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ANTIGAMA  Meteor  CD   (Selfmadegod)   11.98


    The long-awaited return of Antigama! Actually, these Polish avant-garde grinders have kept busy over the past year or so, bringing us a killer, all-too-brief EP that came out in early 2012, and followed that with a collection of experimental electronic remixes of that same EP that came out earlier this year, but Antigama's sixth album Meteor is the full-fledged grind opus I've been looking forward to since 2009's Warning. If anything, these guys have become even more savage in the intervening years, honing their performance into a stunningly precise attack that hints at the crushing lockstep power of post-Y2K Napalm Death, and then injecting a crazed discordance and angular complexity that has more in common with the cold, dissonant sound of Voivod and Obscura-era Gorguts. Antigama take that ripping metallic grindcore sound deeper into industrial-tinged dissonance than anybody else I can think of within the realm of grind, taking that Diatribes-era mechanized math-grind and injecting it with a potent mixture of ferocious musicianship, noisiness, and imaginative sci-fi concepts. They keep the requisite short song lengths on Meteor, but even within the space of a minute and a half, Antigama pack in an incredible amount of riffage, quickly moving between passages of grinding, almost Godfleshian discordance and hyper-speed blastmetal forged out of complex, angular riffing and stop-on-a-dime tempo changes. Man, this stuff is FEROCIOUS, and the cumulative power of these eleven songs makes this possibly my favorite Antigama album yet. Can't really remember any of their previous albums sounding quite this vicious. There's some awesome, almost noise rock-like breakdowns that show up on songs like "Prophecy", skronky, dissonant chords smashing into sludgy rhythms and disappearing into weird wormholes of droning, dark feedback/electronics, and "Fed By The Feeling" whips out some vicious mid-tempo rocking chuggery that later turns into this weird stuttering, off-kilter passage where the singer slips into some off-the-wall jazzy scat-singing that comes from out of left field; it's easily the most insane moment on the album. The black kosmische voids of "Turbulence" give birth to both dark drum-n'-bass abstractions and a burst of awesome 70's style Moog-drenched space/prog-metal heaviness that might be my favorite song on here, and "Stargate" transforms into complex time-signature changes, constantly shifting riffage and alien electronic ambience fractured into a surrealistic stop-start blastscape. Billowing black ambience unfolds across the first few minutes of closer "Untruth", before lurching into another crushing discordant dirge, this one with a real heavy Killing Joke vibe, emblazoned with massive math-metal breakdowns and more of that crazed proggy Moog organ all over the place. Fantastic, and highly recommended to fans of high-quality, forward-thinking grind.


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