Silly names from hardcore bands are par of the course, as is having weird orthography like merged words, words wrapped in "x", the entire "verb the noun" thing, so maybe a band whose name starts with the dot character isn't that far from genre conventions. Still, .GIF From God is a band that got my attention first and foremost from its band name, then for its music. I found them around the same time as their similarly quirkily named SeeYouSpaceCowboy and the less quirkily named Nuvolascura (the latter I've since covered), which didn't seem like that long ago at first but I now realize it's been more than half a decade.
...Defragmented...Reformatted already celebrated its tenth anniversary a month or so ago, an album that felt like a more chaotic mathcore version of the MySpace sassy metalcore (those absurd song titles are really nostalgic) of the noughties blended with noise and skramz in a way that felt both retro (it's been decades since the sound originated) and forward thinking. The two releases since felt like they were leaving some of those sillier nostalgic elements behind. Dissimulation arrives as a continuation of that direction.
There's less on Dissimulation that I could call "silly" or "sassy" in the same way I could stuff on ...Defragmented...Reformatted. It's not like the sound stops having clear influences from metalcore's history, but it stops pulling so directly from that specific one towards something that feels like it pulls more from a mathcore sound stuck between chaotic noise, a thick chug sound with some hints of sludgecore, a melodic touch of alt in some clean vocal sections, and the kind of emoviolence in the vein of Love Lost But Not Forgotten with some groovier bass sections.
Despite there being quite a grindcore pace to the songs, with most songs except for three being under three minutes and the longest still shorter than five, Dissimulation is the longest of .GIF From God's albums, the first to pass the thirty minutes mark and therefore count as a full-length by non-punk standards too. The flow is helped a bit by the relatively longer songs or by the ambient interludes, but since the gist of it is still very intense fast-paced chaotic music, the thirty-five minutes do feel like they're nearing the "too much" point.
It should definitely be "ɡɪf" by the way.
