��� I expected chaos with the new Deiphago album, but what they unleash here turned out to be another level of bestial weirdness. These Filipino black/death warmongers have been detonating their blasts of Satanic hate since the late 1980s, but Deiphago's latest Into The Eye Of Satan delivers a seemingly newfound level of aural ear-hate and outr� blastcraft. The guitar playing alone is totally insane, an assault of extreme atonal shred that makes one wonder if Deiphago axebeast Sidapa had been guzzling large quantities of Last Exit and Fredrik Thordendal's Special Defects during the writing process. It's not like this feels self-consciously avant-garde, though; the fucked-up, hyper-violent atonality of the solos and fractured, weirdly warped nature of the riffs churning and gnashing through Eye are all in service to an atmosphere of hellish violence. In the past, Deiphago have been derided by some for being too chaotic and seemingly unstructured, but it's that reckless, turbulent quality that makes this stuff sound so unique. "Psychedelic" isn't a word I often when describing this kind of black/death metal, but it definitely applies to Deiphago's swarming, delay-drenched bestial blast.

��� On their latest, Deiphago remain rooted in that classic Conqueror-influenced war metal sound while pushing their barbaric sound into stranger extremes. That they enlisted Colin Marston from Gorguts / Behold The Arctopus / Krallice to produce the album is telling, as this propels Deiphago's sound into more abstract, angular territory. The album enters their killzone on a wave of imperious orchestral murk and snarling black noise, then proceeds to unleash a violent assault of total noise metal. In some ways akin to Teitenblood's latest, this is bestial black/death metal pushed into utterly cacophonic madness, a grindcore-style blur of hyperspeed blastbeats and pummeling war-toms hurtling beneath a maelstrom of hopelessly angular riffage and full-blown atonal noise, but with more emphasis on sculpting monstrous riffs out of that churning black chaos. That awesome, twisted dissonant guitarwork really adds to the unusual feel of this stuff; when you hear the sweeping waves of spaced-out skronk and almost jazz-like shredding that flies across these nine tracks, and the overload of rhythmic weirdness that continues to unravel with each song, it's clearly a new level of madness that Deiphago is exploring here. There are moments like "Bloodbath Of Genocide" where the violent blasting falls back and it sounds as if the guitarist is attempting to wrangle a mutated classic rock-style riff out of his instrument, then suddenly everything erupts into an almost Gorgutsian assault of atonal shred. A few riffs even seem to mimic the sounds of doom-laden orchestral string sections, lending moments of oppressive, desolate ambiance glimpsed briefly in the band's cyclonic deathnoise attack. Other tracks like the suffocating �Red Dragon of Chaos� become saturated with cosmic synth-like noise, giving the song an almost industrial vibe.

��� It's only with the very last song, "Into The Eye Of Satan", that Deiphago slow down into something approaching a "groove", a monstrous, sludgy, dundering caveman riff that is quickly sucked back up into the tornadic chaos, flayed by another savage shot of ultra-atonal, unmusical skronk-shred that resembles a demonic Sonny Sharrock, and ending with an abrupt blast of sinister, clanging metallic noise and garbled voices tangled in atonal violin-like skree, like the sound of some monstrous sepulchral door slamming shut, leaving the listener entombed in absolute blackness. Definitely one of the most intense blackened death metal albums to show up this year, thanks to the wealth of whacked-out, gonzo riffs and the sheer weirdness of Deiphago's sonic assault. Awesome.