siLLy puPPy In the world of extreme metal bands seem to release EPs for a few reasons. One could be as flotsam and jetsam compiled from previous recording sessions that doesn’t fit well onto official album releases. Two could be a significant deviation from the band’s established style and three a chance to break in some new talent and see if they’re up to the task as replacements for former band members who jumped ship. All three cases seem to fit with GOROD’s so far one and only EP titled TRANSCENDENCE.

This five track EP was released between the albums “Process Of A New Decline” from 2009 and the 2012 album “A Perfect Absolution.” Its the first release with newbies vocalist Guillaume Martinot who replaced Julien Deyres and guitarist Nicolas Alberny who replaced Arnaud Pontacq. The EP features a remake of “Earth Pus” which first appeared on the band’s debut “Neurotripsicks” as well as a totally unrecognized acoustic flamenco version of it called “Earth Pus: Salvation.” Add to that another flamenco remake of “Blackout” from the band’s second album “Leading Vision” which is called “Blackout: Renewed Souls.”

Also included is a remake of Cynic’s “Textures” from their classic “Focus” album and last but not least is the 15 minute plus title track which is the only new track on the EP but substantially different than anything the band had cranked out at this time because it’s by far the most progressive track of the band’s career. However don’t let the length scare you away as the band lost none of its intensity and vibrant use of technical wizardry however it does wend and wind through slower passages as well as choppy prog fueled time signature frenzies.

Given the diverse nature of this album, it’s very much a collection of disparate tracks rather than a bonafide release but the title track alone could’ve served as an EP in its own right with the other four simply serving as bonus tracks except for the fact they are pretty damn good in their own right. While i’d hate to hear an album’s worth of cover songs, just one select cut from a stellar band works quite well here as it showcases the band’s metal inclinations beyond their established sound. Likewise the band flirted with flamenco on previous albums but only as a hidden backdrop that would reveal itself during the scant times when the metal bombast dropped out. Here it’s the whole enchilada and showcases the band’s ability to transverse the larger swath of guitar-oriented musical genres.

The epic title track also features some clean vocals which the band never really explored before this point in its career but the track is mostly choppy staccato-rich guitar riffing with the usual death metal accoutrements including the guttural growls however even on this one there are traces of flamenco rhythms and the progressive touches remind a bit of Opeth as well as Cynic and Atheist. The flamenco touches come to the forefront at the end of the track as the metal is dropped for a smooth ending. This one is easy to miss in the GOROD canon as it’s the band’s only EP thus far and up until now i’ve avoided it myself but that was a mistake as the EP is actually quite brilliantly executed and a nice little excursion from the band’s regularly scheduled program.

siLLy puPPy Emerging from the fertile technical extreme metal scene of Bordeaux, France in 2005, GOROD has incrementally continued to refine its interesting take on technical death metal ever since. The band established itself as a tech death behemoth on its first two albums “Neurotipsicks” and “Leading Vision” and continued to ratchet up the progressive and experimental attributes without sacrificing the finger-melting technical gymnastics which propelled the band onto the world’s stage. This approach served the band for five albums but beginning with 2018’s “Æthra” the band put a self-induced restraining order on itself and veered into the more accessible regions by adding stronger melodies, more familiar songwriting structures much in the same way fellow Frenchies Gojira began as a no nonsense go for the tech jugular type of band only to mellow out a wee bit.

THE ORB is GOROD’s seventh album and pretty much continues where “Æthra” left off with a batch of nine strong tech death tracks that continue the monstrous ferocity of outstanding instrumentation from the now stable lineup of Julien "Nutz" Deyres (vocals), Mathieu Pascal (guitar), Nicolas Alberny (guitar), Benoit Claus (bass) and Karol Diers (drums) who have been together since 2015’s “A Maze Of Recycled Creeds.” With the expect dazzling virtuosity and in-yer-face bombast, GOROD continues down a more melodic path with whizzing guitar riffs and thundering bass stomps coalescing into a greater melodic sum of the parts with some tracks sounding a bit more like melo-death than technical infused (such as the title track for example.)

