AQUARIUS REVIEW:
The Optician is a new limited edition EP that features two new songs from these Italian avant-grinders, and it's also their first release with the new Psychofagist lineup that includes Luca Mai from jazz/prog-thrashers Zu and Black Engine! I love both Zu and Psychofagist, and couldn't wait to hear these guys with Mai now contributing his burly sax blowing to their crushing mathematical grindcore. The Optician is comprised of two tracks, and even though the music on the disc clocks in a just six minutes, the band packs a skullcrushing amount of spastic riff arrangements and violent free-jazz into their cyclone-tube of grind. Both tracks careen through vicious minigun blastbeats, angular thrash riffs, stop-on-a-dime time changes, brief snippets of weird melodic singing wriggling out from between the regular bestial deathgrowls, static drones, and Luca Mai torching the proceedings with his fiery, violent skronk. Think Brutal Truth meets Fantomas meets John Zorn - this is unrepentantly experimental and weird without giving up any heaviness, even dropping this weird part in the middle of the first track where total jazz-fusion style flute makes an appearance over churning low-end riffage. As always, these guys absolutely crush, and are one of my favorite bands out there currently gene-splicing jazz and grindcore.
This disc comes in a full color 4-panel digipack, and along with the two songs also includes a seriously fucked-up four minute music video for the song "The Optician" that combines primitive animation, disaster footage, and chopped up art-film weirdness created by Dagon Lorei, who also created all of the original artwork featured in the digipack. There's also a live video for the song "FreeNonJazzPowerViolenceSonata" from their split with Thousandswilldie, and photos of the band. Limited to 250 copies, and each one is hand-numbered.
