ANTEDILUVIAN / ADVERSARIAL SPLIT

Late last week Nuclear War Now released a six-song vinyl split by two of Canada’s most horrifying death metal bands, Antediluvian and Adversarial. I learned this through a personal message on The Living Doorway blog. I knew the message was intended for me because JGD began his post with these words: “Attention mongoloids”.

I’ve been keeping my bloodshot eyes on Antediluvian ever since being overwhelmed by their 2011 Profound Lore album Through the Cervix of Hawaah (which I reviewed here). Adversarial is a name I’ve heard, but listening to this split was my first exposure to their music. Each side of the vinyl LP has a name: “Leviathan” is the name of the side that features Adversarial’s music, and “Lucifer” is the side that includes Antediluvian’s three tracks. According to NWN, the bands collaborated on the EP’s themes, and the six songs are meant to be heard together.

Adversarial’s music is dense and chaotic, a swirling hornet hive of grinding, distorted guitars and a nearly non-stop machine-gun snare attack. Contrasting with the vicious smashing of the instruments, the vocals are slow, ghastly, and deeper than ocean trenches. The riffs are usually blazing in their speed, and there is a complexity and unpredictability in the guitar and bass performances that’s almost hidden in the unabashed ferocity of the music. Occult guitar melodies swirl up out of the dense smoke and fire from time to time, but the songs are mainly full-tilt eruptions of annihilation.

By the way, I wasn’t kidding about the non-stop snare attack — it consumes the vast majority of the drummer’s repertoire (along with a healthy dose of brutish double-bass), but man, I do dig it.

If anything, Antediluvian’s three songs are even more inhuman and remorseless. The guitars crackle with seething distortion, veering from an apocalyptic barrage of fury to slow bone-cracking hammer blows to a droning miasma of static. Shrill shrieking noises and howls of feedback penetrate the murk, and muffled drums blast away underneath like the sounds of a distant battleground.

As in the case of Adversarial, Antediluvian’s vocals are slow, horrifying, and cavernous — so inhuman that even an adjective like bestial is an understatement. And like Adversarial, running throughout Antediluvian’s ritualized cacophony is a dense weave of intricate and rapidly shifting chords, perhaps most prominent in Antediluvian’s final song, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (I Am That I Am)”, with its widely varying tempos and prominent bass notes.

This split is about as complete an expression of voraciousness and utter doom as you could want. You want to run, but the music roots you in your place, too transfixed to seek a hiding place before the obliteration is complete.

NWN is selling different versions of the vinyl, which can be ordered with a tremendously cool t-shirt, at this location. You can find the bands’ Facebook pages via these links:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/ANTEDILUVIAN-Canada/142055909212205

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Adversarial/112999465463527

Now, here’s the music, courtesy of the NWN Bandcamp page: