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Gigan > Multi-Dimensional Fractal-Sorcery and Super Science > Reviews
Gigan - Multi-Dimensional Fractal-Sorcery and Super Science

Science is Metal - 100%

flightoficarus86, July 1st, 2015

When I was growing up, death metal was happening all over the place. You had the continuing explosion of brutal death metal, the hay-day of melodic death metal, and the development of technical death metal. With such exponential growth, the bubble is always bound to burst. And it did. Oh how it did. Since then, most of the genres have become caricatures of their former selves. There is the occasional surprise here and there, but for the most part, these wells have gone dry.

And yet from the ashes, a new breed of technical death metal seems to be rising. Between groups like Ulcerate, Malthusian, and Portal; there seems to be a veritable geyser of untapped potential that is far from stagnant. Enter Gigan, a tech death band far removed from the endless waves of Dying Fetus clones. With a penchant for the progressive, and occasionally psychedelic, the latest album Multi-Dimensional Fractal-Sorcery And Super Science is as impressive as it is wordy.

The most basic thing about this album is probably the vocals. They are your typical death metal grunts and growls with the occasional retch for good measure. But Gigan’s “basic” is your average group’s 110%. Eston Browne will throttle the shit out of you. Each verbal assault is measured and calculated to be as crushing as possible. But let’s move on to the true stars here: Nate Cotton and Eric Hersemann. These cacophonous riffs and insatiable rhythms will have your head spinning like Lind Blair. Time signature leap from measure to measure while the guitar throbs, pulsates, and punctures.

And yet, for all of its chaos, Multi-Dimensional Fractal-Sorcery And Super Science is far from an unfettered freak show. This is “technical” death after all. Each wailing chord, each sweeping of the fretboard, each jarring tempo change is coldly calculated. There is a level of order that rivals the aforementioned Ulcerate, but within a completely different aesthetic. Foregoing a bleak, sandblasted blackness, Gigan occupies a massive obelisk in the cosmos. There are surprising amounts of hooks and memorable moments carrying each song through time and space.

Final word: this is some of the best death metal you will hear from the past few years. It's alarmingly technical, but not in the done-to-death (har har) traditional sense. There is a sense of the psychedelic, as well as a masterful churning of dissonance into melody and order. This is a supernova contained within a tesseract.

Review courtesy of Metal Trenches (metaltrenches.com)

Cosmic Communications - 91%

atanamar, January 19th, 2014

Some albums, like mathematical formulae, require a revelation. This is what we live for, the moment when an album’s enzymes cause an unlooked for catalytic catharsis. Gigan’s music has always interested me, but it’s never induced a chemical reaction. Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery and Super Science changes that in spectacular fashion.

Although typically tagged as tech-death, Gigan just don’t sport a weedily-Wilton aroma on this record. Eric Hersemann’s careening riffs are borne of wild astral forces, possessing a frantic and frightening immediacy. These chromatic acrobatics and contortions amaze and delight without turning into a carnival. The crystalline riffs and perplexing rhythms speak to me in grindcore tongues. I’m hearing whispers of Discordance Axis and Dephosphorus. I like what they’re saying.

Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery and Super Science has a deliberately ornate and alien atmosphere. Every corner of its soundscape is crawling with intricate minutia; you’ve got to admire the attention to detail. Some of the album’s sparser moments are its finest. “Mother of Toads” feels like the product of a xenomorphic Primus, with a freak tremolized riff riding a barrage of perfectly absurd percussion.

Cold-blooded howls burst from the beating heart of this album. Eston Browne has perfectly synthesized the venom and brutality he perfected in Salö and Humanity Falls, respectively. The humanity of this cacodemonic rage helps to balance the album’s science and sorcery; I can somehow relate to Gigan’s mystifying madness.

Somewhere along the line, Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery and Super Science swept me up in its anomalous onslaught. It took a few spins for the epiphany to occur, but I’ve been craving these cryptic transmissions and vicious grooves ever since. Perhaps you, too, can become a vessel of these cosmic communications.

Originally published here.

Tentacles in OOTER SPEECE - 87%

RapeTheDead, November 21st, 2013

There appears to be a subtle, but still fairly noticeable recent change in the direction death metal's heading in. Instead of just making thrash metal heavier, meatier and more gruesome, new death metal bands take the more outlandish aspects of Morbid Angel and Autopsy, add a nice dose of Obscura-era Gorguts and streamline it into something very detailed and showy, but still twisted and ugly. Popularized by Ulcerate and Portal, Gigan has actually been playing this brand of abrasive, incomprehensible death metal for quite a while at this point. Back in 2008, The Order of the False Eye was an incorrigible slab of filth that seemed unfortunately out-of-place on a label like Napalm Records. Fortunately, Willowtip is much more fitting to their style and they've refined and grown as a band in the five years since that album came out. Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery is an endless blitz of frantic riffing, but there's still enough oddly captivating melodic guitar frills to give the album a bit of accessibility to almost any death metal fan.

Is this the rebirth of Floridian death metal? One can certainly hear the cues taken from things such as Altars of Madness in the brute, low-end death metal riffing, but that's only one face of the multidimensional fabric of the album. Mostly thrashing about in mid to high-note spastic dissonance with the suffocating, mostly linear structuring of Immolation and Gorguts, there are additional flashes of intricate consonance amidst the frantic riff blender to give you something that actually sort of makes sense before swallowing you up in a discordant riff frenzy again. Even in giving you that small piece of melody to grasp at, Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery never loses its speed in the process as long as the guitars are playing. Even when they give you some sort of melody to grasp at, it's just as detailed, twisted and alien as anything else in the music. As seems to be the staple for any extreme metal band attempting to be "atmospheric", there are a few sections where the guitars and drums stop playing and the keyboards dominate with simple, haunting verses. These infrequent moments actually serve as quite welcome breaks from the intense abrasion that surrounds them, and are placed in the music only for that purpose and never wander for too long to distract the listener from the main purpose: getting paralyzed, scrambled and suffocated in a cosmic vortex.

The professionalism that both Willowtip and years of technical growth and artistic evolution have provided to Gigan is almost crucial to the expression of the themes on Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery. Chaos is, in reality, a complex and precise process, and only with the capabilties and resources the band has accumulated can these sort of things properly be articulated. New drummer Nate Cotton is an absolute beast, constantly changing up what he's doing while still staying consistently manic and active. Constantly changing up the riffs like Gigan does on this album requires the drumwork to consistently keep up with the pacing of the riffs, and Cotton accomplishes this masterfully. He stands out really nicely on "Mother of Toads"; it's like Brann Dailor if he listened to way too much Marduk. His performance could have been buried under a raw production, but the crystal-clear modern sheen on this album captures every minuscule detail. That's very fortunate, because Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery has a lot of riffs for you to sink your teeth into. Not every riff is particularly accessible or intriguing. There are riffs you probably won't like very much, because they do throw them at you at a rate so fast you can barely catch up to what's going on and nobody bats 1000 with this sort of approach. Nothing ever strays far from the chaotic, astral atmosphere, though, and that in itself is commendable.

So this is technical death metal then? I guess. The band is technically proficient, they play death metal--but this won't sound like the technical death metal one might be used to hearing in this day and age, which tends to take heavy cues from modern brutal death metal and deathcore; the similar bands are too old-school and the music is way too jam-packed and dissonant and lacks the punishing groove or bludgeoning that death metal usually does almost as a byproduct of its nature. Gigan serve to remind us of how versatile death metal can be and how broad a palate of influences death metal bands can draw from these days. Recommended for fans of Gorguts, Mithras and Ulcerate.

Originally written for http://thepitofthedamned.blogspot.ca/