Kaiju metal is back on the menu, boys! In a lot of ways, Gigan really is the ideal kind of band for their namesake movie monster. A mix of the organic and cybernetic, they feel absolutely alien. Maybe a little confusing at times, but damn cool to look at, and unquestionably brutal. After a long seven years of relative quiet, the band has reared its head with their fifth album, Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus, ready to flay minds and conquer the Earth. But did they succeed?
I’ll admit it up front, Gigan is a band I bounced off of pretty hard when I tried them out years ago. By all means, their sound should have been right up my alley. Occasionally dissonant technical death metal with a brutal streak, shrouded in a mist of electric psychedelia is an approach that on paper should have rocked my whole world. Maybe I was in the wrong headspace at the time, but previous albums just didn’t lock in with me. Cheerfully, Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus has landed very well with me, despite no obvious changes in approach.
It probably helps that Gigan does a great job of kicking off their album in an oddly welcoming fashion. Despite its eight-minute runtime, opener “Trans-Dimensional Crossing of the Alta-Tenuis” leads off the proceedings with some strong riffs that move along quickly without being too alien, at least until the chirping swarms of notes emerging in the back half of the song. But once “Ultra-Violet Shimmer and Permeating Infra-sound” kicks in, all bets are off. Riffs begin contorting into non-euclidean forms, the drumming goes insane, and waves of trippy synths start washing over like cosmic tides going in and out, pulling sanity out as they retreat.
This template pretty much sums up how Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus runs. The degree to which the psychedelic elements emerge varies song to song, but the overall feeling of the music is borderline Lovecraftian in its jarring weirdness. And honestly, it comes across very well. Individual tracks vary a lot in length, with songs like “Erratic Pulsivity and Horror” or the aformentioned “Ultra-Violet…” remaining succinct while tracks like “Emerging Sects of Dagonic Acolytes” and “Ominous Silhouettes Cast Across the Gulfs of Time” run much longer. The mood shifts subtly throughout the album, such as the more noticeably brutal dip on “Square Wave Subversion” or the upped retro sci-fi vibe on the slower “The Strange Harvest of the Baganoids” and lightly djenty intro of “Ominous Silhouettes…” Even if their sound by its very nature can be overwhelming, Gigan does a great job keeping things engaging for listeners with the endurance for the bands approach.
That’s not to say I’d call Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus a perfect album, because a few small quibbles do plague it. Both longer tracks I mentioned above feature protracted middle sections that ditch structure entirely and become loose jams. On first listen, it was a very cool approach, and the band locking back into riffs feels wholly satisfying in both cases. But several listens in I became a little apprehensive when “Emerging Sects…” would pop up, given at least half the song is committed to that exploration. And thinking it over, the wildness of the album does make some of the songs bleed together a little, making it hard to parse just what cool part happened where. Paired off against the necessity of the right headspace for Gigan‘s insanity, these elements do give me a little issue for this album.
That said, the band proper is absolutely on fire throughout the album. Nathan Cotton is an absolute monstrosity on drums, and his performance is yet another stellar showing in a year of great drum performances. Eric Hersemann proves a mad genius throughout between the spidery riffwork, rock-solid bass, otherworldly synths, and delightful bits of theremin and otomatone he provides. By comparison, Jerry Kavouriaris’ bludgeoning grunts provide a solid, leaden anchor of reality for the rest of the band’s insanity, being a through-line to hang onto when everything else gets crazy. A gritty production and that cool pulpy album art included, and the album does look great in most every way.
Gigan is a band who pretty much only sounds like themselves at this point, and I applaud what they’ve done with Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus. It’s a challenging album for sure and trying to think about what’s happening too hard might make you lose your grip on reality a little. It still lost me a little here and there many listens in, but hey, that could just be a me problem. My recommendation is simple: just sit back, forget about analysis, and let the album wash over you like a solar flare. Death metal rarely feels so delightfully sci-fi as it does in the hands of Gigan, and even if the band’s saws, scythes, and lasers may rough you up a bit, it’s still a great album. Give it a spin and welcome your new cosmic overlords.
