Album Review: Pleiades Dust [EP] by Gorguts

The 2013 release of Colored Sands was an epic return for Quebec technical death metal masters Gorguts. Thankfully, frontman Luc Lemay and company haven't waited quite that long to follow it up, as they're now offering up a new EP, titled Pleiades' Dust.The band took a unique approach with the release by creating a single, 33-minute track divided into several "movements" that equate to chapters in a book. Their most compositionally ambitious release to date, the EP maintains Gorguts' signature sound, with brilliant guitar work, crushing riffs, brutal blasts and Lemay's iconic vocals.

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Review Summary: Is "Pleiades' Dust" just 33-minutes of "Colored Sands" condensed into one song? Yeah, it basically is. Is that in its own right a wonderful thing? Absolutely. Only Gorguts could disappear for over a decade then rise from the abyss and still claim the status as the greatest death metal band around.

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After 25 years of making music, Gorguts still manage to break barriers. Taking the name of the famous constellation, 'Pleiades’ Dust' offers a kind of sonic interpretation of celestial affairs. Of course the technical musicianship of the EP is top notch, but the form is what’s most striking. The entire release consists of one 33-minute track that operates more as an orchestral movement than a death metal jam.

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The month of May certainly didn't overwhelm Carl and I as much as last month did, but it was still chock-full with important releases to whet our appetites until the summer begins. Carl was also significantly more generous - though he's completely enamored by James Blake's winning streak, I ….

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For a genre whose fans are so often labeled (sometimes rightly) as rigid constructionists, metal’s last few years have been marked by an unprecedented burst of boundary-pushing experimentation. While there are still staunch traditionalists, many of metal’s best minds are now dedicating themselves to uncovering heretofore undiscovered realms of heaviness. In the last few months alone there’s been a flurry of invention all the way across the heavy music spectrum, with black metal bands like Blut Aus Nord embracing classical bombast, and thrash outfits like Vektor unafraid to offer dead-eyed chanting that wouldn’t sound out of place on a new-age record.

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