P.H.O.B.O.S.

With its eye-popping volcanic cover art, Tectonics should immediately draw metal interest, and the album’s been a long time coming. Born in 2000 as a four-piece, the Paris, France-based P.H.O.B.O.S. have since been whittled down to a solo act for founder Frédéric Sacri, and his debut album contains both new material and re-recorded cuts from previous EPs. The brief "Nietzschean Dynamics” instantly recalls Godflesh with a dash of Namanax, and the seven-minute "Gregarious” furthers this idea with Darkthrone-like vocals, malevolent keyboards, and industrial backbeats. "Wisdoom” is a doomier number like Candiru or Dead World interpreting Cathedral, but with a constantly grating, amplified noise of a pick being pulled across the ridges of bass guitar strings. "Monochrome Red” invites strains of Streetcleaner-era Godflesh: deliberately slow drum machine, punishing guitar chords, and echoing effects in the background. Despite clocking in at half the length of its album counterparts, the intro to "Engulfed in Subduction” sounds like the deep-space ambient of Thomas Köner, then the song is assaulted by industrial explosions and flange-effected guitars. "Nihil Credo” (Latin for "I believe nothing”) nods simultaneously to Soulstorm’s Darkness Visible and Winter’s Eternal Frost, yet retains a more pronounced black metal vibe. The album concludes with a pair of ten-minute-plus epics: "Inseminator/Matrix” sports a falsely irenic intro before demolishing chords rain down like an industrial Reverend Bizarre, and "Dormant/Dead End” has the vocal delivery of Whorgasm along with Godfleshy riffage — and, nearing the end, a Witchery-like marching outro. Named after one of the attendants of Mars, god of war, P.H.O.B.O.S. surely channel such vitriol and filth to cause other bands to cringe out of either fear or disgust.