Recently re-issued by Nuclear War Now, Antediluvian's suffocating surrealist death metal nightmare Through The Cervix Of Hawwah is presented in a gorgeous hard-back tipped-in gatefold package that is book-bound and includes the entire booklet bound into the cover - it's one of NWN's coolest vinyl presentations, and pretty essential if you're as big a fan of the band's unique, amoebic artwork as I am. The album is spread across four sides of black wax, with the fourth side featuring etched artwork.

I was definitely one of the converted after I heard Antediluvian's Revelations In Excrement. That platter of swirling, mutated death metal and discordant blackness offered one of the more outr� interpretations of early death metal barbarism, finding it scuttling around in the same dank, mold-slick pit as the likes of Portal, Impetuous Ritual, Teitanblood, Mitochondrion, Rites Of Thy Degringolade, and Encoffination. Of course this also means that some have described this Canadian band as a mere Incantation clone, but as far as I'm concerned, the more avant-garde moments in Incantation's musical history are always prime for pillaging if the music is as fucked sounding and unsettling as it is on their first full-length album Cervix. One of the best descriptions I've seen for this album came from the excellent blog Grimmer Than Thou when they compared it to "vintage Incantation jamming on the rim of a worm hole.", and if that sounds even mildly appealing, you need to pick this up. The nine songs on Through The Cervix Of Hawwah are complex webs of hyper speed blast beats and controlled rhythmic chaos, swirling blackened tremolo riffs awash in diseased, nerve-scorching discordance, ultra-guttural occult exhortations, and passages of pitch-black ritualistic ambience that form together into a mind-bending labyrinth of experimental blackened death metal. The brutality level on rampaging blastscapes like the title track and "Intuitus Mortuus" mostly stays in the red, save for when the band detours into hellish black ambience like the last half of the latter song where they roll out ecstatic moaning, chamber strings, demonic grunts and a fogbank of Funerary Call-esque dread.

Antediluvian's doom-laden, sludgy death metal isn't as chaotic and abstract as that of Portal, nor is it as bone-crushing as the graveyard ooze of Encoffination; the band instead blasts through a squirming vortex of wormy riffs and brief eruptions of slow-motion doom, the weird deformed riffing sometimes blossoming into the kind of triumphant hooks found on "From Seraphic Embrace " and "Scions Of Ha Nachash", sometimes mutating into vicious, angular deathsludge, born of the same hellish micro-organisms pictured in the album's superb surrealistic black and white artwork. And closer "Erect Reflection (Abyss Of Organic Matter)" is a wall of dissonant sound that wouldn't sound out of place on a Sonic Youth album, at least up the point where that roaring guitar-squall finally explodes into a swarming mass of jagged blackened death metal at the end.

Highly recommended!