Totally amazed that I'd never heard these guys before. This Philly band has been around for a while and released a picture disc Lp a few years ago, but until this new album came through I had no idea that they existed. They're a perfect fit on their new label Web Of Mimicry, if way more metal than the Mr Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3 connected projects than the label is usually associated with. It's like that Ep from Girth that Mimicry put out a couple of years ago: intense and ultra-complex grindy metal fused with avant garde composition and a MASSIVE prog influence, but Cleric are even more complex and technically mind melting, delivering some incredibly crushing avant prog grind mixed with weird abstract doom and dark filmic ambience.

Opener "Allotriophagy" is twenty minutes of brain-scrambling chaos, a spastic volley of angular thrash metal riffing skyward before slipping into some PUNISHING Meshuggah style angular anti-groove, the vocals getting all stretched out, screams time-stretched endlessly and drenched in weird effects as they fly back and forth from harsh panic-stricken screams to harsh distorted bellowing, the music speeding up and slowing down unexpectedly, one minute incredibly brutal and sludgy grind, then the sound is suddenly pulled apart into a weird abstract soundscape of slow tribal drumming and processed vocals and electronic noise and creepazoid keyboards. A single sinister guitar line appears overhead after a moment, leading the track into a cloud of deep chanting voices, very prog, almost like a metallic Univers Zero for a moment, the sound lush and symphonic and terrifying, then the insane math shred explodes back into view, connected to soulful Middle Eastern vocal melodies in the background, weird ogrish chanting high in the mix, winding it up into a taut angular dirge when the death metal screams suddenly swoop in, dissonant guitars crashing over the lurching stop/start sludge. From there, the band speeds up into a whirlwind of skronky, murderous calculus-grind, dizzyingly complex and difficult riffs that eventually shift once again into some ethereal electronic haze with proggy guitar and skittery jazzy drumming, inching back into that UZ-esque prog sound with soaring dark vocals, swirling electronics, pounding intricate percussion, slowly morphing once again into doom-laden prog metal, everything drenched in delay, the music finally exploding in a geyser of angelic voices and saurian slow motion drumming before shifting into an insanely heavy maelstron of math-metal insanity and backwards drums, chaotic glitch and processed vocals that sweep over the final minutes of the track in a cybernetic tide of explosive power. And that's just the first third of the album.

The rest of Regressions buttresses the longer tracks with short industrial/ambient/drone interludes, and then "A Rush Of Blood" blossoms in a jittery jet of stuttering mathgrind violence, sudden swell of cinematic ambience, breaking off into quiter jazzy passages, machinegun hypergrind, Lustmordian drift, a totally unpredictable, dizzying rush of ultra-complex avant garde grind/doom. The rest of the album works its way through those shorter interludes of dark buzzing drone, birdsong, deep rumbling industrial murk, and the longer blasts of epic, confusional grindmetal. The heavier material is violently erratic, the band in the blink of an eye flying from massive warped doomcrush to lush choral ambience, crushing sludgemetal atmospherics and jagged hyperspeed mathmetal meltdowns, eerie jazziness drifting into spastic time-stretched metal riffs and soulful clean vocals, the album twitching and squirming through this insanity like a cross between Whourkr and Dillenger Escape Plan and a Ligeti piece, all the way to the end where the band slips into a hallucinatory, abstract sprawl of glitchy field recorded sounds, choppy distortion, and weird electronic noises swirling together into alien ambience that finally fades off with the sound of just minimal piano. A stunning disc; definitely looking forward to hearing more...