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Mi'gauss (Shawnee for "total warfare") were a Death Metal band from Pennsylvania that caused a bit of a stir in their local scene back in the day, playing in shows for luminaries like Deceased and Vital Remains while also having members going on to be part of other projects like Incantation and Rottervore. Despite all that, a number of personal setbacks kept them from releasing a full-length until 2003 with Open Season, which was largely overlooked at the time before the band went dark for over a decade. They eventually got this album reissued via Night Rhythms Recordings, complete with a snazzy new cover courtesy of Barney Fried, but it still seems to languish in relative obscurity, which just goes to show how easy it is for great bands to slip through the cracks, because this may well be one of the best Death Metal of its time.

Mi'gauss worked in a very melodic vein of Death Metal without really going Melodeath, and they certainly didn't sacrifice aggression to achieve that. They stood out thematically by focusing on Native American folklore and warfare, specifically that of the Talaqua Shawnee in Pennsylvania, and even incorporated a touch of tribal ambience in their melodic sensibility to make a sound that even today sounds fresh and innovative while still retaining a recognizable heaviness and aggression that's akin to Bolt Thrower being mixed in with Dissection. Album opener "Open Fire" sets the mood perfectly with chugging riffs and vicious melodic leads that twist and turn in startling directions for the entirety of its 7-minute length, and everything from the murderous "Ni'sahmadaqui" to the stunning closer "Within the Myst (Blizzard of Fyock)" keeps that momentum up throughout the entirety of the album.

Most of the time, when an obscure album is rediscovered and re-released as some long-lost classic, you end up discovering why said album was forgotten in the first place. Open Season is one of those rare releases that deserve such a treatment, for it is an album that beat the piss out of most of its contemporaries and even today remains a crushing and novel slab of Death Metal that should turn heads now like it should have all those years ago. A lost masterwork.