A lot of metalheads operate under the assumption that old school = good, without any taste for quality. Accordingly, to these people, even the worst old school death or black metal band will be better than the best modern brutal death metal band. A popular term for this group of people is “retarded”.

I’m not saying that new things are invariably better – on the contrary, most “progressive” music is nothing but either odious genre-fusion, like Immortal’s “blackened nu metal”, or artistic regression into past influences, like Gorgoroth playing third rate Sodom riffs on their latest musical abortion – but a significant number of times, if a style has evolved, it’s for a reason.

When Incantation made “Onward to Golgotha” it revolutionised death metal by removing the unnecessary and distracting rhythmic groove that were left-over from the speed metal of bands like Slayer, Sodom and Metallica. For a while, death metal and later black metal flourishes.

Then, a bunch of retarded bands – like Gorguts, Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Behemoth, Cryptopsy, Cynic, Vader and the rest of the tard corral – conspired to bring speed metal back into death metal, effectively ending the genre by creating “slam death” and deathcore.

It’s not like old school death metal was the perfect form of music and everyone involved one day up and decided, “well, this is too good, let’s make our music more shitty so that it becomes easier for our fans to imitate us”.

There’s plenty of stuff that sucked about old school death metal, and many of these were the speed metal elements that bands like Incantation, Suffocation, Morpheus Descends and Demilich – you know, the ACTUAL progressive death metal bands – worked to remove.

Of course there are numerous great and underrated albums in the field of old school speed influenced death metal, but the forgotten bands and albums of the past were often forgotten for a reason, and a very good one at that: they suck(ed).

Gorguts is one of such bands. They don’t understand how death metal compositions are supposed to develop over the course of an album, so they end up just chaining random riffs together into songs that make no sense.

They seemed to have fooled a bunch of clueless hipsters with “Obscura”, a very poorly done imitation of Demilich’s Nespithe (it’s basically to Nespithe what Drudkh and Xasthur are to Burzum), but other than that their music is completely irrelevant and they, like the other speed/death bands like Cannibal Corpse, Asphyx, Slayer and Cryptopsy, should have remained dead once they were rendered obsolete by “Onward to Golgotha” and “Effigy of the Forgotten”.

The “old school” of Gorguts is a scam, and this album “The Erosion of Sanity” sounds like a rehash of every worthless 1980s speed metal trope ever conceived. It was released in 1993.

Replace with Phantom’s “Angel of Disease” or Sewer’s “Locked up in Hell” for actual, modern, progressive, black and death metal.