Archives: Reviews

1 - 2,000,000 grinja spava sa vama 2 - Crvenilo i parfem 3 - ?uvaj zdravlje 4 - Poludjeli psihijatar 5 - Savršen dan za samoubojstvo 6 - Supernova budala 7 - Melem za uši 8 - Uvijek problemi 9 - Idemo na papu 10 - Nesavršen svijet(jebiga) 11 - Lauf 12 - Produkt progresa 13 - Biraj: budala, debil, kreten ili imbecil? 14 - Gusti sloj septi?ke 15 - Zbog love 16 - Sam protiv sebe 17 - Exploziv

Ah! So Blythe was serious when she was talking about her Deathbag records and this Bolesno Grinje release! This means I am the only cunt who’s not able to release a Cd on his own, dammit! Anyway the Claudia fuckin’ Schiffer of Grind Core started out with a grand debut for her label with this Cd, quite different from the previous material. For once, I can tell there’s real progression here, from every angle you eye it. Dropped the fleas, the packaging is real top level, the lyrics are finally understandable (if contorted) and what’s even better, the music has bloomed into a schizoid and thoroughly original pulp of Grind, Death and general extreme music elements. First off the production is sharp and well balanced, the sound has a bit more emphasis on the metal side, with some intreesting turns which even reminded me of some Neurosis stuff and the songs really difficult to pigeonhole. There is just a track which I cannot swallow easily and that’s “Uvdek Problemi” which sounds a bit too emo-progressive post-something at first yet even this one branches out quickly into a plethora of different styles, all at the same time. It is interesting how this band manages to explore and define a sound of their own yet paying homage to a lot of distinct genres. It’s one of those concoctions which just amalgam finely and without sharp contrasts. Surely there is a huge English/Swedish crust vein, expecially in the vocals, but heaviness and complexisty are definitely borrowed from metal. Yet I wonder: to this day, after hearing bands like Nasum and Rotten Sound does it really mean something to talk about labels? Whatever, even if I am still all for teenage gore bands, my critical sense admits there is something big developing here, this band is developing fast, with a lot of logic and inner consitency. Simply put, for being one of the very few bands I can think of from Croatia, this is absoutely the best I know from that country. Were I in you I’d buy it, eh.

1 - The Curse Of Immortality 2 - Torso 3 - Schorched By Demons 4 - Paraplegia 5 - Patrons Of The Dark 6 - Shroud Of Iniquity 7 - Decomposed 8 - Goredawn 9 - Crematorium 10 - Mausoleum 11 - Gates Reflected 12 - The Immortalist 13 - Descent Into The Pale Hour

We talked about Grind Core records so far, so let’s throw in one more. How could one talk about that label and not mention this release? Wonderful logo full of root-like lines, a Gustav Doré artwork and gory lyrics, got it on the fly. The reason why this band isn’t mentioned as one of the first and best ever from the Louisiana area puzzles me. Paralysys used to play a very early kind of Brutal Death Metal, apparently tradional in form, but speckled with an abundance of brutal, punchfucking moments. The vocals are of an inborn true guttural, a bit Broken Hope in timbre maybe, grating with a even, low sound and alternated with some higher pitched ones. The sound of the bass is very high and pervasive in the mix, but contrarily to the other bands from Colorado of the time, the arrangements are not too progressive or experimental, it sounds more like a glitch in the recording process than something done on purpose to quench the thirst for protagonism many bass players have. I cannot tell the music proposal is amazingly original, but I like the complete lack of melody of this album. The metallic murkiness of the sound, the blastbeats, the raspy vocals, all contribute to a really primitive sound, with exceptionally sober riffs, abrupt changes and no-nonsense vocal patterns. I don’t know if it stands the test of time, but I heard this album a lot when I bought it, and I just liked the uncompromising straghtforward approach of these songs. I also have a demo called “promo ’91” by this band, but there is not really much to say about it, it just sounds more or less like the Cd, with slightly worse production (of corpse), and a different logo too.

