!T.O.O.H.! — Premiant
!T.O.O.H! ("The Obliteration of Humanity") is a Czech experimental metal duo that creates extremely dense, non-repetitive music that should appeal to fans of groups like Krallice, Behold the Arctopus or Atheist. This eleven-minute EP, Primiant, is the latest in a discography of sporadic releases dating back to the 90's, making them one of the pioneers of avant-garde technical metal.
The runtime may seem quite short at eleven minutes, but in reality, this is about as content-rich a release as I have ever heard, reminding me of such similarly concise progressive masterpieces like The Locust's Safety Second, Body Last EP, Dillinger Escape Plan's Under the Running Board or Cynic's Carbon Based Anatomy. There are hundreds of 'riffs' in these 11 minutes, and the only way to understand all of the ideas that have been put down is to repeat the experience.
Like Krallice, this group rides the boundary between heroic, classically inflected Viking-esque melodies, and post-jazz alien dissonance. There are clear roots in symphonic black metal and classic death metal in the tonal constuction of the music, but the technicality and complexity has reached a level where there's isn't a single repeated riff or figure on the whole recording. This lack of repetition, and the guitarist's penchant for chromatic runs, remind me of Mick Barr's other, more dissonant project, Orthrelm.
At other moments, I think of Emperor's Prometheus. The flowery sweeps and logical scalar patterns of 80's thrash and 90's melodeath are still present in this music; yet, more often than not, they've been recontextualized into a subtlely unnerving, dream-like setting; perfect melodies playing for strangely offkey accompaniment, or abandoning themselves before logically concluding. It does to classic metal writing what 20th-century composers like Alban Berg and Anton Webern did to the classical music that preceded them.
Though I often see this group classified as 'grindcore', it is their bizarre melodic compositions which stand out on this brief yet world-sized EP. It is a meticulous micro-symphony with an exacting level of detail verging on the absurd. It is metal that achieves the depth and tonal intelligence of classical music.