Review by Felix on July 24, 2019.

I confess: it took many years before I understood the inner strength, the power and the dimension of Artillery's debut. I had the same situation with Mercyful Fate's two classic albums, but the style of Artillery's compatriots was very extraordinary, and this might be an explanation. But Fear of Tomorrow is not without peers. So, it remains a mystery to me why I did not enjoy this album right from the beginning. Perhaps I was just suffering from a rare sort of allergy against Danish bands.

Well, there were two songs that I liked immediately. The straight "The Almighty", based on a conventional verse-chorus-verse pattern, hits the mark with regard to its accessibility and catchiness. Roughly the same goes for "Out of the Sky". The Danish express starts rolling and who will be able to stand against it? The listener is confronted with a stormy, dark and sinister monster. Once unleashed by its creators, it leaves a trail of devastation. Especially this song shows, in hindsight, the enormous sound modifications of the band from the debut to their most famous work. The complete absence of the smoothness of "By Inheritance" is remarkable and Flemming Rönsdorf sounds like a demon from hell. In other words, he is far away from the approach he chose on their third full-length. His voice expresses darkness and calamity and he manage the deep tones very well. The entire album, the artwork as well as the music, creates a nightmarish feeling. Pure 1985 underground!

The niche black thrash did not yet exist back in the mid-eighties, but today I would label the album as very dark, venomous thrash, not least because of its production. The sound engineers were not interested in transparency, fine nuances or technical details. They put the focus on a dusky atmosphere without killing the numerous brutal elements of the relatively complex songs. Moreover, they did not take away the dynamic of the material. From this follows that even a decent, but not outstanding song like "The Eternal War" scores with its vibrant solo part. This is just one example - there are more songs that glitter with interesting details. The socio-critical title track, for instance, possesses a comparatively melodic chorus which does not meet the thrash standards, but its powerful, almost frenetic verses with the massive double bass speaks another language. Sometimes the band sounds like the (much) heavier alternative in terms of Danish occult metal. The first minute of "Deeds of Darkness" almost spreads some Mercyful Fate vibrations, but this introduction leads to a pretty fast and straight part. I guess Denner and Sherman agree that this would not have been the best surrounding for the King's falsetto.

Well, there are two songs that I still don't like very much. "King, Thy Name Is Slayer" has a well flowing speed part, but mainly it tends to doom metal with rather crude vocal lines. "Into the Universe" starts much livelier and faster. Yet all breaks down with the half-baked bridge ("come with me, come with me") and the failing chorus. Anyhow, Fear of Tomorrow paints an apocalyptic. hopeless picture of the future and has rightfully become a classic. If I compare my rating with those of my colleagues, I am still not sure whether I really have realized the whole quality of this album.

Rating: 7.7 out of 10

Review by Felix on July 24, 2019.

I confess: it took many years before I understood the inner strength, the power and the dimension of Artillery's debut. I had the same situation with Mercyful Fate's two classic albums, but the style of Artillery's compatriots was very extraordinary, and this might be an explanation. But Fear of Tomorrow is not without peers. So, it remains a mystery to me why I did not enjoy this album right from the beginning. Perhaps I was just suffering from a rare sort of allergy against Danish bands.

Well, there were two songs that I liked immediately. The straight "The Almighty", based on a conventional verse-chorus-verse pattern, hits the mark with regard to its accessibility and catchiness. Roughly the same goes for "Out of the Sky". The Danish express starts rolling and who will be able to stand against it? The listener is confronted with a stormy, dark and sinister monster. Once unleashed by its creators, it leaves a trail of devastation. Especially this song shows, in hindsight, the enormous sound modifications of the band from the debut to their most famous work. The complete absence of the smoothness of "By Inheritance" is remarkable and Flemming Rönsdorf sounds like a demon from hell. In other words, he is far away from the approach he chose on their third full-length. His voice expresses darkness and calamity and he manage the deep tones very well. The entire album, the artwork as well as the music, creates a nightmarish feeling. Pure 1985 underground!

The niche black thrash did not yet exist back in the mid-eighties, but today I would label the album as very dark, venomous thrash, not least because of its production. The sound engineers were not interested in transparency, fine nuances or technical details. They put the focus on a dusky atmosphere without killing the numerous brutal elements of the relatively complex songs. Moreover, they did not take away the dynamic of the material. From this follows that even a decent, but not outstanding song like "The Eternal War" scores with its vibrant solo part. This is just one example - there are more songs that glitter with interesting details. The socio-critical title track, for instance, possesses a comparatively melodic chorus which does not meet the thrash standards, but its powerful, almost frenetic verses with the massive double bass speaks another language. Sometimes the band sounds like the (much) heavier alternative in terms of Danish occult metal. The first minute of "Deeds of Darkness" almost spreads some Mercyful Fate vibrations, but this introduction leads to a pretty fast and straight part. I guess Denner and Sherman agree that this would not have been the best surrounding for the King's falsetto.

