Here's another amazing reissue from the Polish label Metal Mind. Amazing in that both the label actually decided to reissue what is one of the weirdest death metal albums of all time, and also in that the label gave this another one of their high quality packaging jobs, making this totally essential for both fans of the Austrian band Disharmonic Orchestra who have been missing this long out-of-print album from their collection, and enthusiasts of severely warped death metal.

The band's first album Expositionsprophylaxe from 1990 found a home with fans of creative death metal who grooved on their quirky riffing and general oddball aesthetic that had them compared somewhat to the more interesting death and thrash bands of that time like Celtic Frost and Voivod. But when their second album, 1992's Not To Be Undimensional Conscious rolled around, even the more adventurous metalheads were trying to figure out what to make of it. From the surreal, New Wave style cover art from Gerhard Klopf to the absurd band photo on the back of the album that pictured the members kneeling among a pile of stuffed animals with freaked-out stares on their faces, this sure didn't look like a death metal band, and it just becomes weirder once you start spinning this. The music on Not To Be Undimensional Unconscious is definitely death metal, there are the requisite gutteral vocals, the ferocious double bass drumming and blastbeats, the crushing riffs...but the way that it's all put together just sounds completely fucked up and warped. The bass is the first thing that jumps out at you, because bassist Herwig Zamernik essentially plays a heavy funk style complete with bass slaps and percussive plucks and crazy fretboard runs that sound totally alien next to the blasting death metal. The riffs are all contorted, too, going from straightforward thrashy riffing to jazzoid chord structures and more melodic parts, and drummer Martin Messner fills the music with awesome, off the wall rhythms, furious jazzy fills and technical patterns. The songs go through weird twists and turns, and there is a tendency on a lot of the songs to slip into these subversively catchy choruses that almost sound poppy. Then there's the song "The Return Of The Living Beat", which is a remake of a song that appeared on their split with Pungent Stench from 1989 - at one point in the middle of the song, the band actually breaks down and starts busting out this totally goofy, brain-damaged old school hip hop part. And instrumental "Time Frame" combines death metal riffing, some mutoid version of jazz fusion, and Casio-powered prog rock in the space of six minutes. I'm betting that Disharmonic Orchestra were really influenced by the genre-defying Into The Pandemonium when they were putting this album together, but what they ended up with turned out to be much weirder and definitely goofier. The closest contempos for this album that I can come up with are bands like Cynic, Pestilence and Atheist with their prog/jazz/fusion leanings; but again, this album is far weirder, existing in it's own weird world where funk, prog-damaged riffing, imbecilic rapping, and whirlwind deathmetal blur together. Probably an acquired taste to anyone whose not a rabid fan of bizarro-death/thrash, but if you do happen to be a fan of the weirder end of death and thrash metal from this era (Voivod, Garlik D'eth, Cynic, Into The Pandemonium-era Frost, you get my drift), you should give these guys a listen.

Another excellent package from Metal Mind, the gold pressed disc presented in a full color digipack with a mulitpage booklet with all of the lyrics. Oh yeah, and they also included the tracks from Disharmonicn Orchestra's 1989 EP Successive Substitution on here as a bonus.