What has always made GOROD a standout tech death band for me is the amazing diversity in guitar riffing, bass bantering and drumming prowess all stuffed into an album’s run of A-class material. I am, like many others, in disbelief that this band hasn’t reached the status of tech death gods in the vein of Obscura or Nile with its firm attention to detail all the while crafting melodic constructs that don’t stray too far into the competition’s sound spectrum. Not enough gimmicks i guess. In effect GOROD has been and remains a true original in a world where more often than not bands simply emulate past masters without giving their works a proper makeover in the originality department. No such woes for GOROD and as the band continues to release album after album of stellar material, THE ORB only showcases the band firing on all pistons with a delectable menu of nine strong tracks.

The album opens with the fiery “Chrematheism” which leaves little doubt that GOROD is in the house with its unique dueling guitar attacks and strong bass / drum freneticism laced with proggy hairpin turns, eloquent palm-muted freneticism and excursions into melodic connective mojo. The tracks are on the shorter side of things with most well under 5 minutes leaving only the near 7-minute track “Savitri” taking some extra excursions into slower atmospheric passages. Overall THE ORB provides another slice of GOROD’s razor-sharp tech death metal maestrohood as focused and balanced as the tasteful cover art that accompanies the musical performances. Add to that a modern production sheen suitable for a modern extreme metal band that brings each instrument into its perfect sound range.

All in all GOROD does an excellent job of continuing its no nonsense approach of crafting short and to the point tech death compositions while losing none of the fiery passion that has been the band’s powerful puissance since the beginning. GOROD could be accused of playing things safe with THE ORB and not really deviating significantly from its now established playbook but why change a good thing when there is plenty of mileage left? For my ears i’ve not yet tired of the stylistic approach of GOROD and THE ORB continues the band’s legacy with a blazing brash bravado we have all grown to expect from this band.

siLLy puPPy In the beginning, the Bordeux, France based Goregasm evolved into present day GOROD and released a trilogy of high quality technical death metal that took a cue from the German Necrophagist only adding a plethora of new progressive rock twists and turns which created an insanely wild ride that i personally call zigzag metal. While starting out as a combo pack of resolute death metal with melodic neoclassical dual harmonizing guitars and frenetic percussive and rhythmic drive with the standard souless death growls from beneath the grave, GOROD conjured up some of the most complex and challenging metal that could be heard and easily stood up in quality and intensity with contemporaries Obscura, Decapitated and Martyr just to name a few, however by the time the band got to the third album “Process Of A New Decline,” they seemed to be losing their melodic touches and opting for more dizzying instrumental gymnastics on the sonic playing ground where technical wizardry was winning out.

That’s not a bad thing mind you, especially for those of us who dig that sorta thing, however it is always preferable to find some sort of balance between the extremes for contrast’s sake and that’s exactly what GOROD pulled off on their fourth album A PERFECT ABSOLUTION. Sticking to the 3-year plan between albums, this one follows suit but during the time in between a new lineup took place and found vocalist Guillaume Martinot being traded in for newbie Julien Dreyes and guitarist Arnaud Pontaco finding a replacement in Nicolas Alberny. On A PERFECT ABSOLUTION, this tech death quintet with an extra guest list of four musicians on select tracks took the best of what came before and added all kinds of new experimental features all the while keeping the brutal time signature rich guitar riffs in tack with insane percussion drive and frenetic death growls and best of all the band revived the more melodic neoclassical underpinnings of their origins which added a little beauty to the brutal beast.

A PERFECT ABSOLUTION shows the band in full spitfire mode having not lost an iota of its feisty balls to the wall tech death angst. In fact, if anything someone turned up the pilot light and made the insane freneticism even louder, faster and more technically inclined however what REALLY makes this one stand out amongst the pack is how deliciously diverse the tracks are and how the band manage stitch in so many disparate fusional possibilities. The album starts off with the short instrumental “The Call To Redemption” which is a classical war march that ushers in not only the soundtrack to a impending battle scene of some sort but gives a nod to the complex melodic underpinnings of the entire album no matter how abstract and brutally angular the sonic bantering becomes. The track quickly yields to the high octane explosive “Birds Of Sulphur” which borrows a groove or two from the classic Pantera style but takes it to the powers of ten. Despite the dueling axe masters only coexisting for a very short time, Pascal and Alberny bedazzle with twin tech harmonizing that’s literally insane!

