As all life fades, dimmed to a dry-brown crisp by the sun and annihilated through an endless stockpile of artillery, memories of the final firestorm of chaos at the end of days are all our wasteland will remember… but most of all, I’ll remember the riffs as I skate through the now three long-player thick stack of releases from Indianapolis, Indiana-based death metal quartet OBSCENE have built. A dangerous meeting of ideals reveals itself within as the feral-minded torsion of their troupe remains alive and deep underground in its fixation despite signs of progress and decadence each on the ups. An obsession with reeling pulverization and adrenaline-fraught movement remain within the core directive of their ‘old school’ death metal inspired presence regardless of how forward (or backward) the movement on ‘Agony & Wounds‘ is perceived. Eleven horrified, gloom-stricken and decaying scenes from their wasteland to ours enter us into collective procession where their morbid funeral narration is told in erratic, sometimes melodic, yet always riff driven bursts of pure death muse. These folks only seem to improve with each record, making gains in the surety of their gig as time goes by, yet the important thing here is they’ve not lost their knack for writing intense, wild-ass death metal songs in a distinct enough voice.

Obscene officially formed circa 2017 and I’ve not been shy about lobbing praise their way beyond some unsurety per their first tape (‘Sermon to the Snake‘, 2017) where their first album ‘The Inhabitable Dark‘ (2020) would land at #42 on my Top 100 Albums of the Year carried an approachably classic sound which probably had the most in common with early Asphyx and Morgoth but also featured vocals which read somewhere in between the mania of Tomas Lindberg pre-‘Slaughter of the Soul‘ with the diction of Martin Van Drunen at his best, most thrashing efforts. It was a lasting impression made and the main insight for their follow-up (‘From Dead Horizon to Dead Horizon‘, 2022) appeared to simplify their modus for the sake of deeper impact. This’d lead to some of their most memorable songs to date and an escalation of the general quality of their work as I’d commented in review: “[Obscene] impress this second time around with a smarter, sharper and even more charismatic” album though I definitely felt the melodic nods, pit-level riffs, and such felt like a step towards personality rather than dryly focusing on the riff. On that level I understood that some felt the raw, canonical ‘old school’ dankness of the first record hadn’t been replicated but, either way the riff and rhythm of this group has always read as thrashing and energetic beyond the status quo of their generational peers.

‘Agony & Wounds‘ is not a regression in any sense nor does it reach a point of stagnancy but rather a potential font of refinement flowing past the source of ‘From Dead Horizon to Dead Horizon‘ into the depths and density of their first proper 40+ minute stinger of a statement. Both the discerning modern-day death metal (false) nerd and the past-sighted ear for the gruesome should appreciate the sound and style of this album for its obvious points of auld personage and their own voice, a glom which continues to impress. Beyond the harmonized dual guitar lead that cracks us into opener “The Cloverland Panopticon”, we get an immediate taste of this carnal imbalance via the constantly swerving and thrashing stampede of the song as a true opener meant to get the blood striking down its tubes to the slap of the beat. This is the initial pulse read but just moments later we’re in the true limb-grinder of “Watch Me When I Kill” (the album’s “Deathless Demigod” moment, more-or-less) the song that’ll have you cranking the volume a few notches and riding the waves of nuclear threshing overdrive they’re tearing up here. The first thing I’d noticed about this album was Kyle Shaw‘s voice, of course, but I’d just as quickly honed in on what appears to be a moderate revision of their main rhythm guitar tone which cuts some of the hollowness felt in sustained chords past and calls down some extra thunder as they begin to throw some additional curveballs into the early 90’s death metal slaw typically brought.

