P.H.O.B.O.S.
“PHLOGISTON CATHARSIS”
Album Review by Dark Juan

10/10

P.H.O.B.O.S. are: Brutal deluxe!

Frederic Sacri – Vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass, programming. He’s a busy chap, is Fred.

Good afternoon, mes amis. Dark Juan is currently dying from heat exhaustion but you are being brought this review via the means of iced Breton cider, a darkened room, headphones and P.H.O.B.O.S. This is a welcome relief from the pig bladder kicking tournament that is currently gripping the world. Apparently some Brazilian guy called Neymar falls over a lot if you so much as look at him. It makes you wonder what the point is. It’s a silly game played by silly people and it’s just bread and circuses to distract you all from reality. And reality, my friends, is METAL! Metal will never leave you or harm you (it might hurt you but it’s meant to!) and it is ALWAYS there for you. It’s the perfect partner for everything you do. I love metal. It makes me happy. It also doesn’t roll all over the floor screaming as soon as someone breathes on it. And then magically gets up as if nothing has happened when a bloke waves a sponge over it.

P.H.O.B.O.S. also make me happy. It’s another French band, this time coming from the Ile De France and fuck me but I never thought I would hear this kind of music coming from France. P.H.O.B.O.S. play a weird fusion of industrial, grind, doom and black metal and I fucking dig it! Imagine an orgy involving early Pitch Shifter (before they lost the space in their name, any form of brutality, and started Making Plans For Nigel…) Swans (especially around the Cop era), Electric Wizard, Godflesh, a quite terribly stoned and drastically slowed down The Berzerker and Sunn O))). Now imagine the bastardised offspring of those bands after a difficult gestation.

“Congratulations, scuzzy metal bands of many genres. You’ve got a healthy, bouncing baby…. something. Oh GOD MY EYES TAKE IT AWAY AND KILL IT AND BURY IT IN A DEEP DARK HOLE BEFORE IT SEES THE LIGHT OF DAY. YOU CAN’T LET LOOSE THAT MONSTER ON THE WORLD!”

Those were the words of the midwife who birthed P.H.O.B.O.S. But in French. They were her last words before the unfortunate and strange accident that found her with several bite wounds, strung up with piano wire and every major artery opened, all apparently done by her own hand and teeth. Disturbingly, she had turned herself into a mannequin, it was subsequently discovered by Gendarmes. P.H.O.B.O.S. was closely questioned about these things but subsequently cleared in the investigations as it was conclusively proved P.H.O.B.O.S. was elsewhere at the time…

Now, it’s fair to say that Dark Juan is partial to a bit of industrial music, considering Slateman by Godflesh is my favourite ever tune (followed very closely by Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, but that’s by the by) but P.H.O.B.O.S. speak to me like no other band has for many years. This is simply an incredible record to me. It has everything I love on it – murderous slow grind, like slowly being fed into chain driven toothed rollers. Industrial noise, like the sound of the meat factories pumping out their product from the humans being herded into the other side of them. Bastardised, distorted, fuzzy, filthy dirty guitars, like the sound of your worst nightmare when you wake up from it and discover you’re still in the post-apocalyptic, decaying hospital you were dreaming about and remembering the sound of the massive, malformed creature hurtling towards you. Drums that are distorted, evil sounding and reminiscent of the marching of the cyborg deathsquads clearing out the ruins of your city and herding you to the meat factories. Their boots crunching over human skulls and stamping on human faces, forever. P.H.O.B.O.S. paint the kind of aural soundscapes that make Blade Runner look like an advert for the Maldives. It’s black, stygian, dystopic, ruined industrial landscapes with acid rain and scuttling people with unsuited limbs. It’s the sound of armoured hovercraft manoeuvring over the ruins, spitting purple laserlight from beam projectors at dark shadows that might have been people whilst their turbine engines scream and throw up clouds of dust and gravel and stones that pound off the windows of your hiding place. This record is utterly compelling and absolutely incredible. The vocals are brutal, visceral and eye poppingly in your face. There is not a bad track on the record. It’s one long trip down into the pits of some mechanised, oily hell and P.H.O.B.O.S. are the sound of it echoing up from the depths as you timidly approach. Murderous, heavier than your mum covered in plutonium, relentlessly bleak and blacker than a miner’s armpit. Dark Juan would give both bollocks to play this music live with M. Sacri and watch the people just dissolve in front of me, such is the power and heaviness on display…

So, then, this is a great record. It’s brought new life into a genre you don’t hear much of these days. It’s so uncompromising it is probably preferable to slice off your own skin. It is also utterly magnificent and worth every penny you spend on it. It’s that rare thing, my friends. Full fucking marks.

The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System thinks P.H.O.B.O.S. are the soundtrack to his own personal apocalypse and has been sharpening his own weapons for hours now. P.H.O.B.O.S. are awarded the ultimate 10/10. I’m getting too soft.

TRACKLIST: Be prepared for some word salad here….

Biomorphorror (I like this one. Pretty much describes the music of P.H.O.B.O.S. in one word.)
Igneous Tephrapotheosis (Fuck knows. I know that igneous is a type of rock but I am far too lazy today to search out anything on the internet. Deal with it.)
Zam Alien Canyons (At least I can understand this one!)
Aurora Sulphora (Otherwise known as the Devil’s farts?)
Neurasthen Logorrh (Just forget it.)
Taqiyah Rhyzom (You’re just making shit up now, Frederic. You don’t fool me…)
Aljannashid (See? Now you’re not even typing. You’re just battering the keyboard and seeing what happens.)
Smothered In Scoria (Before being excoriated?)

http://www.phobosdrone.org/
https://megatonmassproducts.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/P-H-O-B-O-S–997291130295639/

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