GIGAN — Quasi-Hallucinogenic Sonic Landscapes (review)

GIGAN — Quasi-Hallucinogenic Sonic Landscapes album cover

Album · 2011 · Technical Death Metal

4/5 · 2018-05-29
siLLy puPPy

The beauty of the pummeling technically infused extreme metal of GIGAN (ガイガン) is that despite the band’s best efforts to unleash every possible form of sonic brutality in the playbook, somehow they create an underpinning that keeps drawing me back to explore their music on a deeper level in an almost subliminal nature. Well, come back i do and by doing so i have found GIGAN (ガイガン) creeping up on my list of favorite über-extreme musical acts as each subsequent listen ratchets them up the list ever so slightly more. And despite the almost shoegazy effect of juggling the tech death metal elements with grindcore, progressive rock and dark space ambience that hypnotize as well as bombastically lambaste, GIGAN (ガイガン) prove they have the musical hook equivalents of the arch-enemy of Godzilla in the movie that was the first foe to inflict damage on our favorite walking lumpy lizard only the tortuous assault is tantamount to a sado-masochistic romp into the sonic assault world of this power trio from Tampa, FL, yeah the cradle of US death metal.

It took three years but the triumvirate power force of Eric Hersemann on bass, guitar, synthesizer, theremin, xylophone and newbies John Collett on growling death vocals with Kesava Doane as one of metal’s most technically skilled drummers rivaling the likes of Behemoth and Nile, return with a newly formed band that carried on mainman Hersemann’s tortuous metal antics and upgraded in pretty much every way while retaining the same identifiable features that were unleashed all the way back on 2007’s “The Footsteps Of GIGAN (ガイガン) EP.” The second album QUASI-HALLUCINOGENIC SONIC LANDSCAPES continues the sonic bombast and angular dissonance and takes the journey even further into uncharted GIGAN (ガイガン) territories.

While the monster in the movies was clearly land bound, this band of the same name is clearly aiming for the stars with their spaced out surreality as evident in their multi-syllabic song titles in the form of “Mountains Perched Like Beasts Awaiting the Attack,” “ Suspended in Cubes of Torment,” “The Raven and the Crow,” “In the Tentacled Grasp of a Buried Behemoth”, “Transmogrification Into Bio-Luminoid,” “Skeletons of Steel, Timber and Blackened Granite,” “Vespelmadeen Terror” and "Fathomless Echoes of Eternity's Imagination”

While the metal approaches would take a turn on the next album “Multi-Dimensional Fractal-Sorcery and Super Science,” the underlying musical approach on QUASI remains the same. GIGAN (ガイガン) dishes out the expected pummeling brutality which is based on old school death metal conformity but expedites the onion effect with layers of realities that have a hierarchical level. While the brutal death metal attacks clearly takes precedence with their sonic supremacy, it seems that the underlying psychedelic suaveness of the theremin, synthesizers and atmospheric backdrop that only emerge in brief interludes between tracks and pauses within. The tension that is created between the utterly chilled and the bombastically frenetic is a very strange tension indeed much like eating fried ice cream in a vacuum packed anti-gravity chamber.

GIGAN (ガイガン) is certainly a tough nut to crack and only the most ambitious who crave the most ruthless metal assaults married with the angular avant-garde prog and nerdy space oriented sci-fi themes laid out in paramount elixir will dig this, because of the fact that this music is laced with avant-prog sensibilities and exhibited in full tech death metal regalia. The psychedelic accoutrements are displayed in not only the ambient backdrops between tracks but also in some of the extraordinarily weird guitar riffs that occur in the higher registers with iterating almost robotic whizzing up and down the scales somewhat reminding me of math metal wizards like Psyopus or Behold…. The Arctopus. Did i mention the drumming? Fucking phenomenal. My arms hurt just listening to this shit. Solid as a fucking rock. GIGAN (ガイガン)!!!!