Well, there are two songs that I still don't like very much. "King, Thy Name Is Slayer" has a well flowing speed part, but mainly it tends to doom metal with rather crude vocal lines. "Into the Universe" starts much livelier and faster. Yet all breaks down with the half-baked bridge ("come with me, come with me") and the failing chorus. Anyhow, Fear of Tomorrow paints an apocalyptic. hopeless picture of the future and has rightfully become a classic. If I compare my rating with those of my colleagues, I am still not sure whether I really have realized the whole quality of this album.

Rating: 7.7 out of 10

Review by Nathan on August 17, 2021.

In my home country of Canada, there's a lot of metal bands I can boast about. For one, I'd argue our tech-death is the best in the world - we have the Quebechnical scene which has flagship bands for the style such as Beyond Creation, Gorguts, Augury, Neuraxis and First Fragment (to name but a few), not to mention B.C. is home to the current running undisputed heavyweight tech champs that are Archspire. We've got some Cascadian black metal and crust on the west coast, modern extremities such as Tomb Mold and Adversarial in Ontario... I didn't even mention the outstanding quality of QCBM and how it's one of the best current black metal scenes right now.

Out of all of those little, the one that may be the most intriguing is the Canadian war metal scene. We have a surprisingly large stake in the genre, being the home of two of the main pioneers and shapers of the genre in Blasphemy and Revenge, and the West coast in particular took the primeval chaos invoked by those bands and twisted it in all sorts of haphazard, entropic directions, creating a unique niche of black/death metal in the process. Bands such as Mitochondrion, Auroch, Dire Omen and Begrime Exemious are the current torch bearers of this obfuscating, inaccessible death metal. Even within such a turbulent and uninviting scene, though, there is one band that still manages to rise above as the most obscure. They are the most convoluted and demented, the weird, uncomfortable black sheep in a style full of them.

That band is Antediluvian, and they have unceremoniously announced a new full-length. The Divine Punishment is only the third full-length of the band in 15 years, though they always remain perpetually active through a trickle of EPs and splits. It's a fittingly weird release schedule for a weird band: never still, but never in the foreground. They subtly slipped out of metal's consciousness after Logos, however, they didn't fade into obscurity - they were already neck deep in it to begin with. Their notoriety exists more in the form of a fringe, tertiary sort of hype. No one's going to claim this is their favorite band, but if you're an extreme metal fan and talking about the bizarre fringes of it, Through The Cervix Of Hawwah should unquestionably come up in conversation. There's a certain unspoken respect between the (clearly very disturbed) individuals that can appreciate this music, because this is not the type of thing that is meant for normal people, even within an extreme metal sphere.

There is an x-factor giving that extra dollop of entropic convolution: the drums. Mars Sekhmet has one of the most original ways of navigating the instrument I've heard. At first, the abundant, stumbling fills and constant, sudden tempo changes sound like Sekhmet forgot how to drum and reacted by pushing her kit down a flight of stairs, but after two songs, you realize all the drum hits sync up with the guitar. The attention to detail and precision isn't immediately noticeable, but the magic is in how Sekhmet channels a Picasso-esque form of expression, turning high-minded complexity into simple primitivity. It sounds like a child playing drums, and I mean that in the best way possible. The amount of talent you need to create a vibe like that is not instantly apparent, but Sekhmet's chops are nonetheless astounding when examined.

Of course, that's merely the skeleton of what makes this band so twisted, incomprehensible, confusing and fascinating all at the same time. The meat of the emotion is conveyed through the guitars, themselves a series of disjointed stutters that operate more in the realms of texture than they do taste. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that whoever the primary songwriter is has never heard a pop hook in their life. Your definition of what "memorable" means will get completely thrown out of the window with this band, because you don't actually remember how any of the songs go, even with repeated listens to try and get the "pattern" down. What remains once Antediluvian finishes playing is an overwhelming sensation of totality, like you saw the entire observable universe within your frame of view for a split second. You have absolutely no clue what just happened, but at the same time, you want to do it again.