The song that’d had me kicking my leg and feeling the classicist death metal venom’d been “Breathe the Decay” to start which is, from my point of view, the quintessential pit-ready ‘old school’ death-thrashing howler Obscene have always done best. The main chord progression here is deceptively simple, something you’d expect from an album like ‘Testimony of the Ancients‘ in terms of ignoring the bluntness of 80’s death metal tropes but still presenting a with hardcorish thrash metal directive at its root and the slow-doomed midsection of the song helps put this mode into perspective by pulling us right out of it before building back up to that maximum point of burn. One thing I will say, neither as a detraction or intending any specific praise, is that the first several songs on ‘Agony & Wounds‘ are similar in pace, attack, and general cadence. It starts to feel samey with such a high batting average going down… On one hand those five-or-so opening numbers have flattened and mauled the psyche already by hunkering down and focusing on their pulverization, on the other hand a lot of the nuance available to them might only appear coincidentally interesting until the whole of the album has sunken in, or, if you’re prone to take a closer look at the details.

With this in mind, how are you gonna live with this death metal album? Maybe the lead guitars that close out “Noxious Expulsion” catch your ear every time and reinforce that snazzy intro piece, or, the percussive bash of “Death’s Denial” is simply enough of a death-thrashing thrill to whip neck to… point being Obscene once again show their knack for writing death metal that encourages spastic movements by way of kinetic energy applied to the delivery of each and every line, riff and run. The major point of ‘progress’ made here is probably in the nuance and those smaller ear-catching moments that endure but the greater effect of this new capability is an entertaining experience which hums with dread as often as it spits on the first three rows getting its words out diaphragm-first. In this sense if you’re wild about records like ‘Slowly We Rot‘ and that drastic, groovy-ass sense of movement you’ll likely appreciate what this band’ve brought here but let’s not overlook the shredded lead runs and semi-melodic motion sickness that brings it all under their own bone ‘n bat-winged umbrella when all is said and done.

The coffin-squatting burst of witchcraft at the swamp-borne funeral depicted on cover artwork for ‘Agony & Wounds‘ via the legendary Brad Moore does a fantastic job of inviting the eye into its adipocere smeared centre and sending it spiraling outward through the grotesque details abounding. Not only is it a rad, abstracted work characteristic of the artist but it naturally sets the mind alight with a fatalistic vision, a seeming end-of-days point reached by humanity which is (as far as I can tell) likewise depicted in the lyrics beyond the general horror and torture of it all. The high expectations set for aesthetic naturally match the grimy yet thunderous launch of this Noah Buchanan (Mercinary Studios) engineered/mixed sound which received its final touch via mastering from Dan Lowndes (Resonance Sound Studios) a pairing which gives us a fresh angle on Obscene‘s mostly classics oriented sounds and moreso when they slow the hell down on “Rotting Behind the Madness”, the aforementioned “Breathe the Decay” and especially the return of horror cinematic use of the piano riff on closer/title track “Agony and Wounds” a prime finishing touch for the band’s first album to stretch a full ten minutes beyond the half hour mark. I’d like to blame these additional nodules of doomed energy on the juices flowing downstream of the drummer’s other project Mother of Graves but only for the sake of mentioning them, these dips into the slower side of things have become increasingly dramatic within their oeuvre but still read as part of their original wheelhouse.

The extra space allowed both in terms of time and sound design find Obscene more than capable of meeting said voluminous demands with work that’d do just as well in a moshpit void bar or set upon something a bit bigger and stage-like as they crush through these songs with a crisp and clear yet stank-ridden clap. The thing I’d add that I couldn’t have said about the previous album is that ‘Agony & Wounds‘ has an even more serious, kinda miserable fugue state around the edges which sits nicely beside the ferality of their performances and precision production values as the occasional stretch into the beyond, an unreal touch which helps to bring an otherwise densely stated barrage of elven songs some breath and expanse beyond its sonic lustre; As a listening experience attuned to the ‘old school’ brainwaves the use of repetition, rocking / divebombed leads alike, and an inhuman vocal style all read as exciting stylized details which are in service to the real thing, a canonical species continuing to hone its own knack to notable results. As a fan who’d stuck around to find out I’m left impressed by the ongoing primed yet primal vision of the band as each album has one-upped the last from my point of view. A very high recommendation.

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