While the beginning of the album tends to stick to the band’s death metal riffs with tracks like “Sailing Into Earth” sounding like a geeked out tech version of something Behemoth cranked out on albums like “Demigod,” other tracks deviate from that recipe. For example, tracks like “Elements And Spirit” take on not only the tech death bombast but reprise the neoclassical dual shredding along with a funky grooved out bass that find little intermissions of clean vocals that tease with a classic Enslaved sort of prog metal but only play peek-a-boo before jumping back into the galloping wallops of the tech death guitar driven cacophony. “5000 At The Funeral” is something totally different for the band and adds a circus music touch in classical piano form with clean guitars and symphonic elements slowly ratcheting a demented sort of gypsy jazz sound that morphs into a satisfying groove thrash based riffing pattern. Augmented with whispered vocals and other deviations from the status quo, Deyres finds no problem displaying his own stylistic approaches.

“Carved In The Wind” perhaps displays the most daring angularity of the album with ridiculous convoluted riffing that somehow still manages to eke out a melodic hook whereas the most experimental track “Varangian Paradise” takes a wild ride on the funky side of life with an almost 70s sounding bass line set to death metal ushers in the heavy driven guitar heft before jumping into Latin influenced rhythmic drives to create a frenetic jazz-fusion along with a stellar Bumblefoot inspired torturous display of guitar solo virtuosity complete with progressive time sig tugs that are quite dizzying but oh so satisfying for electric tech death metalheads such as myself. “Tribute Of Blood” ends the album with yet another display of guitar antics and trad death metal sounds along with some killer drowned out vocals trying to emerge from the darkened din. GOROD keeps the album below the forty minute mark which suits this music perfectly because it’s an intense ride both technically and aggressively to the max. An exhausting ride indeed reserved for only the most ambitious headbangers but well worth the time it takes to decipher this bout with musical insanity on steroids. Perhaps my favorite GOROD album.

siLLy puPPy After dropping the Gorgasm moniker and becoming GOROD, this French band from Bordeaux released two albums on the Willowtip label. First a re-release from their Gorgasm days on the debut “Neurotripsticks” in 2005 and then the first bona fide new material as GOROD with “Leading Vision” the following year. The band spent a couple years crafting new material for the third album PROCESS OF A NEW DECLINE but then in 2008 drummer Sandrine Bourguignon left the band and was replaced by Samuel Santiago formerly of Next On The List and Zubrowska. This album would also be the last for vocalist Guillaume Martinot and guitarist Arnaud Pontaco.

Following the tech death metal template of Necrophagist that the band had implemented on their previous two albums, GOROD continues the chaotic mix of labyrinthine compositional styles decorated with various strains of metal including the business as usual neoclassical soloing, groove thrash chugs and the tech deathy frenetic time signature guitar riffs and jazzy drumming on steroids. While the first two albums provided some sort of melodic grounding that while meandering from one hook to another, PROCESS OF A NEW DECLINE tends to be more scattered and harder to latch onto. While the melodic hooks have certainly not been discarded, the tracks seem a tad less predictable as the band sort of zigzags through various moods and technical bombast.

While the album as a whole can seem like a display in technical futility run amok with crushing frenetic speedy riffs accompanied by pummeling blastbeats, fretless bass meltdowns and the expected emotionless death growls, the tracks redeem themselves in unexpected ways as the band drops the metal charade all together and displays various underlying influential drives whether it be Django Reinhardt gypsy swing, classically infused guitar or melodic rock elements that the band plays technical leapfrog with. The album is certainly a more difficult listen than the first two albums and i initially found the album to be an inferior third offering in comparison however the album has its addictive features as well. It’s hard to call this a song oriented album. This is geeky progressive tech death metal through and through and the band’s aim is to bedazzle and cast a spell of OMG!!!!

