Polish reissue label Metal Mind has resurrected another death metal anomaly with Disharmonic Orchestra's 2002 album Ahead, which originally came out on Nuclear Blast. Given their standard deluxe treatment, fully remastered and presented in a machine-numbered digipack (and limited to 2000 copies), the label gives fans of weirdo European metal another chance to get their hands on what was Disharmonic's weirdest album yet, a collection of songs that went way beyond the limits of death metal, even further than their earlier work, which is still some of the wonkiest death metal you'll ever hear. Besides Xysma, these Austrian heshers had one of the oddest trajectories of a death metal band ever, starting off as a typically brutal early death metal outfit in the late 80s and releasing a now classic split LP with Pungent Stench, to evolving into an whacked out hybrid of death metal, grindcore, prog/art rock, goofy humor, and totally mental attempts at jazz fusion, releasing the insane, Zorn-damaged death metal of Not To Be Undimensional Conscious. A couple of other albums followed, but for the latter half of the 90's Disharmonic Orchestra was pretty quiet until they resurfaced with Ahead in the early oughts, throwing another curveball with a new industrial/alt rock tinged sound that was blended with their whacko Faith No More/Bungle inspired genre fuckery , but anyone expecting the blasting death metal of their earlier years would be disappointed, although there are some traces of that here as well...

The album begins with the instrumental industrial metal jam "Plus One", then tears though another instrumental called "Rusmtsim" where the band shifts into twenty seconds of brutal death metal. It's not till track three, "Supervision� that the vocals finally kick in, over another catchy industrial rocker a la Prong or Therepy? that changes into metallic crunch after a couple of minutes, then briefly morphs again into some spacey, complex grindcore right before heading back into that chunky industrial metal riff. From there, gentle woodwinds and weird vocalizations start off "Nine9nine", then the song turns into a mathy alt-metal jam with backwards vocals, submerged techno rhythms, and swirling guitar effects, and "Grit Your Teeth" is an oddball mix of melodic metallic punk and tribal drumming and metallic mosh. The rest of the songs wig out further, unpredictable and quirky jaunts through crunchy guitar rock, Voivod-esque riffs, parts that sound like heavier Faith No More, brief blasts of crushing death metal, bizarre song arrangements, metal/techno mashups, sudden detours into gorgeous piano-driven pop that erupt into thunderous Fear Factory-esque mecha-metal, and some stuff that resembles the spacey operatic metal of Arcturus. The band's death metal side raises it's head here and there - the short deathgrind eruption of "If This is It, It Isn't It, is It?", the throwback to the early Disharmonic sound "Pain of Existence" - but that's a minor element here, mixed in with their absurdist dadaist metal and wacky sense of humor. The album ends with aq hidden track of traditional Austrian yodeling, for chrissakes. Metal fans that dug the weirdness of Into The Pandemonium might dig this, but Disharmonic Orchestra are much weirder and goofier and far-out.