Antigama release seventh album

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Antigama dispatches their seventh full-length studio album, The Insolent in the coming days. This all transpires just one week before the band makes their long-awaited return to American soil for their East Coast tour with Selfmadegod Records lablemates, Drugs Of Faith, including the band’s second time attending Maryland Deathfest.

Recorded in February at JNS Studio in Warsaw, The Insolent was engineered by Pawel Grabowski, mixed by Pawel Grabowski and the band, mastered by Scott Hull at Visceral Sound in Bethesda, Maryland (Pig Destroyer, Agoraphobic Nosebleed), and features a guest appearance by the legendary Polish electronic artist Władysław “Gudonis” Komendarek.

Orders for The Insolent are available on cassette, eco-pack/gatefold digisleeve CD, black 12″ gatefold LP, and a translucent 12″ gatefold LP, limited to 100 copies worldwide. All four versions are now available internationally from Selfmadegod HERE and in the US via Selfmadegod’s stateside mailorder outlet, Earsplit Distro, RIGHT HERE.

Antigama tour the East Coast US Tour w/ Drugs Of Faith:

  • 5/13/2015 Nihil Gallery – Brooklyn, NY w/ The Communion, Buckshot Facelift [info]
  • 5/14/2015 The Funky Jungle – Providence, RI w/ The Communion, Eaten, Feedback [info]
  • 5/15/2015 Clash Bar – Clifton, NJ @ Mildfest w/ The Communion, Organ Dealer, Pink Mass, more [info]
  • 5/16/2015 Second Empire – Philadelphia, PA w/ Infernal Stronghold, Past Tense [info]
  • 5/17/2015 Smash! – Washington, DC w/ Ampallang Infection, Blockhead [info]
  • 5/18/2015 Cellar Door – Annandale, VA w/ Earthling, Blooddrunk Trolls [info]
  • 5/19/2015 Strange Matter – Richmond, VA w/ High Priest, Empty Hands [info]
  • 5/20/2015 Main Street Annex – Charlottesville, VA w/ Earthling, Blooddrunk Trolls [info]
  • 5/23/2015 Baltimore Soundstage – Baltimore, MD @ Maryland Deathfest [no Drugs of Faith] [info]

You can follow Antigama on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/antigama

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Antigama – Meteor

antigama-meteorHardcore music shows us the paradox of the individual and the group. The more individualistic someone is, the more they want the group to like them. But to do that, they need to fit in, even if being ironically “different.” This phenomenon ate up hardcore music as former anarchists found out that soliciting support for their bands was a lot like, well, capitalism and politics.

Since that time, stretching from the dawn of the 1980s to late in that decade, hardcore has been contorting to find a new voice for itself. The best candidates came out of the late 1980s post-hardcore bands, who essentially “got postmodern” by deconstructing music into lots of simple bits put together into something bigger. But instead of becoming complex, it became disconnected, dissassociative and chaotic.

After that point, and the onslaught of grindcore, hardcore headed further into the breakdown model. How chaotic could something be before it fell apart? In the late 1990s, they reinvigorated the genre with a dose of metal, which gave it more complex riffing, but still the songwriting aspect of this new genre was elusive. One reason some bands around here get praised is that they’ve tried to make songs coherent again.

Into this drops Antigama, who use the techniques of the current time but are trying to get back to the punk ideal of simplicity. They use the math-metal slash “progressive hardcore” (emo/indie) riffs as much as the next band, and they feature the frenetic vocals that match eight syllables to each beat and stay slightly ahead of the beat as if commanding it like propaganda through megaphones. However, these songs are at heart very much in the classic hardcore vein of verses and choruses and, when a point has been established, some kind of break (not breakdown) before repeating.

The problem is that the “collage” mentality afflicts them still. Under this mentality, it’s bad to have too much focus on any one thing, but better to be open to everything. Thus you mix it all in your music, throwing in as many radically different things as you can to maintain high contrast. Antigama do this more as the album goes along (was this written in studio?) tossing in bits of hard rock, jazz, blues, and other genres.

The first half of this album is really the part to listen to, which is some good and focused hardcore dressed up as metalcore (the hybrid of metal and hardcore that focuses on high contrast through abrupt changes to unrelated riffs). If this band thought through this situation further, they might pick up where hardcore left off actual experimentation, and try some more complex but structured song forms or more articulated riff styles.

Like most record reviews, this one is essentially a “it’s good if you like this style.” This means the band are competent, but when dialogue is about style only, it means that the content wasn’t there enough. What did this record express? Better than average participation in metalcore by a band that should’ve written hardcore music instead and completed the album before getting into the studio.

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