Review Summary: Serocs provide one of the year’s seminal death metal records.
Death metal has certainly had a rough, if not controversial 2018. Obscura, Horrendous, Beyond Creation, Alkaloid, Aborted and Deicide becomes the quick mentions of contentious technicality and verbose brutality. But it’s the band’s outside of the ‘bigger’ names (Rivers of Nihil, Letters From The Colony) that have marked the year’s most arguable, fruitful and detrimental to the brand of overly expressive, technically based progressive death, filled with all sorts of copycat, self indulgence and that ever dubious sax…
If that wasn’t at all hard enough to digest, there’s Serocs. A death metal act that works beyond the reach of the mainstream radar allows itself a certain level of quiet anonymity (because we all know death metal is known for its quietness…). With an artwork that slightly suggests that a melted face is imminent,
The Phobos / Deimos Suite somewhat shuns the plaguing self-indulgence that has swept over the more progressive/technical acts of the genre and replaces it with a thick, technically sound display of furore and aggression.
With a sound suited better to the cavernous depths of unyielding darkness, rather than the sterile, somewhat surgical precision of some of the acts mentioned above. Serocs build on some incredibly strong foundations to bring you the slab of tech death 2018 needs. Even as
The Phobos / Deimos Suite takes a figurative dig into the realms of furore and brutality there’s the very essence of technical songwriting. Typically,
The Phobos / Deimos Suite achieves entry with a stereotypical show of force. “Being” crashes Sonic boundaries al a drum fills and blasting riffs as Laurent Bellemare’s gutteral roar accents the very meaning of the band’s hyperbolic sonic hell. It’s a business as usual soundscape, but done with a detail that would see Seroc’s newest compositions see prolific depths when compared to the genre’s heavyweights. Light neoclassical themes run through the likes of “Lethe” adding light contrast to an otherwise seamless wall of beautifully incoherent distortion, growls and a ruinous bass section. But it’s the very trademarks of the genre done well that make Seroc’s 2018 musical invasion worth the listen.
For forty six blistering minutes, Serocs make the listener feel at home in their own cavernous hell. The noteworthy legacy of death metal may continue to overlook the likes of
The Phobos / Deimos Suite but the underdog status suits this band to a “t”. For those who find themselves missing something in the precision, honed or well stated paradigmatic displays (or even the trend following found within some of the year’s ‘better publicised’ albums), Serocs has the potential to fill the bits between soul and mind, adding marrow to the bone.
