Gerda's new full length album III delivers the band's best material yet, still centered around their brand of ultra-crushing mathmetal wound into massive apocalyptic grooves, but the band has tapped deeper into their melodic side, bringing some epic melodic moves to their otherwise brutally dissonant wall-of-skronk assault. Gerda arose out of the Italian DIY hardcore/screamo underground, but their music has more in common with the punishing angular heaviness that stalked the American midwest during the first half of the 1990's, especially the influential metallic math rock of Dazzling Killmen. Gerda take that sound and make it darker, heavier, more blown out and chaotic, and definitely much more complex...

The first half of the album blazes through several tracks of chaotic, metallic power. None of them are particularly short, with several songs exceeding six minutes in length, but Gerda never let their churning riff meltdowns get tedious; instead, the guitars collide against each other with dissonant riffs and layers of repetitive skronk and droning single-note lines and create these massive walls of sound, clusters of riffs and wailing guitar noise that turn into a seriously hypnotic sonic assault, and while this is going on, the drummer goes from frantic math-thrash workouts to locking in to a monstrous off-time krautrock groove, a stuttering heaving but unbelievably HEAVY rhythmic pummel.

The first song is one of the best examples of this. Almost from the word go, the band plummets headfirst into a crazed tangle of skronky guitar, crushing metallic riffs, detuned blower bass fluttering madly, weird electronic noises and oscillator fuckery squealing and droning in the background, the drums pounding out the warped time signatures, the sound of a chaotic metalcore band gone completely mad, sometimes slipping into something resembling an angular groove, but more often getting caught in a violent throbbing mass of psychedelic mathgrind. Towards the end, it does turn into a huge rocking mathy groove, super noisy and krautrocky but still locked into a weird off-time rhythm, and slowly an epic melodic "riff" starts to take shape underneath the guitar wreckage and percussive freakout, teasing at becoming a dramatic climactic riff for a minute before the recording suddenly breaks up, drops out, as if the tape has gone haywire, and the song abruptly ends.

The next track is less hectic and with more melodic riffing, eerie lurching math-metal laced with ominous ascending guitars and those larynx-ripping screams, but the end is a total surprise, a massive melodic hook, all jangly guitars and dissonant chords raging over a propulsive rolling drumbeat. Those melodic guitars reappear for the beginning of the third song, which continues with that dirgey, ominous feel, and the song alternates between softer, darker sections and the heavier, more frantic and dramatic parts, with clanking metallic percussion and spacey electronic fx showing up.

That's followed by an eleven minute epic that moves from skronky thrash to pummeling metallic no-wave to frenetic hardcore before finally falling into a bass-heavy dirge that stretches out for several minutes, a doomy, majestic, mathy groove that extends almost all the way to the end, with large parts of it almost totally instrumental as the band winds through intricate arpeggios, parts where everything drops out for a moment and only the drums remain, pounding out slow, heavy tribal rhythms. And the last song is another blast of brooding complex mathiness, chaotic riffing that once again slowly turns into gorgeously moody heaviness.

As they did on their last album, Gerda channels the gloomy grandeur of Neurosis through the jazzy math-metal of Dazzling Killmen, cranks up the metallic crunch and the complexity tenfold, and comes out with one of the most intense and adventurous math-metal sounds around. But on III, the band has taken this sound a step further, crafting some immensely epic melodic moments that are all the more powerful when contrasted with the apeshit angular riffs, but best of all, the rhythm section has turned Gerda into a much more hypnotic and proggy beast with the huge choppy confounding grooves, a kind of anti-motorik pulse, Dazzling Killmen meets Neurosis meets The Psychic Paramount, muscular and weighty and insanely complex. Highly recommended!

Italian import on black vinyl, and comes with a cd version of the album.