Review Summary: Although it creates some paths it doesn't finish walking down, Warning is still consistently varied and entertaining. An excellent grind album.
Antigama’s
Warning is a unique, punishing whirlwind of a grindcore album. It’s loaded with hard-hitting and well-written riffs, entertaining drumbeats of all speeds, and crushing vocals. The album touches upon many an interesting idea, both musically and lyrically. And although a few of these ideas don’t get fully developed, they don’t prevent the album from being the consistently entertaining grindcore outing it is.
Yes,
Warning is fast, loud, and heavy, and contains a few very unique aspects that I’ll touch upon later, but perhaps the best thing about this album is how comprehensibly structured the songs are. Even when the longest song (besides the 7-minute ambient closer, “Black Planet”) is just under 3 minutes, the listener can very easily tell that each song has differentiable parts-be it verses, bridges and choruses, or just a collection of verses-and that each part has well-thought out music to go along with it. Even if it’s not
typical grindcore that’s characterized by monotonous riffs that seem to all run together, only
stereotypical, the structures of the songs on this album are still a breath of fresh air because, at the very least, they shatter that aforementioned notion you may have had in your head.
Some examples of this are the memorable, spacey, dissonant riff that “Jealousy” is centered around, along with the lyric/riff/lyric/riff verse pattern “City” contains, and the breakdown that ends it. “Nightmare,” though, has a breakdown played at a speed rarely found in grind, that is to say,
slow. And “Lost Skull” actually has a few, dare I say, catchy stanzas, along with an effect-drenched guitar solo. And just like every other track, it’s littered with fun, brutal riffs. The album’s consistent variation in song structure, and consistent attention to keeping the riffs different and entertaining gives every song its own personality, and makes it so the album is rarely, if ever dull.
But the music on the album isn’t only based around heavy riffing. There are three tracks specifically, that feature nothing that is typically, if ever found in grindcore. They’re all very strange, make-your-ears-perk-up-and-go-”what-the-***” kind of songs. I’m guessing the purpose of them was to, if the album ever did fall down, bring the album back up and keep the listener’s attention. These tracks are “Sequenzia Dellamorte,” “Paganini Meets Barbapapex,” and “Black Planet.” “Sequenzia Dellamorte” is really just an ambient interlude, very quiet and reserved, but eerie at the same time. (The album kicks you right in the face again after this track with “You Have The Right To Remain Violent”). “Paganini Meets Barbapapex” is, in all honesty, a pretty amusing track. It’s an odd, structure-less collection of sounds seeming to be made from all sorts of mediums. I hear cymbals, piano, and guitar, along with a few electronic loops and noises. You really sit back and wonder what the hell you just listened to after this track is over.
And the final of the three songs, “Black Planet,” as I mentioned earlier, is a dark, 7-minute ambient suite that I think is just a bit too epic for this album, even when it has the high honor of being the closer. It’s so trance-inducing that it sounds like it would fit more comfortably on a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, if only it were twice as long.
None of these three tracks seem to make any sense in the context of the album, or seem to fit with the sounds and ideas of the rest of the album; the variety of lyrical topics such as war, religion, artificial civilization and the like. But they’re still pretty fun to listen to on their own- well, fun, or just enticingly perplexing (like a difficult math equation), depending on the listener’s mood.
Antigama’s
Warning ends with some untied ends, but this doesn’t hold it back from being a heavy, refreshingly varied, and at times very weird, grindcore album.
Recommended Tracks:
City
Another
Preachers Pray
Lost Skull
Nightmare
Paganini Meets Barbapapex
