����� I dug Diocletian's latest album Gesundrian a lot, and was utterly flattened by the band when I caught their set at Maryland Deathfest a while back, but it's taken me awhile to check out the earlier works from this savage New Zealand outfit, who unfortunately have called it a day. They left behind an impressive catalog though, and their 2010 album War Of All Against All is a particularly noxious piece of Baphometic noise-metal.

����� The bulk of the album gets pretty deep into virtual grindcore territory, a blasting, barbaric chaos of garbled-but-crushing guitar riffs, rumbling low end, and rhythmically simple but thoroughly pummeling drumming that leads this stuff through frenzies of ultrafast black/grind and passages of plodding doom-laden heaviness. As with most bands in this realm, Diocletian's music is indebted to the classic bestial black/death violence of Conqueror, but these guys found their own warzone frequency with a more straightforward drum assault and a noisier, more unfocused guitar attack. The guitars on War tend to bleed together into a putrescent black blurr of atonal tremolo riffing and low-end rumble, and there are moments like the cyclonic chaos of "Death Tyrant" that feels like the band is right on the verge of spinning out of control into total noisecore, with a filthy, rumbling wall of noise and layered, demonic shrieking layered on top of the monotonous blastbeats. When that suddenly snaps into focus with an effectively eerie riff coalescing out of the maelstrom, that chaos produces a really captivating effect. There's lots of seriously fucked-up guitar soloing as well, bursts of shrieking discordant shred that are reminiscent of Order From Chaos, and the few spots where Diocletian slips into one of their barbaric grooves makes for some of the album's most pulverizing sequences, like the neanderthal breakdown that lurches violently across the middle of "Infernos".

����� But all of that changes at the album's end, though. That last song is an epic, hellish soundscape, quite different from all of the previous tracks. It starts off with another of their lumbering slow-motion riffs, surrounded by gusts of ominous black drift and blanketed with a layer of droning murk. But as this sixteen minute track unfolds, it evolves into a massive sludgy death-dirge, that riff grinding against an increasingly abrasive backdrop of industrial noise and malevolent ambience, the singer's bestial screams shifting into a weird robotic chant, the whole sound gradually breaking down into an ocean of metallic whirr and factory-floor rumble, everything clotting into a dense fog of looping, resonant mechanical drones that stretches across the remainder of the album, sounding more like something from noise artists like K2 or Government Alpha than your standard-issue wargoat racket.

����� Like most black/death bands, Diocletian's ultra-noisy war-blurr probably won't win you over if you don't already have a taste for the more tuneless, extremist violence that comprises this style, but they certainly bring their own interesting twist to it with this album, still my favorite of theirs. Comes with completely different sleeve art than the original release as well as a big foldout poster featuring Paolo Girardi's artwork, and is limited to one thousand copies.