����� I got so fucked up off of Deiphago's latest album Into The Eye Of Satan that I went out and tried to grab anything else from the band I could find. As it happens, the band's previous album Satan Alpha Omega from 2012 had just been reissued on limited edition cassette, so we went ahead and picked that up along with the original CD/LP release of this satanic noise-metal monstrosity. Now, Satan Alpha Omega isn't as pointedly avant-garde as what these Filipino black/death barbarians were doing on their latest, an album that was almost Gorgutsian in it's atonal weirdness. But this stuff is still pretty far out as far as "bestial death metal" goes.

����� We're talking about blasting blackened death metal that borders on the absurd. Their imagery is a somewhat familiar m�lange of irreligious blasphemy and rabid misanthropy, visions of black magic and Satanic apocalypse seething beneath these eleven tracks of bestial chaos. Wailing air raid sirens climb above blats of ominous, soundtracky orchestral music on the intro, but when Deiphago erupt into the fanged chaos of "Human Race Absolute End", this becomes utterly inchoate, an ultra-violent cacophony of loosely structured death metal riffs, screaming atonal guitar solos, rumbling distorted bass and animalistic screams that are weirdly stretched out over the blasting assault, a strange gasping, wide-eyed blast of nearly unintelligible verbal horror that becomes swallowed up by Deiphago's maelstrom. If there's any element of order here, it's the drumming, the crazed rolls and blastbeats and thrashing tempos welding all of these blasts of discordant insanity together. And when this really gets going, it can hit almost noisecore-like levels of disorder, only to consolidate into a monstrous doom-laden riff or pulverizing, off-kilter breakdown that'll come from out of nowhere. There's a cover of Deicide's "Crucifixation" that shows up, and songs like "Heretic Oath" can almost remind me of the savage blastcore of Siege, but amplified a hundred times over, and the guitar playing is absolutely nuts, dismissing any semblance of harmony when they unleash these sickening, hyperfast blurs of atonal noise that really takes the Hanneman shred-style to the extreme. And this abomination continues unabated all the way to the end, where the band offers a final respite from their raging aural warfare. Here they sprawl out into eight minutes of blighted industrial ambience that blends rumbling abyssal drones, distant metallic rhythms and swells of evil, orchestral horror into a tense, ritualized dronescape, a soul-blackening comedown in the wake of Deiphago's scouring sonic violence.

����� It's worth noticing that this album was derided in certain corners of the metal press as being nothing more than tuneless noise. And in a way. they're right, though there is most certainly a demented intelligence lurking behind Deiphago's cacophonic noise-metal on Satan Alpha Omega. Even by "war metal" standards, Deiphago's sound is over the top, chaotic enough to nudge it in the direction of the avant-garde "berserkergrind" of Intolitarian and the outr� barbarism of bands like Tetragrammacide, Nyogthaeblisz and Teitenblood.