Rating: 7.9

Country: Poland

Release Date: 2005

Track list:
1. Seed
2. Izaak [mp3]
3. Jazzy
4. Starshit
5. How
6. The View
7. Wounded Butterfly
8. Sorry
9. Zeroland

Total Playing Time: 24:05

Band Website: Antigama

Antigama - Zeroland

Lukasz Myszkowski - Vocals
Sebastian Rokicki - Guitars
Michal Pietrasik - Bass
Krzysztof Bentkowski - Drums

In spirit with the ruthless nature of this warped Warsaw entity, the term "full length" has to be savagely rebuked without mercy. This may be the follow-up album to 'Discomfort' but with effectively only thirteen minutes of explosive guitar music (i.e. 11 minutes of tolerable noise ambience) this really should have been marketed as an EP. Nevertheless, that is the only negative to report as everything else is utterly unyielding and sadistically magnetic.

Antigama have managed to condense their schizophrenia into a unified body that has a raw grinding heart, the brain of a master criminal, oversized hydraulic limbs and the mouth of madness itself. What deceptively starts as Napalm Death on steroids soon drops into a math metal meets Voivod mode. "Izaak" is a concise heaving discontinuity with drum spasms adding shrapnel to the opaque structure. More direct raucous grind leads into syncopation interacting with discordant harmony that bulges with polyrhythmics and industrial sampling. "Jazzy" sees still more crushing stop/start drumwork building to intense speed over monolithic chords and frequency descent.

Things escalate further once "How" staggers into the picture. Choppy harmonics and Cephalic Carnage dissonant harmony are pulled out of shape over evolving drum patterns before chromatic layers paradoxically both choke and invigorate. A simple metallic chug at the start of "The View" gives some let-up but confusion is revived with super-granite bass, atonal chord bends and a dazzling display of round-the-kit percussive lashing. The howling pinnacle is marked by gigantic 9-note bursts with grisly and eerie vocal lines/gurgles that are heavily processed. It is quaint to think that there has been so much resistance to applying vocal effects in extreme metal, especially when the results here are almost blood-curdling when coupled to the diverse range of vocal delivery. Super-tight jagged blast spasms are prevalent also in "Wounded Butterfly", tied to droning layers of dissonance. "Sorry" is slightly less stressful but no less rhythmically or chromatically complex. What at first appears to be a fill section transmutes into crazy off-beat rhythmic improvisation.

A supreme but short demonstration of the true power of grindcore.

January 27th, 2006