensive atmosphere before launching headfirst into an unabashedly boilerplate arpeggiated melodeath riff, the recently-prominent bass carelessly relegated to the bottom of the mix. Radical jumps in quality continue as a gorgeous inverted-stress drum section creates interesting rhythmic contrast underneath a tasteful guitar solo, only to squander its momentum by insisting upon riffage that gracefully floats away from your consciousness like stellar dust as it’s heard. And this is how the entirety of “Beyond the Seventh Sun” plays out: introduce an excellent idea only to have it crash full-speed into aggressively unremarkable melodeath, then rinse and repeat.
Other tracks make it out even worse than “Beyond the Seventh Sun”, such as “The Prolonging”, which is graced with maybe two good ideas, both of them the same fretless bass line; the rest of the track is anonymous tech death guaranteed to bounce off your forehead like a series of lone photons from the nearest star. “The Sun Eater” suffers the most of all, rooted in groovy tech death sensibilities that should work in principle, but ultimately, the track features a single ear-catching groove lost in a cosmic sea of the most bland Decapitated worship you’ve ever heard. The closing title track is likely the most consistent in quality, faithfully adhering to classic Obscura tropes through energetic guitar pyrotechnics and impressive drumwork, a serviceable enough conclusion that manages listenability without too much fuss.
Most times when A Sonication ends, my music player naturally continues with a track from A Valediction; the leap in production and musical quality is shocking every time. A Sonication makes many bold statements about songwriting and band decorum, and very few of them are flattering. Through wildly inconsistent tech-death and a rushed sound, A Sonication is a lose-lose situation for everybody: Obscura‘s reputation as a tech-death mainstay is tarnished, the new band members are inexorably enmeshed in drama surrounding their frontman, and the listeners are condescended by the expectation of happily consuming a clearly incomplete product, but I guess this is what to expect from a band who fumbled Christian Münzner twice. Melodeath influences abound on A Sonication, but this is not how I expected to see Obscura’s ship go up In Flames.
Recommended tracks: Just listen to Alkaloid or Exist instead
You may also like: Stortregn, Hannes Grossmann, Exuvial, Rannoch, Omnivide
Final verdict: 4/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Nuclear Blast – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Obscura is:
– Steffen Kummerer (vocals, guitars)
– Robin Zielhorst (bass)
– James Stewart (drums)
– Kevin Olasz (guitars)
- Former Obscura members Christian Münzner (Eternity’s End, ex-Alkaloid) and Alex Weber (Exist) have both come forth asserting one-to-one ripoffs of riffs, passages, and even song structures on A Sonication. While it’s not unheard of for bands to ape or homage ideas long after their creation (note the similarities in the first two lyrical lines and rhythms from Pagan’s Mind’s “The Prophecy of Pleiades” and Dream Theater’s “Learning to Live”), the evidence from Weber is particularly striking, outlining unreleased bass work that lines up identically to single “Evenfall”. ↩︎
- I want to emphasize that none of this is the fault of the new band members, all of whom are highly respected and tenured instrumentalists. I frankly feel bad that they are caught up in this mess. ↩︎
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