Tag: grindcore
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Friendship – Hatred
Who says heavy music can’t have a sense of humour? Calling this Japanese outfit Friendship is a little on the nose, but the title of this none-more-black record is much more appropriate. These caustic Care Less Bears blast through 12 tracks of blackened, sludgy crust in a little over 25 minutes on this don’t-call-it-an-EP, with…
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Expulsion – Nightmare Future
Do you like grindcore? How about fast and extreme? Well, take your blood pressure medication and hit play. Expulsion’s highly anticipated album Nightmare Future drops on July 10th via Relapse Records and it is brutal! The band consists of grind/metal veterans Matt Olivo (Repulsion), Matt Harvey (Exhumed, Gruesome), Danny Walker (Intronaut, Exhumed, Phobia), and Menno Verbaten…
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Sigil – Kingdom of the Grave
Sigil have produced a most assured debut. Influenced by the likes of Discharge, Entombed, Black Breath, Death, Immolation and Morbid Angel, Sigil are ploughing their own furrow. A pleasing aspect to this album is the crusty sound to the riffs. I was reminded of the likes of Doom here; these are some seriously dense and effective…
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VENOMOUS CONCEPT – KICK ME SILLY – VC III
Venomous Concept is a supergroup built upon the backs of some of grindcore’s forefathers, but aside from several blasting passages, as with the accelerated latter-half of “Neck Tie”, the band is much more in tune with eighties punk rock and hardcore, not unlike the band which their own namesake pays homage to with a play…
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Wake – Sowing the Seeds of a Worthless Tomorrow
Writing about grindcore almost demands violent language: churn, blast, crush, ad nauseam. Descriptions follow a tried-and-tired vocabulary. You could fit Sowing the Seeds of a Worthless Tomorrow, the third full-length from Calgary grinders Wake, into that familiar mold. It would easily fit in some ways, but it wouldn’t exactly be accurate. I’m hedging against those…
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Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Arc EP
Is it just me, or has everybody in grindcore gone sludgy of late? First it was Pig Destroyer with their Mass & Volume EP, and now Agoraphobic Nosebleed, a band best known for putting out a 100(!) track CD in ’03, has jumped on the sludgewagon. Now, this three-song EP runs five minutes longer than…
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Black Sheep Wall – I’m Going to Kill Myself
Harsh. Caustic. Slower than molasses dripping off a tortoise’s nutsack. These are all terms to describe the new Black Sheep Wall album, which isn’t anywhere nearly as friendly as its cover might suggest…though tis certainly more befitting of its title. Lemme put it this way: there’s this one riff on “Metallica,” the cheekily named, 34-minute…
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Pig Destroyer – Mass & Volume
When one of the biggest grindcore bands of recent years drops a two-song, 26-minute doom-metal album, you can certainly colour me intrigued. Pig Destroyer actually recorded these two tracks back in ’06 but, understandably, they took some time to see the light of day. “Mass & Volume” takes up 19 of those minutes, starting off slowly with…
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Carcass – Surgical Steel
“A record of solidarity between chaps from Liverpool who sharpened their skills in ’88 to explore what rotting flesh would sound like, to persevere through the age of Grunge before taking a break from the operating room. You could say this band is in a state of post-mortem, but the founding spirit of Carcass is…