While perhaps not as cohesive as classic artists like Death or Atheist or as surreal as Gorguts or Portal, GOROD nevertheless cranks out some of the highest quality musical acrobatics and if this is something you crave with unrelenting aggressive performances then PROCESS OF A NEW DECLINE delivers the goods in absolutely every way. This is the kind of death metal where you actually expect it to sound totally off-kilter and unpredictable but yet somehow skirts by on some sort of subliminal flow. GOROD have become one of France’s top tech death acts and although some consider this to be one of the weaker offerings as i once did, i recommend just spending a little more time with it until you can grasp it on its own terms without the influential predilections of what came before and it more than stands up on its own two feet.

siLLy puPPy GOROD started out under the Gorgasm moniker in their native Bordeaux, France way back in 1997 and originally released their debut NEUROTRIPSICKS under that name on the Deadsun Records label in 2004, but after learning that an band from Chicago, USA already had taken that name, they quickly changed theirs to the now more familiar GOROD (Russian for “city” but not sure that’s what they were going for) and re-released NEUROTRIPSICKS on the Willowtip Records label in 2005 only on this one there are two bonus tracks: “Gorod” and “Submission Transfer.” It seems that any technical leaning French metal bands these days are always worth investigating for they utilize extreme discipline in crafting clever and captivating material. In the ever splintering world of tech death metal more and more bands are finding radically new approaches to the highly demanding and energetic metal music that took off in the 90s and while GOROD began as a technical death metal from the start, their music has evolved into a harder to classify concoction that is best labeled as extreme tech metal for it is far too eclectic to be considered death metal alone although it does indeed employ the utmost extremes of death growl vocals and beyond.

Despite the vocals and other death metal aspects, this music rarely sounds like traditional death metal of the 90s. Unlike most death metal bands with the exception of a select acts like Necrophagist or Obscura, guitarists Arnaud Pantaco and Mathieu Pascal engage in complex neoclassical inspired guitar acrobatics as well as heavy Pantera-esque groove metal riffage with harsh dissonant jazzy overtones that make this music simultaneously slightly catchy and more often than not jarring and slightly off despite an impending feel of soon falling off into chaotic fields. GOROD has a way of balancing out the tension with an accessible strain of melody that brings a more technical version of Amon Amarth or Arch Enemy to mind at times. There are also classical thrash metal types of developments that bring the late 80s to mind as well and add on ample progressive touches that come out of left field and the listener is treated to some highly aggressive chugga chugga type of extreme metal that dares enter many metal arenas while never even coming close to something mainstream. One of the many aspects (worth mentioning) is that they employ is a unique staccato and stop and go type of stylistic approach that utilizes dramatic silent pauses at precise moments to create a counter dynamic to the extreme noisefest.

All the musicians are at the top of their game in this band. Sandrine Bourguignon (YES! a female tech death metal drummer!) has some serious chops in her drumming style and with the extreme string workouts of the guitars and the bass of Benoit Claus delivering highly precise and technically challenging time signature workout, we are treated to a very satisfying overall sound that extreme metal enthusiasts will devour with delight. The only “normal” aspect of the music seems to reside in Guillaume Martinot’s death metal growls and while the music employs serious death metal chops and blastbeats, it more often than not seems to stray into other metal sub genre fields that fuse aspects of classical 80s, groove and thrash all doctored up with progressive touches. NEUROTRIPSICKS is an instantly addictive avant-groovy album to sink your teeth into and GOROD sounds unlike any other band that falls under the ever burgeoning death metal banner. This debut is a very solid release that resonates well for the entire run. Perhaps the only weakness is that there isn’t quite enough diversity amongst all tracks for a masterpiece in the making but these guys sure know how to turn a whole bunch of noise into something highly intelligent and attention grabbing.

The two bonus tracks are pretty cool because they give a glimpse into the primordial ooze of the band’s history as Gorgasm and show exactly how much they evolved their sound in a short time span, thus not essential to the overall album feel but a tagged on historical perspective.