ABERRATIONS

"Aberrations" is the debut full-length studio album by US, New Orleans based act Cosmophobe. The album was independently released in December 2020. Cosmophobe released the "Infinite Unreality" EP in October 2020. None of the three tracks from the EP are featured on "Aberrations".

The material on "Aberrations" is instrumental technical death metal/deathcore. With the absence of growling vocals, this probably shouldn´t be called death metal/deathcore, but the instrumental part of the music still points in that direction. It´s both fast-paced and mid-paced and groove laden, featuring heavy chugging riffs and groove heavy rhythms and breakdowns. There are also loads of more melodic moments, leads, and guitar solos, and also some atmospheric moments, so this is not a one-dimensional listen.

Cosmophobe is a one-man project, and that´s unfortunately apparent from the programmed drums. They are decent enough, but a real humam drummer would have made "Aberrations" a better release. There are just some sections on the album where the drums drag the quality of the music down, because it´s too obvious the drums are programmed (listen to the blastbeat section of opening track "Traumatized" about 25 seconds into the track, and tell me that snare drum sound doesn´t bother you just a little bit). The remaining part of the music is very well performed, and well produced too.

The songwriting is intriguing and varied, and there are both some nice brutal and powerful parts as well as some more melodic/atmospheric parts. The riffs and the lead guitar parts are the main attraction here, but if they weren´t placed in well constructed songs, they probably wouldn´t have worked as well as they do here. So the songwriting should be mentioned as an asset here. Upon conclusion "Aberrations" is a good quality debut album by Cosmophobe. A 3.5 star (70%) rating is deserved.

(Originally posted on Metal Music Archives)