Aborted - Vault of Horrors (2024)

Country: Belgium
Style: Technical Death Metal/Grindcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
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I guess Aborted should still be listed as a Belgian band, given that sole founder member and lead vocalist Sven de Caluwé is Belgian, but they're a pretty international bunch nowadays. What blew me away from moment one is the drumming of Ken Bedene, one of two Californians in the line-up, his fourteen year stint with the band making him the longest serving member who wasn't there at the beginning. The others hail from Iceland and Italy, but the latter is bassist Stefano Franceschini who left in 2023 after seven years on board. I don't believe he's been replaced yet but he does play on this album for presumably the last time.

Aborted are usually listed as technical death metal, which is entirely appropriate, but Bedene is a grindcore drummer when Dreadbringer kicks off the album. He doesn't stay there, but damn, he's fast. Of course, everyone else has to be totally on top of their game for this to hold together and I would be failing at my job if I didn't point that out, but it took plenty of effort to tear myself away from what he was doing, whatever anyone else was up to at any particular moment. I remember a gig in Bradford way back in 1988, with Carcass headlining during their demo days, at which I found myself hypnotised by the drummer of Intense Degree. He was so fast that I couldn't see his arms when he was in full flow because they were just a blur. That came quickly to mind here, though the majority of the speed seems to be in his feet.

After Bedene, it was de Caluwé who grabbed my attention with his vocals. He mostly delivers in a guttural death growl that's somehow clear enough for me to be able to tell that he sings entirely in English. However, like Bedene, there are points where he shifts up to grindcore speeds, others where he moves his pitch up to provide more of a black metal shriek and still more where there's some sort of post production done on his voice to give it a weirdly echoing effect. It's almost like he's inside such a small box that he'd have to be crushed into a cube to fit but which somehow lets his voice remain as huge and resonant as ever.

At least, I believe most of that is de Caluwé, but it's hard to actually tell, because there's a guest vocalist singing with him on every single track. Most are North American, with four from the USA and four from Canada, including Oliver Rae Aleron from Archspire on The Shape of Hate and Alex Erian from Despised Icon on Death Cult. However, there's also a Brit, Jason Evans from Ingested, on Insect Politics, the most overtly grindcore song here, and an Italian, Francesco Paoli from the mighty Fleshgod Apocalypse on Condemned to Rot. No wonder that one has a particularly dense sound. Generally speaking, the multiple voices helps this album considerably, adding a diversity that might not otherwise have been there.

The guitarists are Ian Jekelis and Daníel Konráðsson and what I found fascinating about what they do here is that they never seem to solo in genre. During the majority of these songs, they play at a quick pace because that's what everyone else is doing, and they add depth to the music. However, there are points where they play a lot slower, or at least whoever's handling lead at any particular moment does, and that adds a fascinating dimension. There are long sustained notes in The Shape of Hate and Hellbound, even though everything else around them is fast, and the solos, in most of these songs, tend to be almost traditional heavy metal solos, hardly extreme at all.

While those solos can be rather engaging, this is the exact opposite of easy listening. It's not just that it's very loud and very fast, it's that we have to pay a lot of attention to what's happening. It can be easy to get lost in some of these songs, like Condemned to Rot and Brotherhood of Sleep. Hellbound may the most immediately accessible. Death Cult has an almost singalong chorus, merely a simple and brutal one. The Golgothan is an attention grabber, because of electronic pulses as part of the beat, and there are deeper keyboards later in the song which add another element to the sound.

My favourites are the ones that are complex but not impenetrable, ones that I can grasp within a few listens but still have hidden depths that I can explore on further runs through. Dreadbringer has to be the most obvious, but The Golgothan is close and Malevolent Haze has an emotional arc to explore. It seems bigger than anything else here, perhaps appropriately as the closer, only the single that hinted at the album, Infinite Terror, after it as a bonus track. That's a good one too.

It's just hard to call out tracks after only five listens, though. This is material so dense that we just can't judge it properly until we've enjoyed its company for a while, bought it dinner and visited its parents. We have to dive in deep and explore it to find what it's truly offering. The whole album is still growing on me and I'm a little wary about only giving it a 7/10. I have a feeling that, in a week or two, I'd give it more, but I have to let it go right now so I can move onto other albums by other bands. C'est la vie.

