The last Way of Purity was like having an icy bucket of spluttering confusion poured suddenly over your bemused head. Crosscore was a baffling collision of spasming technical chug-core, goth singsongery, and brutally misplaced synthesisers, all wrapped up in a bizarre band concept involving balaclavas and animal rights militancy. That was the upside, what about the downs? Ultimately, the gimmickry in the way the band presents itself infested the music as well which, much as I am favourably inclined towards “weird for the sake of weird” didn’t quite justify its purposefully obnoxious delivery with incisive enough compositional ideas.

And actually the follow-up EP, Biteback (which I am reviewing just in advance of the imminent second full-length) could be described in very similar terms. This, on consideration, is a slightly more balanced record, which neither confuses nor offends to quite the same extent, but which is still deeply strange. A mere three tracks come in at less than 10 minutes. The drums, once again, feel quite synthetic, and this undermines the power of fairly straightforward chuggers like Keep Dreaming. I say straightforward; the thing does segue into into a strange, spacey power metal section, retaining the guttural hardcore vocals. The stop-start rhythms aren’t as intense as the best exponents of the whole rhythmic gymnastics thing, but the farting weirdness of the synths that float gaseously in the background make it sort of work as a perverse experiment. Eternal Damnation to Rene Descartes (presumably because of his role in developing the “Anthropocentric lie”, the scum) is quite a clever track, which takes a thoroughly out-of-place lead line and somehow builds a weird, ever-shifting song around it. Closer Reverse the Time, though, is the best song here. The tinny, industrial feel to the percussion, married to those parping synths and riffing like a death metal hissy fit feels almost like a more technical variant on those 90s industrial metal bands like Spineshank or someone. Somehow it is better than that sounds.

The band’s next record, Equate, comes out soon, and I admit to a genuine curiosity. Most people that hear this will hate it, but something in the sheer nonsensicality of it appeals.