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I remember coming across Obliveon's self-titled demo during my tape trading days in 1987, back when they went by Oblivion. They worked in a relatively weird hybrid of Death and Thrash Metal, and I decided to follow their work from then on because of it. Fast forward to 1993 and we get their sophomore album, Nemesis, which was self-released due to the bottom falling out under Thrash and labels refusing to take anything that wasn't Death Metal or Grunge. That's a damn shame, not only because it indicated the Dark Ages going into full swing, but also because this is easily the best album Obliveon ever made.

This is unsurprisingly a refinement of what they were doing on From This Day Forward. What that gives us is an album full of technical yet catchy Thrash with a strong sense of melody that was perfectly complemented by the death grunts of vocalist/bassist Stéphane Picard to make for a sound unlike anything else at the time, only tighter and more complex than before. This is most evident in the guitar work from duo Martin Gagné and Pierre Rémillard, who churned out an endless stream of tasty riffs and stellar solos that fill the album to the brim, all of which are so good it makes picking standout tracks a matter of reading the whole damn track list. This is all highlighted by an excellent production job whose clarity gives everything the room it needs to breathe, certainly better than the thin sound found on the debut.

Despite having been reissued over the years, this can be a hard album to track down a physical copy for, in no small part due to how underground it is. However, I promise that it's worth finding, as it stands as the finest hour for one of the Canadian underground's greatest bands. An underground classic.