The band's sound has evolved throughout the years, difficult as it is to tell through the swirling noise. Earlier works were much more primitively disjointed, and felt like they were barely holding themselves together from tumbling into a mess of off-timed claustrophobia. The Divine Punishment is more cohesive, although that feels like an ill-fitting word given the nature of Antediluvian. It's more that riffs repeat for more than a few times, there's actually moments that stick to the same theme for a while, and it sounds like the time Haasiophis spent playing live in Revenge rubbed off, with a singular primitivity to the heavier, more forceful sections that is reminiscent of the fellow Albertans. You can actually understand it after a few listens - the band has found different ways of refining and channeling their trademark chaos.

Rating: 8.3 out of 10

Review by Benjamin on February 7, 2024.

There are some artists that are lucky enough to be world-class operators within one sub-genre of metal. An even smaller subset of that group can stretch their talents across multiple sub-genres, without all of their bands simply converging on a similar sound, able to compartmentalise their output without compromising their vision. Dissimulator are the new band from Chthe’ilist and Atramentus members Antoine Daignault and Claude Leduc, the former of whom also played in Worm for a time. Impressively, they are the equal of these phenomenal acts, without sounding anything like them. Dissimulator’s chosen form of metal is a furious take on technical thrash – Vektor with the lysergic psychedelic edge replaced by a biomechanical concept - and their debut, Lower Form Resistance manages to achieve what many bands in the genre grapple with, but fail to master, creating music that is a catchy and memorable as it is warped, with the many, many spectacular riffs moving the body as well as the brain. 

Without being exactly a throwback, Dissimulator unselfconsciously celebrate a form of metal that evokes serious nostalgia in anyone that bemoans the lack of weird progressive thrash and tech-death of the type that seemed to abound during a short stretch of the early 1990s. The way in which tracks such as ‘Automoil & Robotoil’, and the sensational title-track that closes the album combine chunky low-E chugging with dizzying flurries of fleet-fingered modal runs and stabs of jazzy dissonance cannot help but recall Voivod, Coroner and Atheist, all bands there were able to wrest a strange accessibility and warped melodic sensibility from music that could so easily become annoyingly impenetrable. Indeed, the most appealing aspect of Dissimulator’s debut is the way in way the bands technical flair at no point becomes the dominating element of their attack, with the visceral thrill and excitement of thrash sacrificed at the altar of self-indulgent experimentation. While the progressive technicality is at the heart of what Dissimulator do, rather than added as an adornment, the band’s ability to integrate this into exhilarating, rampaging metal compounds the effect, rather than detracts from it. It is quite the trick, and one that betrays the almost embarrassing levels of talent present in the Canadians’ ranks. 

Highlights abound across a consistently magnificent album. The frenzied thrash of the brilliant ‘Neural Hack’ is the perfect opener, a whirlwind of Voivodian madness that accesses the sweet spot between heart and head, immediately generating the sense that Lower Form Resistance will be a special album indeed. This sense is heightened, when the processed clean vocals of ‘Warped’ float amorphously over the gloriously disjointed syncopation of the band’s riffage, what is surely a knowing tribute to Cynic’s "Focus", the listener delights in their mutual recognition of one of technical metal’s greatest bands, although the song itself moves far beyond mere pastiche. ‘Outer Phase’ again features the Cynic-style vocal sounds, but what really stands out here is a phenomenal drum track from Philippe Boucher – Dissimulator are a band that absolutely understand how changing the feel of the beat below the guitars can bring progression and development to the song – and Boucher’s punishing performance creates a compelling push-and-pull tension between the various musicians, as if each one is attempting to pull the music in their direction, only to be restrained by the others, the result being a kind of restless magic that commands the listener’s attention, and demands their fealty. Finally, the most jaw-dropping exhibition of the band’s ability to craft busy, but memorable, riffs is the incredible ‘Cybermorphism / Mainframe’, which adds a tremolo-ridden death metal intensity at times that is reminiscent of Chile’s Ripper, but also moves through classic Bay Area mosh riffs and discordant progressions littered with pinch harmonics, the whole thing underpinned by subtle keyboards that raise the spectre of Nocturnus in a way that very few bands do in 2024. An eight-minute epic that moves past at what feels like twice the speed, the track displaying the full breadth of Dissimulator’s immense capabilities, and hearts and minds explode in response. It would be disingenuous to suggest that Lower Form Resistance is groundbreaking – there is originality here, but one must accept that Dissimulator are operating just inside wide, but previously established boundaries. What they do offer though, is an almost flawless, and ingeniously addictive take on technical thrash, which breathes new life into a niche sub-genre, and immediately places the band within the exalted company that they clearly revere.

Rating: 9.3 out of 10