One of the reasons why I love technical death metal as much as I do (hell, this year I listened to just over one hundred different tech death albums in a month) is how varied and nuanced of a subgenre it is. There’s the neoclassical wank of an act such as First Fragment, the glossy sound of an act such as Symbolik, or the gnarled dissonance of an act such as Baring Teeth, to name just a few styles. Gigan fall firmly into the dissonant category, and have been getting steadily better with each album. Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus is their first new release in seven years, after the marvelous Undulating Waves of Rainbiotic Iridescence, and still somehow sees Gigan at their most experimental while still retaining the same hypnotic, alien rhythms that made previous albums, most notably Multi-Dimensional Fractal-Sorcery and Super Science special. Make no mistake: Gigan have crafted one hell of a technical death metal album, with an extra emphasis on technical riff craft and song composition, rather than a flurry of notes flung the listener’s way in a masturbatory ode to self-excess.
As with each preceding album, the beauty of Gigan lies in the instrumentation and trance-like rhythms. Every Gigan album has been an exercise in trying to figure out what the hell guitarist Eric Hersemann is doing and Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus is no exception: the same hypnotic, layered, listener unfriendly experience is here. This has always been a band that feels like they are on the cusp of a final frontier of sorts in technical death metal: where most artists are similar and at points pedantic or banal with how predictable an album will be, Gigan will always subvert expectations. Case in point: “Emerging Sects of Dagonic Acolytes”, a ten minute track consisting of mostly noise stuffed inside a technical death metal sandwich, that somehow works despite being a giant middle finger to the casual listener. There’s more traditional songwriting on tracks such as “Katabatic Windswept Landscapes” and “Erratic Pulsivity and Horror” which are excellent showcases for the mind-melting proficiency each of the three musicians show, but for the most part, Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus sees Gigan doing what they do best: capturing the spirit of early 2000s Willowtip Records in terms of sheer uncompromising songwriting. In an era where most bands are afraid to buck the trends of music Gigan is a last bastion for those weirder bands. They are unafraid to forcibly make the listener experience the weird side of extreme metal as a whole, and each listen of Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus comes back yielding different results. I enjoy every Gigan record, but the level of technical prowess shown here is hypnotizing, and makes me want to revisit this decidedly alien album again and again, as there are more gems to dredge from its slime-ridden depths.
