It’ll Hit You Harder Than A Puma

Relapse Records veterans Antigama are back for their sixth full length release. The Warsaw natives have consistently released albums with three-minute blast beats for some time, and Meteor, their latest effort, is no different. Grindcore fans shall rejoice, as Antigama drop the hammer once again with 29 minutes of homegrown Polish hate.

“Collapse” opens strong with everything you’d expect from a grind album: tom smashing, hormonally imbalanced guitar squelching, power-frown vox, and complete lack of restraint. It’s rhythmically linear, and doesn’t show any sort of variation throughout the song other than HULK-SMASH, but I guess that makes for a good opener to a grindcore album, right? “The Key” shows a bit more diversity with some mid-tempo chug breaks between 250bpm snare dusting. “Prophecy,” along with a few other tracks on the album, contains one of grindcore’s meat and potato production staples: old movie samples. Whether it be from zombie flicks, sci-fi or whatever other dystopian shit is cool, you best believe there’s some dude with greasy long hair in a metal band sampling it.

Hope you enjoy ear fatigue, ’cause Meteor ain’t letting up any time soon. “Fed by the Feeling,” “Crystal Tune” and “Stargate” show little-to-no remorse– especially “Stargate,” which is almost too metal, like a lampoon of the grind sub-genre itself. Whatever the case, it’ll hit you harder than a jungle puma. “The Signal” is a pretty standard affair, before launching into Wretched Spawn-era Cannibal Corpse, but with more groove. Actually, a majority of Meteor has some abrupt, perhaps even awkward, prog breaks with some strange grooviness going on. And then there’s “Turbulence,” comprised of a Latin-ish breakbeat, synth squawks, detuned acoustic drawls and sci-fi sounds, all before turning into a power-metal jam with Middle-Eastern Van Halen “Jump” noodling. It’s like a few minutes of Rush’s answer to grindcore.

“Perfect Silence” picks the album back up to speed with more unrelenting blast nonsense. However, there’s at least more variety; it isn’t all chugging, and there is some interesting melodic content on this one. Final track “Untruth” is a curveball as the slowest track on the album. Trudging along like an early 2000’s hardcore show, it’s pure brutality and a nice change of pace, as well as a nice way to close out such an intensely fast, short album. All in all, Meteor isn’t groundbreaking, nor is it particularly unique. But it is finely crafted grind with some clever tricks up its sleeve. After all, how can you argue with a metal album that’s 29 minutes long?