This one threw me for a loop right at the start. "Venus" opens with a quick vocal passage before the music starts, but I could've sworn I was about to be treated to a fucking massive breakdown based on those vocals. I find myself here encountering trouble articulating what the fuck I mean by that, but I guess the vocals here just sound kinda deathcorey at times, and I realize now that I have no words to describe how that's different from regular old death metal vocals. They sound... I dunno, more lung and less throat? Does that make sense? Either way, I'm not meaning this in a negative way, I think the sound of Orbstruct's debut, Phobos Rising, is fucking massive, and the vocals are just one component of that. I can't seem to find a whole lot of info with regards to where this was recorded or who was responsible for mixing/mastering/producing the whole thing, but I give a lot of credit to this album's effectiveness to whoever was behind the knobs on this one, because this is a gargantuan wall of sound that just falls on top of the listener with the weight of an ocean.
Beyond how simply fucking huge Phobos Rising sounds, it's equally effective in it's simplistic nature. This is by no means a "stupid" album, as I'm so fond of referring to shallow releases, it's just single-minded and uninterested in technical complexities. This gruesome twosome from Ukraine waste no time with jangly atmosphere or mindbending theatrics, preferring instead to just waltz into the room and headbutt everybody to death. This is the sort of death metal that I always kinda hoped Obituary would've actually sounded like with their heavy emphasis on groove (instead of just being slow and boring for like 25 straight years). This isn't overtly doomy like the slow sections in Autopsy or Asphyx or something, here the groovy elements are much skippier and full of vigor. There's a very pugilistic sense of directness with these tracks. Check out the intro of "God's Gun" or "East of You", or the fucking wicked breakdown section in "Utopian". This is still death metal to the core, no bones about it, but many sections are presented with such a barbaric, single minded focus on one-note chug-savagery that I just can't help but feel like these guys are bloody-jawed cavemen.
That's not to say the tropes of traditional death metal are eschewed entirely here, there are numerous sections of frantic blasting and Vader styled tremolo riffs, they just tend to shine the brightest when the reign in the tempo without losing focus on ferocious intensity. It's at precisely this moment that I remember who Orbstruct reminds me of, and that's the Dubaite Nervecell. While Nervecell tended to be a pretty stock and merely decent band on the whole, they had one huge standout moment on their sophomore release, Psychogenocide. The last 45 seconds of the last song on that album were among the most underappreciated seconds of all 2011. The outro of "Nation's Plague" was fast, simple, and heavy. Just pure brutality in a simplified form that devastated me from the first listen and became the only reason I even remembered that fucking band eight years later. Phobos Rising is like a full album of those 45 seconds.
The only real problem with this album is that it's kinda samey on the whole, and the only real standouts have already been mentioned. "God's Gun" and "Venus" are excellent songs, and "East of You" isn't too far behind, but I still have trouble recalling the rest of the album. But honestly that's not really a gamebreaker, because on the whole this is a very good album that I can definitely see myself revisiting more than a few times as the year goes on.
RATING: 85%
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