Review by Sam on July 5, 2026.

Luc Lemay. Insane genius, death metal savant, Canadian. The aptly titled second album from Gorguts sees them undergoing the process of becoming. With this work, the walls of musical convention are eroding as the band begins to embrace its own road less traveled. Lemay must have realized sometime during the conception of The Erosion Of Sanity that his rightful, even preferred, niche would indeed be that of obscurity. He was fully aware of the musical direction that he was headed in, and that that direction would be beyond the grasp of the masses.

So, he and the dudes left behind Scott Burns and muddy Morrisound Studios to record in their native Montreal with sound engineer Steve Harris, who has afforded much-needed brightening and clarification to the overall mix. If you listen to Considered Dead and The Erosion Of Sanity in that order and in succession, the difference in clarity is rather shocking, and this becomes apparent with the second track and pièce de résistance, 'Condemned To Obscurity'. The title of this monolith reveals that Lemay has accepted his fate. The chilling, eerie piano of the opening moments will haunt your mind until the end of your time on earth. This dreamlike sequence bleeds seamlessly into what I consider to be among the top three death metal riffs of all time. Yeah, it’s better than 'Suicide Machine'. 'Raining Blood'? Forget about it. The pinch harmonic mastery slices through your being over the surgical percussion of Stéphane Provencher as he expertly colors the beat with beautiful bell of ride and hi-hat accents. The effect on the listener is dizzying and disorienting, yet overall dazzling. This is abstract, modern art adapted to the medium of death metal.

I believe Luc Lemay’s body of work to be an extreme response to the mundanity that makes up the bulk of human existence. This music (and especially the material of the hallowed Obscura) is the natural reaction of the metal mind to things like going to school, waiting rooms, registry offices, traffic, a job that you hate, sitting in traffic to get to the job that you hate…the kind of minutia accumulation that can lead to various psychoses, but here channeled into abject misanthropy in the form of extreme metal. Opening track 'With Their Flesh, He’ll Create', as it washes over you in waves of aggression and dissonance, details a possible pathway of how to come to grips with the insufferable, but it also epitomizes the growing pains Lemay and co were dealing with as they sought to elevate themselves from the morass of death metal bands in the early 90s. Gorguts were yet another casualty of Roadrunner Records as formations such as Metallica, Pantera, Sepultura, and even Testament shifted the locus of heavy metal away from the extreme and back towards the mundane. Aside from all that, let’s face it, a name like Gorguts just isn’t conducive to mainstream success within the confines of polite society.

The Erosion Of Sanity lies somewhere in the middle ground between its predecessor and its successor in terms of artistic statement, but it leans more toward the style of the first album. Considered Dead, though punctuated with stirring acoustic classical guitar segues, is rooted in the formulaic death metal of antecedent groups. It would be indistinguishable from an "Effigy Of The Forgotten" or a "Cause of Death" to the ears of the uninitiated. Obscura fully embraces alternate realities and wholly rejects convention, and as soon as you hear Lemay’s vocals on that album, you know that he has passed the point of no return. This second Gorguts LP embodies a band that is reluctantly breaking free from the shackles of the heretofore established death metal template. A juxtaposition of the lyrics to the first two tracks on Erosion illuminates Lemay’s personal struggle with the threshold of metamorphosis at which he found himself. With 'Their Flesh, He’ll Create' is standard zombie/gore fare, whereas 'Condemned To Obscurity' begins to explore the themes of philosophical nihilism that are so prevalent throughout Obscura.

Lemay visited Suffocation while they were in the studio before Gorguts began recording The Erosion of Sanity, and there is a palpable Suffo influence here that is most evident in the dialed-up brutality of the vocal performance as well as the more exploratory bass guitar, and some of these leads have a distinctly Hobbsian vibe. The reverberating death grunt that takes place at 4:45 on Orphans of Sickness might as well be Frank Mullen himself. Pinch harmonics are ever-present throughout the record, and we begin to see some dabbling in odd time signatures. The double bass drums are relentless and crushing, but for the most part, this material does not separate itself from the death metal of 1993, with a few notable exceptions, one of those being the brilliant and discordant bass performance contained in A Path Beyond Premonition.

The opulent classical guitar found in the introductory moments of the final track 'Dormant Misery' showcases an improvement on what were already formidable finger-picking chops, but alas, this is the only attribute of the song that sets it apart. Remove this classical intro, and it’s just another early 90s death metal song. I have a creeping suspicion that the acoustic guitar work of early Gorguts was a huge inspiration to Opeth, and that could be either awesome or supremely uncool, depending on your view of the Swedish progsters. To sum it all up, The Erosion of Sanity is pretty standard for the 1989-93 extreme metal zeitgeist with a few searing moments of deviation from the norm. By 1998, norms, rules, and sanity would be abandoned once and for all.

Rating: 8.6 out of 10