Well, it's been another week. Another week where you are not sure why you bothered brushing your teeth, showering, or even getting out of bed. It's helpful to have something brutal to listen to when I get into some kind of a mood, or rather some kind of a mood rises up in me that I can't manage to tamp back down. Altar of Gore's Obscure & Obscene Gods is fitting for that kind of thing. The two-piece band out of New Jersey plays a savage style of primitive and atmospheric death metal that seems to be attempting to take the aesthetics of cave doom and raw black metal and contort them into the aural equivalent of lye pit. The project debuted as part of the New Jersey Metal Attack Vol. 2 comp back in 2017, and the band has basically been refining their style of fully alienated and occult death metal ever since. Most death metal bands deal with lurid subject matter, but Altar of Gore really leans into the epithet of their epony by trading in themes of ritual mutilation, human sacrifice, anthropomancy divination, and the secret histories of weird and death worshiping cults. What I love about underground metal albums like Obscure & Obscene Gods is that they literally sound like they are coming from underground. Like you are half hearing a Cannibal Corpse riff weaving up from between the slots of a sewage grate like an odious whisper. Comparisons to Impetigo, Archgoat, and Proclamation are more than fitting but don't necessarily account for the uncanny texture of these songs or the way that they manage to conjure a preternatural sense of unease. If you can imagine the feeling of watching the planchette of an ouija board continues to move and impart answers to questions no one asked, long after you and your friends have let go of it, then you can adequately picture the dread that this album is submerged in. Obscure & Obscene Gods reveal that you are never alone, even when there is no one around to hear you scream.
