D’you ever listen to albums that just make you feel inadequate? Stuff that basically rips up your existing notions of a particular genre right in your face and expands them beyond your comprehension? (You rube, you putz.) Think about, like… the first time you heard Cynic’s insane, technical chops, or when Primitive Man took sheer bleakness deeper than you ever thought possible.

Chicago trio Gigan‘s had a knack for making that kind of album over the years, but it’s been a while since they reminded us how adept they are at exposing our listening deficiencies. (Seven years! My period of “not feeling like a yokel” is in second grade!) That’s a big reason why their new record, Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus, has been such a delight: I need to be brought down a peg or four.

Another reason? It’s just fuckin’ good.

Gigan starts things off with a bang — and by “a bang,” I mean “what I imagine the literal Big Bang must have sounded like in real time.” Anomalous’s opening track, er-hem… “Trans-Dimensional Crossing of the Alta-Tenuis” …spends its first two-and-a-half minutes slowly, deliberately, devastatingly expanding the universe. The band simultaneously builds and layers its sound outward, yet also feels its sucking the entire world inward with a gargantuan vacuum. It’s unsettling, but also completely mesmerizing — like the emergence of a truly compelling villain in a science fiction film.

Sure, the track eventually unfolds itself beyond this initial movement, and only then does the band really start to flex its muscles. Gigan’s blend of technicality and dissonance hits in a couple of different ways. There are the outwardly abrasive individual parts, of course: the nearly-six-minute middle section of “Emerging Sects of Dagonic Acolytes,”* which essentially just goes wild experimenting with harsh noise, or the ascending chord progression** on “Erratic Pulsivity and Horror,” which I’m pretty sure I’ve heard in my head during a panic attack before.

_{^{* – Yeah, these song titles fuckin’ go.
** – I hesitate to call it a refrain because lol the idea of Gigan using refrains in their music}}

But there are also plenty of parts throughout Anomalous where Gigan generates discord by combining parts that might otherwise sound… [Straightforward? No. Conventional? Definitely no. How about…] less shocking. Take “Square Wave Subversion,” whose gnarled intro riffing injects what almost feels like a sense of groove into the proceedings. But oh hey! Don’t look away for too long, because after about 45 seconds, the track explodes into an absolute tornado, with each band member seemingly asynchronous with the others. Taken individually, you wouldn’t really bat an eye at either of these “waves”; combine them and you’ve got something extraordinary.

However they’re going about utterly leveling you at any given moment, you can be sure the guys in Gigan will be doing so absolutely exquisitely. Drummer Nathan Cotton somehow manages to make utter chaos sound positively jazzy, with tasteful fills and liberal high hat work throughout the album. Eric Hersemann not only handles all the non-percussive instruments — guitars, bass, synths, etc. — but also finds ways to make each and every one of them squeal, stab, howl and pierce through your eardrums.

But if there’s a standout among the three, for me, it’s vocalist Jerry Kavouriaris. No matter which sonic twist or turn his bandmates might take throughout Anomalous, this dude is there to match them. It takes a lot to stand out vocally in death metal, but with everything from shrill, throaty bursts to dense, gutteral, what-if-Chris-Barnes-didn’t-develop-emphysema growls in his bag of tricks, Kavouriaris pulls it off.

In an already above-average year for challenging death metal, Gigan might be a bit late to the party, but they sure have come in hot. I don’t pretend to understand everything I’m hearing on Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus just yet, and I may not ever! But I also don’t particularly want to stop listening to it, even if it does make me feel like a big dummy. Don’t miss this one, friends.

Keep it heavy,
—Dan

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Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus is available now via Willowtip Records. For more information on Gigan, visit the band’s Facebook page.