Phobocosm, a Canadian death/doom metal band, released their senior album "Gateway" back in December via Dark Descent Records. Nothing really spoke out to me about this album's appearance or the band in general, as I assumed they're just another group with simple music to offer. After reading other reviews of their previous works (which were positive across the board), I figured I should be the next critic to join the hype train.

The walls of distortion and siren-like guitars that begin "Deathless" tell me all that I need to know about going into this album. Phobocosm leans more doomy than deathy here, as S.D. and R.M. let their guitars blend into an impenetrable sound fortress. The death metal starts when the drums, courtesy of J.S.G., start firing off, and the murky gutturals of E.B. reverberate throughout the instrumentation."Unbound" is a track of similar length, this time taken up by faster playing, yet slower singing. The monstrous effect the vocal delivery has on the music is crushing from the second they start and up to five minutes after they end. The extreme technicality shoves this into dissonant death metal territory, if the first song didn't already. For another six minutes, Phobocosm ravages on. After "Unbound," we have our first "Corridor." There are three short intervals, each called Corridor (insert thing). "Corridor I - The Affliction" is just an instrumental segway into "Sempiternal Penance," the featured single for this LP. The dissonance rears its dissonant head once more, but something's different. I'm not too excited for it as I just waited through a pointless interval. There are more of those, and boredom is on the rise.

"Corridor II - The Descent" is simply a longer corridor, and so is "Corridor III - The Void." The third ends the album, which isn't an awful choice. I'd rather all of these corridors be combined and condensed into a final composition to end the project, rather than break up each meaty track. The last non-corridor track is "Beyond the Threshold of Flesh," an eight-minute epic that grabbed my attention just like most other songs for a small period, but the slowness and gloom are boring at this point. The cruel, plodding tempo is fine for a while, but I started to do other things to pass the time while listening.

Phobocosm's blend of slow, chaotic genres is executed just fine, but I have to be in a really obscure mood to fully appreciate it. My reaction could be a result of my generation's epidemic of shortened attention spans, but I have a high tolerance for music."Gateway" bleeds slowly, but it bleeds so much sometimes that I forget when, where, and how it began bleeding. I love the technicality, but I wish it didn't put me to sleep.