This Polish grindcore band has been getting a lot of attention lately, after releasing the excellent Zeroland album last year and the recent announcement of their signing with Relapse Records for their next full length. As far as I'm concerned, all of the hype surrounding ANTIGAMA is justified, 'cuz Zeroland was one of the most ferocious, forward-thinking grind blasts of 2005, a heavy as hell mutation of precision grindpunk and mechanized metal fused to a thoroughly creepy mixture of futuristic sound collage and dark ambience. While we're anxiously waiting for their follow-up to Zeroland, Selfmadegod Records has stepped in with this new re-issue of the debut album from ANTIGAMA, Intellect Made Us Blind, originally released back in 2001. This album is, as one would expect, a slightly rawer incarnation of the band's mechanoid grind sound, but these songs are just as fucked up and bizarre as anything the band is doing now, making this pretty essential for anyone who fell under the spell of Zeroland. The band unleashes an avalanche of relentless blastbeats and burly grindpunk riffage that tap into the same rabid bloodstream as late-era BRUTAL TRUTH, majorly heavy shit, but Intellect Made Us Blind really messes with your neurons when the band makes their sudden left turns into punishing GODFLESH-esque dirge, freeform tribal-industrial trance, and transmissions of steel sheets of electronic ambience. With their more recent, goth-mecha-avant-grind material being my introduction to ANTIGAMA, I really wasn't expecting their early material to be this terminally badass and weird, but it is. Sometimes the massive percussive riffage and industrial metal rhythms remind me of a crustier version of what FEAR FACTORY was doing on their first album, but this is way more fucked, a schizoid dystopian urban grind nightmare illustrated with bizarre, seemingly stream-of-consciousness lyrics. An awesome debut, highly recommended, especially if you were as big a fan of ANTIGAMA's Zeroland album as we are!