��� Trans-Atlantic crush-squad Combat Astronomy are back with more of their brilliant fusion of Magma/Univers Zero-style Zeuhl prog and Godfleshian heaviness, and this time they're bludgeoning us with two discs of their jazz-wrecked power. As on other Combat Astronomy albums, this features the core duo of James Huggett (five string bass, guitar, drum programming) and British saxophonist Martin Archer (who also contributes organ, electric piano, mellotron, electronics, clarinet and glockenspiel), with additional assistance from British jazz drummer Peter Fairclough, but for such a small lineup, the music they create sounds massive. Time Distort Nine expands their dark, ultra-heavy sound further across this two-disc set, easily their most immense album to date. And it is immense, heavier than anything I've heard from the band, which is saying a lot if you've already heard the kind of pulverizing jazz-metal these guys have been perfecting over the past decade, a monstrous take on the sort of jazz-damaged heaviness that we used to get from bands like 16-17, Kevin Martin's God and others of the Pathological Records ilk.

��� Kicking off with an over-modulated bass guitar winding through the opening minutes of "Tenser Quadrant", the group erupts into their contorted crushing prog pretty quickly, sprawling out across this seventeen minute opener as an ominous riff begins to take shape over Fairclough's martial snares and the slow sinister swirl of electric piano. It's gradually joined by trumpets as the song suddenly swings into a sort of dark, burly jazz-rock, with complex arrangements and hypnotic mile-long grooves that the elliptic bass guitar riffs cut through the constantly shifting time signatures. This song is a perfect example of their mesmeric, menacing jazz-prog, underscored by some amazingly creepy layers of dissonance and electronic noise, the sound sometimes shifting into squalls of improvised shriek and skronk while never straying too far from the heavy percussive rhythms, and often slipping into crushing awkward grooves that hint at a kind of abstract math-metal.

��� The other three tracks on that first disc are in a similar vein, with crushing staccato riffage and twisted, angular grooves laid out over swirling electronics and spacey jazziness, the lurching, almost Meshuggah-esque riffs sputtering and slithering through clouds of dreamy keyboard drift and the soft bleating of saxophones. Those horns are layered into lush drones and haunting melodic shapes, plumes of brass rising over those monstrous stuttering rhythms. This stuff can sometimes slip into stretches of abstract ambience and deep-space drone, with squelchy synths buzzing and flitting around the sound of gleaming chrome chord clusters hanging suspended in in space, breaking out into minimal pulses of light and energy, or dissolving into surreal washes of fragmented vocals and abstract electronics, like the glitchy weirdness that takes over the second half of "Unity Weapon". And the closer "Hypogeous" decays into a total drone-zone of dark, rumbling sound, everything stripped down to swirling waves of dissonant thrum and tectonic rumbling, a crushing, almost Earth-en metallic dronescape slowly billowing across the end of the disc.

��� Most of the eight tracks that make up the second disc are shorter and more direct, though these too see the band often veering into different directions at once. There are more of those frenetic sax-splattered math-metal grooves that seem to spin out into infinity, ghostly jazz-drones curling across washes of ghostly sample-laden ambience, and ferociously cacophonous jazzcore assaults like "Ankh" and the pummeling industrialized dub-crush of "Almaz"; some of the more experimental material is found in the forays into improvised clatter and squonk on opener "Inertia in Flames", where they develop a pervasive feeling of unease until the track finally erupts into monstrously malformed Magmoid heaviness, while towards the end Combat Astronomy give us what is probably the most accessible song I've ever heard from the band, an almost Sabbathian-style rocker called "SuperFestival" that's pure hypno-rock perfection.

��� Needless to say, if you're a fan of Combat Astronomy's prior slabs of monstrous mutant jazz-prog, Time is a must-hear. Comes in digipack packaging.