Antigama

Polish tech-grinders Antigama have been getting weirder and weirder for their past few releases. By that I mean the mind-warping grindcore band have been playing it increasingly straight. Listening to the first half of sixth full-length Meteor, you'd think they were on that same path, but you'd be wrong. Sure, killer opener "Collapse" is pretty straight-ahead, sounding more like Napalm Death than any mind-numbing prog-grind, and second tune "The Key" gets a bit trickier — the simple whiplash groove is more Nasum or Rotten Sound than the weirdness Antigama are known for — but it works. Third track "Prophecy" starts getting more out there, in a Voivod-gone-grind way the cover art promises (the riffing that starts off the title track is pretty Piggy-ian, to boot), but it's still not zany like this band always are. By the time "Fed by the Feeling" gets goofy at the album's mid-point, it ends up sounding more like a novelty. However, the moments of tech goodness, like the slow-burn prog-grind build-up of "Crystal Tune" and the blazing "Stargate," are so much more powerful sandwiched in between the standard grind. Then, by the time "Turbulence" kicks in, it's a Rush album on hyper-speed, the normalcy of the first half replaced by meandering outer limit explorations, not so much obsessed with the tech, rather slowly bending minds —not explosions, but expansions. Closer "Untruth" plods like classic-era Voivod before it slowly builds and builds into a swirling tech metal vortex before ending suddenly, perfectly.