1 - Coroner's Report 2 - Random Decay 3 - Repulsive Death 4 - Plagued Birth 5 - Severe Psychopathology 6 - Personality Conflict 7 - Eroded Thoughts

Argh, so I finally skipped one day, but luckily I am already here to ammend, by making two posts at once. I felt ill yesterday so I had to slip under the bedsheet without solving my review duty. So, it is the friday review and it has to be an old record, so what about Morgue from Sweden? I already had this band spinning in my player since I dug up Broken Hope‘s debut on Grind Core rex, and what can I tell you, this is an excellent Cd to own if you manage to find it. The cover art is wondrous, bloodspattered and abstract at the same time, the colours of flesh and bone. I miss these cover arts today, really I do. And how it’s great to see a good dripping logo which is not glowing a million colors. Musically, you can really tell by hearing this Cd, how the early Swedish scene was horizonally influenced by Autopsy. Morgue plays rather solid, classic Death Metal with an abundance of cartilaginous riffs with have the fragrance of the Autopsy doom passages. The vocals are the deep kind, but they struggle for some variety so you might hear influences of Asphyx, Autopsy (hm), Unleashed and early Sentenced as well. The music too, is able to display fast, grinding facets which even recalled memories of Carbonized. I have to say the lumbering obscurity of early Finnish/Swedish bands is generally lacking here, but we have a good breed of classick Death Metal which is always a pleasure shredding your ears at. This is a product of its own time, as much as the Wommbath review I made earlier, it’s difficult to believe one could be able to play like this today. I loved the track “Severe Psychopathology” for it’s variety of riffs balanced between old school grindings, crushing passages and even some brief snapshots of melody. The lyrics are also a mix of introspection, sick thoughts and gore, in the pure Death Metal tradition. As a closing note, for those complaining too much about today’s rap look of Death Metal bands, I would like to point at the jacket the drummer wears in the band photo, ah, for what reason should one add so much paint on a leather jacket two sizes more than what fits you? Man I always found a logo painted on a leather jacket to be ridicolous. But let’s not fall into a fashion review. Classic 90’s Death Metal, the best music there is.

1 - Step Into The Forests of Your Dusk 2 - Caller of The Typhoon 3 - Before There Is Light 4 - Bury My Coffin By My Own Hands 5 - Winds of Plague 6 - Hell Is My Heaven, Pain Is My Pleasure 7 - The Relentless Agony Intimidates Me Into The Black Silence As A New Moon 8 - Downwards The Roots of Darkness 9 - Fury of The Mountains 10 - Below The Moon, Above The Earth 11 - Black Metal Terrorism

In the beginning I hated this Ssorc from Tokyo (Ssorc is just the opposite of cross, clever uh?), I was wondering how could a good label like Obliteration sign such shit. Naru even created a sub black metal division of his label called Armageddon for this band. At a first listen, it is the same old dish which has been served with the same flavors for over a decade since the nineties, and the gods below know how I am fed up with this shit. Actually while the vocals ARE bad, the kind of heard-a-million-times nasal shriek typical of Norwegian penguins, the music is indeed a lot more violent than the average buzz. Indeed some riffs are complex while maintaining the veiled dissonace typical of Black Metal bands in the Northern Heritage vein (the label I mean), one could even compare them a bit to Surrender of Divinity I think, maybe a bit less bestial. Anyway we’re not completely lost in mediocrity, while the vocalist is atrocious, there is a nicely talented drummer, which is fast and quite dextrous to fill up the sound created by the guitars, and a good, intricate texture of different styles combined, you even hear traces of “Realm of Chaos” Bolt Thrower in some of the slower bridges. If I can manage somehow to remove these gay vocals, I bet something interesting could come out. Fast and quite sick stuff here, enclosed in a nice, traditional black metal packaging with gothic fonts and black and white layout. For those into real Black Metal I would not reccomend it, but if you only listen to that stuff then maybe this stands above your average buy.

1 - intro de muerte 2 - slave 3 - ride my horse 4 - silver attack 5 - for my kids 6 - cucas don't lie 7 - dooming maggots 8 - green card for all 9 - kids playing crazy 10 - 3,5 tons of putrid people 11 - shake the mouth 12 - reality of pubs 13 - formatris 14 - nice ass but not fat 15 - let's kill a nazi scum 16 - cows are the girls best friends 17 - under water love song 18 - brown brains - kick this 19 - speedfreak 20 - the horny asshole 21 - patholigicial art 22 - let's dance the samba 23 - nasty feeling 24 - Yokohama techno massacre 25 - love is the field 26 - united states of world - outro

