Abasi Pathos

Djently does it! New distortion from Animals As Leaders man

On their most recent tours, Animals As Leaders’ mercurial frontman Tosin Abasi has ditched the Axe-fx so beloved of his fellow djentlemen, and switched back to an old-school pedalboard into a tube amp. With Tosin starting his own guitar company, it makes sense that a foray into pedals wouldn’t be far behind.

The Pathos is a high-gain drive with a three-band EQ and a voicing switch offering a darker and brighter option. In our testing, we found that the ‘smooth’, or dark setting, didn’t really get a

look in. Metal is kind of a midrange game, and we found that the bass was pronounced enough that dialling it right back to about 10 o’clock was required for a bridge single-coil, and back to 9 o’clock or less when playing on the bridge humbucker of a Les Paul. There’s buckets of gain on tap, but, disappointingly, not loads of volume, meaning any saturation was pretty much entirely down to the pedal, and not due to our tube amp breaking up.

The pedal was designed by Wampler with Tosin, and is produced by them. It has some elements of its voicing that recall Tosin’s previously favoured Friedman BE-OD, but it also bears more than a passing resemblance to the Wampler Dracarys, its current compact high-gain offering.

All in all, it’s a quality, goodsounding pedal, as you’d expect from that partnership, but for more straightforward rock the Hamstead Odyssey might be a better shout, while for modern metal, the Amptweaker Tight Metal would win in a straight shoot-out.

Alex Lynham

Metal is a midrange game and the bass was pronounced enough