Death Metal Monday, A to Z: GORELUST

(Posts will be terse in the year-end chaos of the next two weeks or so.  You should still see them on schedule even through the holiday because we’re enjoying it too much.  Cheers!)

Back to ultra-obscurity this week as we approach 2015.  How many have even heard of Québec’s GORELUST in any capacity?  I chalk up my encounter with them as quite random: an early review in a death metal rag from back in the day coupled with the sheer luck of a used purchase at old Nightfall Records.  A lot of death metal got buried circa 1995, and Reign of Lunacy is a prime example of what went quickly missing in those harrowing times of death metal’s original demise.

The GORELUST moniker seems an obvious tribute to provincial heavyweights GORGUTS and there’s something to be said there with regard to the band’s general approach as well.  Is Reign of Lunacy worth a salt?  Find out for yourself:

(There’s something strange about this YouTube posting — the cover art is altered and there is comment chatter about it being lifted from an unofficial version.  The music should be there for your proper judgment nonetheless.)

Not bad; one can hear the mid-period SUFFOCATION influence, perhaps half via GORGUTS and the other half direct.  Some of it comes across as a bit directionless and unrefined, but the chops are there and so is the sound.  The fact that it borrows SUFFOCATION’s “good” influence works in their favor as well — where bands like INTERNAL BLEEDING were playing up the slamming side of things, you can at least hear where GORELUST had ambitions to a more musically nimble form of death metal.  The nice KREATOR cover of “Extreme Aggression” shows their hearts were in a more metal place as well.

For all that I think old PYREXIA is an apt comparison; if only GORELUST had gotten traction a couple years prior I assume their craft and popularity may have each been much more substantial than it was.  Alas, we have SUFFOCATION’s Breeding the Spawn, DEEDS OF FLESH’s raw Trading Pieces and GORGUTS’s first two masterpieces to warm our hearts to what may have been for another victim of the overwrought mid-90s scene.

Cheers