Hoo-boy, if that Ulcerate disc that we have listed in this weeks update isn't brutal and warped enough in the death metal department for you, Deepsend has another new disc out that takes the cake for weirdest death metal album of the month. To begin with, Devast comes from the country of Algeria in North Africa, which on it's own would make these guys pretty unique. How many African death metal bands have you heard? Surprisingly, Algeria seems to have a fairly thriving death metal scene, with at least twenty different bands listed on the Algerian Death Metal page I found on Myspace. If Devast are indicative of what is going on in the Algerian DM underground, I intend to explore it further, because beyond their exotic location, there is something much stranger going on with Devast when you start listening to the music on Art Of Extermination. The disc clocks in at around 23 minutes, it's short but sweet, and the band delivers some very weird, very quirky death metal, definitely fast and brutal, with choppy downtuned riffs and blastbeats galore, but the instruments sound weirdly out of tune much of the time, and the band slips into these twisted chords and dissonant riffs that sound like something is...wrong, as if you are listening to a sick, blasting death metal band through some strange alien prism, with oddball riffs and sudden, confusing stops and starts, bizarre jazz-fusion like leads and parts where the bass player breaks into some mutant slap-bass. The guitar playing in particular is so bizarre and fucked up, with twisted alien melodies and chaotic tangles of hyperspeed shredding that use scales totally foreign to this world, that Devast enters that realm of convoluted avant-garde death metal inhabited by bands like Portal and Gorguts. Which also means that this album is seriously awesome. Their sound is just as rooted in brutal death metal as it is weird though, so you get the best of both worlds, crazy dissonant mutant death metal riffage and warped vocals combined with crushing percussive assaults and mini-gun blastbeats, a bizarre vortex that mixes Immolation with Portal into a seriously weird sound of their own.