2022 vinyl pressing of one of the most recent albums from NYC's premiere instrumental tech-death / avant-math-blast weirdo unit. It's been almost twenty years since Colin Marston (Gorguts, Krallice, etc.) and crew started unwrapping their Gordian Knot, which hit me like a brick; their split with Orthrelm was one of the earlier Crucial Blast releases of the 2000s, and holds up as a all-to-brief but still skull-melting display of compositional madness. And boy has their cult grown in the subsequent two decades. Hapeleptic Overtrove first came out in 2020 via a CD version on P2 (I'm getting my mitts on that pronto), and it's total madness. Release the Overtrove!

Sounding like something that could just as easily appeared on John Zorn's Tzadik label, Hapeleptic comes screaming in from the far-flung fringes of metallic prog. The Voivodian cyber-wasteland artwork from Terry Grow is fantastic, but a blind buy expecting this to be some kind of death metal based on that techno-skeletal abomination would be backhanded by the over-the-top complexity of this music. I mean, any adventurous tech-death fan would probably cream themselves over this, but Behold...The Arctopus are attacking you with a very unique and very detailed blast of extremity that's only tangentially related to death metal.

The opener "Quithtion" should immediately confound you, spitting out a thirty-second clatter of percussive pointillism and insane avant-jazz rhythms, splattered with just brief chunks of crunchy angular riff and spastic bass work that reminds me of Les Claypool. And then it's off into shred-nirvana, as "Adult Contemporary" pairs that crazy hyper-obsessive percussion / drum performance with droning, looping metal guitar shred, weird and serrated riffs, and the occasional euphoric eruption of tech-metal groove. It's bonkers, even by their standards. The drumming from Jason Bauers is really the standout here; his performance is way more eccentric and expressively abstract than anything I've heard him do in his other band Psyopus. It's a perfect fit with founding members / guitarists Colin Marston and Mike Lerner, making this newer material takes an off-ramp into deliciously demented territory. There's still plenty of Marston's berserk " Warr guitar" shred and Lerner's dissonant chord structures, but as I'm listening to stuff like "Blessing In Disgust" and "Forgotten Explanations", that noodly, super complicated fretboard action and gymnastic riffing feels more like a textural (if insanely complex) backdrop to the wild shit that Bauers does here. I don't think I've ever heard an Arctopus record that reminded me this much of both Carl Stalling's frenzied, apoplectic compositions, Rock In Opposition stuff, AND the avant-garde rhythmic adventures you hear in Harry Partch's work. The "metal" elements from the guitarists continue to lean into a kind of Gorguts-ian angularity (of course, Marston is a member of that band's current lineup), and while things get pretty goddamn heavy at times, these instrumental car-crashes share more DNA with the most precise, confounding wings of prog rock than anything else I can think of. The album credits list Bauers weird percussion rig as "wood, plastic, metal", utilizing metal pipes, bells, wooden planks, and man it sounds like all of that is clattering and crashing and clanging at the same time. Controlled chaos.

I love it. I've been a fan of this band ever since they sent me their very first demo on a 3" CDR in the mid-2000s, and the past couple of albums from Arctopus blow my mind with their diversions into even weirder and more confusional music. It's great. There's even a moment on the album (as "Other Realms" segues over into "Perverse. Esoteric. Different") where the looping notes build into this mesmeric wall of fractalized sound that actually reminds me of The Keep-era Tangerine Dream, this wash of gorgeous, almost orchestral ambience swirling with arrays of dazzling finger-tapped notes. The last few tracks on the album evoke a spaced-out, horror-film soundtrack feel. Definitely a high point in this band's impressive discography, and one of their strangest and most challenging.