Antediluvian - The Divine Punishment (2021)^{Release ID: 30473}

Hard to imagine that ten years ago I first discovered Antediluvian via their debut Through the Cervix of Hawaah.  Quite where the last ten years have gone is mystery to me, but I recall at the time inhabiting the now defunct Tez forums and a few of us had a penchant for blackened, squally, death metal.  Antediluvian made discussion threads alongside the likes of Portal, Mitochondrion, Grave Upheaval and Impetuous Ritual.  This tag of blackened death metal is only half true for the majority of cases it gets used against in my opinion.  There was never a lot of black metal going on in Antediluvian's sound back in 2011 and based on this outing there hasn't been any more added in the intervening years either.

These Canadians are rooted firmly in death metal and although they make a fucking godawful racket, paying little attention to detail or construct they do not stray into Deiphago-like war metal territory at any point.  Like their Australian counterparts, Portal, Antediluvian adopt a kind of grinding and/or mining style of riffing hidden under a myriad of off-kilter rhythms and sonic chaos.  At times it sounds a little too chaotic in all honesty (and I am not just referencing The Divine Punishment here) and there has been more than one occasion when listening through an Antediluvian album where everything just moulds into a sensory overload on a much too grand a scale.  On their latest offering this remain the ongoing criticism of the band.

As a lover of the extreme end of extremity itself in my musical forays, it is hard to turn me off usually on a first listen to a death metal release.  Unfortunately, The Divine Punishment manages to do this more or less immediately as the opening track takes an age to form any discernible structure.  I spend most of this track waiting for it to start, then when it sounds like it has started I end up hoping this is not the direction for the  remaining six or seven minutes of the track because it truly is awful.  Disjointed and shapeless with no menacing allure to keep me interested, this sets the tone for the rest of the album very accurately unfortunately.  Take track three, How the Watchers Granted the Humans Sex Magick in the Primordial Aeon (yeah I know, right), there is clearly some attempt at a ritualistic edge here but the chanting is ineffective and serves to blunt the mood as opposed to enhancing it.  The drums try to take on this tribal beat but in fact sound like the drummer has a hard time keeping in time with the rest of the instruments and just comes off as being really naff.

Now, I know this is supposed to be sloppy and I am down with that, really I am.  But there are stabs of cosmic transcendence in here that are just poorly performed beyond any attempt to be kvlt.  I love extreme music that I find value in; some acknowledgement to instrumental prowess or song writing brilliance is not uncommon on most of what I listen to.  Guardians of the Liminal is both written and performed by a band who are drunk though.  If they are not drunk then they are taking the piss big time.  Even the argument that there is characterisation going on here leaning to the performances being done by some fictional being in the story (yeah, like this album has one of those) and so is open to interpretation is just not relevant here.  This is a bad album and it has nowhere to hide the fact.

Layering in atmospherics somehow adds to the problem.  The sound effects are just as irrelevant as most of the instrumentation and just add to this wall of dripping noise.  The band were allegedly on hiatus prior to this record and in all honesty I hope they revert back to such a status based on this outing.