It seems that every time Antimatter releases a new album I get to experience it in November - January span, somewhere around New Years anyway. I can't quite call it a love affair, but rather an acceptance, but I know when it started between me and Antimatter. It was when they switched from cold faceless electronics to personal acoustic rock on Planetary Confinement. Or, even more specifically, it was Mick Moss' deep, profound, to the bone cutting compositions which were a click for me on that album. And so Mick Moss continued, for a couple of more albums, while getting almost goth rockish on Fear of a Unique Identity.

The Judas Table, at least I felt so anyway, is a little bit of a step back towards art rock of Planetary Confinement, but also a step forward for Antimatter to be even more direct and personal. There are many elements of Planetary Confinement in The Judas Table. There is this fantastic sound richness, percussive beat, lots of acoustic music and Mick's front and center penetrating vibrating voice, which cause shivers to run down my back. The songs like guitar/violin acoustic conversation Comrades or spacey opener Black Eyed Man in their unfolding culminate into emotional, attention grabbing solos, in Comrades delivered by a man left completely alone in this world, but the one who could be actually better off this way. The cold piano notes of Killer are a precursor, an alarm, just like Integrity is also bulging with anticipation until it's mid-Eastern desert closing motif.

Where the move forward has been made, just about everything on The Judas Table which is dark is also dense and full-bodied. The songs here, like Can of Worms, the most intense track on the album, add even more depth to bass levels and lower register, which makes their emotional premise to be seething. Yet, I also feel that the album has a bit of a soft underbelly, Stillborn Empires, Hole and to some extent Little Piggy, where things become a little static and stagnant. Maybe not as much with Little Piggy, which is full of quiet brutality, climaxing with a violin solo, but I simply do not want Antimatter to operate anywhere less than the pinnacle of emotion. Maybe egotistically so, but I want more desperation, more philosophy in the lyrics, more end of the world feeling, more melodies that are complete whirlwind. I don't want Antimatter to waste a single second of the album's running time on meandering.

The Judas Table has a lot of the above, in long stretches and spades, but I want it to be 100% so, perhaps a high, or even impossible, demand. A few places along the journey Mick Moss made me drop my concentration, and while applauding loudly to The Judas Table I anticipate even better things to come from Antimatter in the future.