Back in stock. The latest album from Canadian outfit Antediluvian, Logos (the English translation of the actual title, an ancient Greek term for "the word of God") brings us nine new tracks of their bizarre blackened death metal that had previously pummeled me on the Through The Cervix Of Hawaah album and with their split with Adversarial. With a lineup that has connections to other ferocious black/death outfits from the Great White North like Gloria Diaboli and Revenge, one expects Antediluvian to share in the savagery that seems to constantly radiate from the Edmonton black/death scene; while their music is most certainly violent, the chaotic, tentacled blackness that swarms off of Logos is far more surrealistic, a bizarre mutation of that oft-copied Incantation-influenced death metal sound that has here been twisted and warped into something much more contorted and nebulous. Antediluvian's embrace of gibbering chaos often places their music at the intersection of bestial black/death, the angular insanity of bands like Mitochondrion and Portal, and even the splintered discordance of Obscura-era Gorguts, but there's an additional seething, amorphous quality to this stuff, mirrored in the band's strange abstract album art, that gives this a uniquely horrific and repulsive atmosphere.
The opening track on Logos exemplifies this formless horror, spreading open with a gaping black chasm of murky industrial ambience before erupting into droning, churning death murk; "Homunculus Daimon-eon (Awakening)" spreads quickly outwards like an oily black stain, a cacophony of incoherent bottom-heavy riffage and tumultuous blastbeats, the sound shifting between the blazing fast chaos and sudden descents into crushing, unformed deathdoom. The vocals are a primal gurgle, a litany of incomprehensible guttural growls smeared into bestial rumblings, while screams of soul-rending terror streak across the shimmering petroleum blackness; within these abject howls lie lyrics that read like a kind of jet-black surrealist poetry. The rest of the album spills out in similar fashion, each song a shambling mass of discordant blackened death metal, the guitars spewing eerie atonal melodies amid the chaotic riffing, the sound teetering on the edge of total incoherence, balanced between crushing, sludge-encrusted riffage and hellishly infectious barbed hooks, and a gnashing maelstrom of mindless chaos that comes threateningly close to the dissonant, otherworldly delirium of Portal. Brief passages of nightmarish ambient drift, distant hazy choral gleam, and putrid minimal synth continue to ooze out of the cracks that appear between tracks, and the band will frequently loom out of the frenzied, murky blast into a sickeningly discordant doom riff, an almost Gorguts-like passage of immense fractured riffage and atonal ugliness that is soon enough swallowed back up in the gibbering amoebic maelstrom.
Comes in gatefold packaging with a twelve page art-zine style booklet that features the band's signature strain of high contrast, hyper-abstract bacterial illustrations, accompanied by a large foldout poster.