Antaeus

Production: Edged and clear despite democratic production values (small studio).

Review: Rattling extremism of dissident sound that shapes itself around the battery of grindcore or death metal using basic fragments of classically derived melody which shift moods as they gather intensity, expanding into sonorous patterns of thematic centrality between raging explosions of percussion and muffled rhythm picking, Antaeus make warmachine clatter metal in the style of Zyklon-B or second album Impaled Nazarene, and create in their music the same rising beauty these bands achieved. Chaos, and violence, give way to clarity although in Antaeus a newly disturbing cyclic nihilism brings a sense of no direction and a suffocating compression in the linearity and necessity of events.

As if representing the brief fire before heat death, or the lack of motion between objects in the universe, Antaeus are hopeless and minimally hopeful as well. The style is well executed, the playing reasonable and the vocal performance profound, yet the casing of nihilistic battercore mixed with the faint stirrings of melody in the same obscure mythos that worked for Immortal "Pure Holocaust" are wrapped around phrases of tones so conclusively negative and suspendedly nothingbound in their gesture of will that suicide, morbidity and pointlessness are the only sensible outcomes.

Bloody shrieks whip on the churning percussion with layers of floating tremelo power chords behind it, letting melody bleed through the degenerating sound of collision, introducing changes in structure and inception of song. Long introductory ambient works settle mood around these violent appearances of song which demonstrate retribution as an art form and repulse all humanitarian instinct with their reduction of music and human affairs to an empty relativism. Gruesome and confrontational in all of the ways that metal can focus its rhythm and dynamic shift of theme to a point of comparison and fundamental readjustment of worldview, this highly refined music is within recent memory the best of melodic black metal from Europe.