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Antigama - Warning review




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Band: Antigama
Album: Warning
Style: Experimental grindcore
Release date: March 2009


01. Disconnected
02. Jealousy
03. City
04. Another
05. Not True
06. War
07. Heartbeat
08. Preachers Pray
09. Sequenzia Dellamorte
10. You Have The Right To Remain Violent
11. Lost Skull
12. Nightmare
13. Paganini Meets Barbaplex
14. Empty Room
15. Orange Pills
16. Black Planet

Some grindcore bands sound like squealing pigs in a whorehouse, others like burly anarchists voicing their discomfort with being hit by a skinhead's baseball bat in the face. Others still recall the cheerful laughter of a psychopath finally succeeding at wearing that pelvic bone as a funny nose. Well, Antigama instead sounds like a rusty machine shop occupied by greasy dudes angry at flunking out of engineering school.

The Polish band mixes this rusty aesthetic with a fair proclivity for fusion instrumentation and complex rhythms, a combination that results in music that at its best recalls Godflesh and at its worst the kind of sound throwing a guitar into a box filled with screws and shaking it maniacally would create. Warning contains echoes of past Polish crazies such as Kobong and Yattering; however, it seems to lack a sense of purpose. This is not Dillinger Escape Plan or Cephalic Carnage - Antigama indulges in weirdness for its own sake. For example, the band utilizes a notoriously big drumkit; however, their drummer is not Terry Bozzio and what is the point of using so many different toms if most of them sound like frying pans anyway? Furthermore, irregular rhythms are mixed with fly noises, shards of guitar feedback and lengthy fusion jams, seemingly simply because that is what the musicians like doing, and not because it contributes to creating conceptually sound music. In other words, Antigama is a somewhat self-indulgent and masturbatory band. Now then, someone wanking is already generally not something I want to listen to; however, in a rusty shop filled with nails, metal shards and heavy machinery, it is simply irresponsible.

Not surprisingly, Antigama's approach ends up not being particularly fertile in truly memorable material, with the rest of the album being more akin to reinventing the wheel. "War", for example, is a great little song; however, the rest leaves me apathetic.





Written on 10.05.2009 by With Metal Storm since 2002, jupitreas has been subjecting the masses to his reviews for quite a while now. He lives in Warsaw, Poland, where he does his best to avoid prosecution for being so cool.


Comments

Comments: 2   Visited by: 89 users
11.05.2009 - 23:53
Jeeers

Fantastic review!!!
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12.05.2009 - 12:57
Deadsoulman

Well-written review as always, but I respectfully disagree with, well, almost everything you said - except the part about the drums, yes the drummer is good, but the drums indeed all sound the same.

As for the rest, although this album is slightly less good than Resonance and Zeroland, it is still an awesome piece of (sometimes experimental) grindcore and I actually think you're overdoing the "masturbatory" part. To me a band like Cephalic Carnage is way more mastubatory than this for instance.

Anyway, I have neither the time nor the will to go more in depth about it, I'll just let you know that my opinion is the exact contrary of yours on most points, and ultimately Warning is my favourite grindcore album of the year. The memorable factor is sometimes lacking - probably due to the very short duration of the songs - but it is still there on most songs.

Oh, btw, just a detail: the fly noises aren't mixed with anything, they're just the intro of the album
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