In general, when everyone else discards a record as noise shit, I just pick it up and just happen to like it just becouse it’s impossible to stand. But this time we open here a big can of fat, white slimy worms, becouse for once I can’t really tell you if this band can be considered good or not. With goregrind, and with this last brand of cyber-techno oriented grind gore noise music, things just shrink to the level of subjective opinions, nothing else. Everyone could tell you Nile knows how to handle their instruments, or Last Days of Humanity is instense and heavy beyond belief, but how can you tell when music like this is good or not? I haven’t been able to distinguish even good from bad gabber or techno music, it just doesn’t shake anything into me, so on a technical level, this thing could stand anywhere. But I could tell you that I liked very much projects like Kots or SMES, despite being depravely nonsense and bare bones in sound. All my friends from the “metal” circle have often laughed at me for hearing stuff like the aforementioned, when I just swelled in that swampy, idiot music. However I didn’t find much amusement while listening to this Spaceshiters album. It is not a matter of “extremity” becouse you know, bands like The Boredoms or Niku-Do-Rei are able to make 10 times this noise, it’s just the textures are very, very dialted, and it seems to be a lot of vacuum in these songs. The overall sound of the srtings is fuzzy and recorded quite low, which gives a feel of very bad instrumentation but also of little interest and there is just a very big feel of idiocy (in a good sense) vibrating all over this. It’s like the more demented parts Gronibard, but made it to a whole disc length. On the long run, the fun is a bit reduced… this is definitely a fun project but I think this time we just pulled a bit the reins on the sheer extrenmity that makes this genre fun to hear. It’s mostly sound samples, barking vocals mouthing nonsense, with some scattered notes, nothing more than people trying different sounds on a sequencer. If it was noisier or heavier I would accept this, but there’s just too little going on here… In other words, I’d give it a listen before getting this, if I were in you, we’re somewhere between real stuff and an amateurish bedroom project. The artwork and layout too don’t have many pretenses, it’s just schizoid scribble and sketching of aliens and big ugly fonts on a single page booklet. Looks and sounds like a cheap product.

1 - Dream Master 2 - I Will Kill You 3 - Claustrophobia	4 - Napalm Death 5 - Untergang 6 - Power 7 - Crash 8 - Frozen Stiff 9 - Infected Brain 10 - What I Am 11 - Cancer 12 - Gesichter

I didn’t find much on this band so I have to stick to the elements I can perceive only. For a self-produced album, this doesn’t look bad, although the cover artwork suffers from heavy lack of sharpness becouse the images have been manipulated in a low resulution, the brain on the coiver results quite fuzzy, not to mention I hate the slick tomato effect on the logo and fonts on the back of the packaging. Anyway the concept is okay enough, it could just have been much better by just taking a few precautions. Infected Brain is an old German band that plays straight, heavily chuggish Death Metal in the vein of other German classics like Pavor, Purgatory or Obscenity. It always happens like that, when I hear a band I cannot but make comparisons to bands from the same country, it just clicks in my brain eh. The sound is quite pwoerful, and there are very few digressions from the genuine, brautal and to the point sound of this band. There are no space warp accelerations or technical frills, just a lot of emphasis on the rhytm that constantly chugs and hammers in mid to fast tempos, with guttural snarls and grunts all across. I might be blunt but I have the impression a band like this suffers a lot from releasing an album today when we have bands like Arsebreed, Artery Eruption or Disavowed playing Brutal Death Metal with twice as fast and thrice as complex riffs. I still am a big supporter of old School Death friggin’ Metal but some bands just falls in between that gap that separates the fascinating old school and the immensely powerful new breed of Brutal Death. And this has to be the case, the vocals are deep, the riffs are never banal or tarantella, which is a real feat when you play only heavy rhythmic riffs, and they even have a solos or two scattered in the middle. However to this time and age, an extra effort is being asked to Death Metal bands to stand out. Maximum support to a band that has gore lyrics and a festering brain on the cover, but I have to slip in a vote which is neither a praise nor a punishment. In other words, not bad but not a must buy.

1 - The Necrotic Mutation 2 - Exalteration 3 - Flying Over Ether'n'Thee

Necrotic Mutation probably released this MCd (or Cd single?) just to show the world that the band was still alive despite changing the complete line up save for the singer, and the passing of 6 years since the debut album was released. Even if some distinct personality remains, the menacing, twisted necromantic sound of the early band here is almost lost. I have the impresison that when bands begin to experiment how flexible the Death Metal genre can be, the bass player automatically becomes an idiot. Not the rest of the band, just the bass player. Bass players become protagonists as soon as the band wants to push the sound to more creative areas and they do this by turning the volume switch all the way up and starting to go their own way despite the song coherence. “Slap slap slap” everyone wants to be fucking Les Claypool. There are some really horrendous moments of cheap aimless bass string slapping in this album. Despite this however, the songs have a clear, well developed structure, with even a few moments of complete digression with elements of samba and ambient music. In respect to “The Realm of Human Illusion” the band however seems to have become a bit uninspired, creating three tracks with have no punch, and that are more a show of musical prowess than Death Metal anthems. I like the Canadian insanity this band still emits, and these guys surely know how to play their shit, but the energy level is definitely lacking here. The vocals have become a bit clearer, with some spoken phrasing as well, but this album remains far from being easily edible. Canadian insanity strikes again, but if I were in you, I’d go for the full.