Nashgul - Oprobrio (2023)

Country: Spain
Style: Death Metal/Grindcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Sep 2023
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For a band who mix death metal with grindcore—and shift from one to the other and back in most of these songs—I have to say that Nashgul chug gloriously. That's why some of these tracks actually became earworms for me; when was the last time that happened with a grindcore band? There's a repeated slowdown in Protocolo Deus that has stayed with me, the simple but highly effective riff in Sewers Across gets me every time and there's a real bounce to songs like Rexa Vesania that tell me that they're really punk standards that we haven't heard before that have been given energy and pace beyond our expectations.

Initially, this was all about that mix for me. I've heard a lot of bands who claim to mix death metal with grindcore but few actually do. For the most part, they're either death metal bands who speed up enough to be called grindcore or grindcore bands who slow down every once in a while to churn. Nashgul are that rare example of a band who honestly merge the two because precious few of the sixteen tracks here are just one or the other. They listened to both sides of Scum and weren't quite sure which they preferred more.

Most of them feature frantic sections of grindcore, with vocals so distorted that we can't identify what language is being used—Nashgul are Spanish, hailing from A Coruña in the far northwest of Galicia, but most of these song titles are in English, with what looks like a couple in Spanish, a pair in Galician and two more in Latin—but most of them also feature solid death metal riffing with a voice that's closer to a death growl. Crucially, they shift back and forth constantly between these two sides of their sound with the two vocal styles not necessarily divvied up how we might expect. And then there's that edge of much more traditional punk that occasionally takes over.

Opener Quien puede matar a un niño, for instance, is primarily grindcore, with that deep vocal as unintelligible as words as the faster early Napalm Death tracks, sounding more like gargling with bleach than an attempt to deliver lyrics. The Fake, which is almost entirely spent at frantic speed, reminds of The Kill, with the accompanying pitch shift in the vocals. However, there are drops into growly death metal and into a bouncy old school punk with regular shouted vocals, albeit without any associated drop in energy. Even when they play slow, which they do surprisingly often for what many would hear as grindcore, Nashgul are full of energy, always ready to shift up a gear or three.

Flay Off works the other way round, starting out as an overtly death metal song that occasionally speeds up and adopts those grindcore touches. There's also what I presume is a sample to kick off and it gives the song a different flavour, as if this was political punk. Surely the most unusual intro is on Los que deben seguir muertos, which starts out with prowling electronica, hardly something I expect from either death metal or grindcore. It's almost John Carpenter-esque and it doesn't last long, but it flavours that song just as that sample flavours Flay Off.

And, just to continue flouting our expectations, there are songs that rely so much on the chug that they trawl in genres we simply don't expect. Sewers Across may play mostly in death metal but it's almost doom at points. Buried, But Still Alive, plays in doom too, but with punk feedback overlaid for a while and drumming from Iván that's often much faster than any other aspect of the song. It counts as the joint-longest song here at 3:14 and that's because it's all instrumental churn, Alex a notable absence on this one. While Nashgul do ramp up to grindcore speed often across the album, he's always its most extreme aspect; when he isn't there, the result feels far less extreme.

Oprobrio was a submission for review, so thanks to the band for sending this one over. It's been an odd couple of weeks here at Apocalypse Later, mostly because I've been concentrating on getting a bunch of books ready for publication, so I've had this playing on and off for far longer than tends to be the case. What's telling is that it hasn't got old at all and grindcore has a habit of doing that quickly. I adore the infusion of energy that the genre brings, but it's rarely memorable because it tends to rely so much on that effect. This works as an energy shot of grindcore, but it also works as slab of music to sit down and enjoy.

Nashgul are hardly a prolific band. They've been around since 2001 and they've been featured on a lot of split singles over the years, but this is only their third album, after El día después al fin de la humanidad in 2009 and Cárcava in 2016. A seven year album release schedule isn't ambitious but it works when the quality and versatility are this high. I may not want to wait another seven years to hear their next album, but I'll do it. This is good stuff.

Wormrot - Hiss (2022)

Country: Singapore
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Jul 2022
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Singaporean grindcore sounds exactly like the sort of thing I review here at Apocalypse Later but a lot of the mainstream press ignores. However, Wormrot have been press darlings for years and this fourth album has been consistently acclaimed as their masterpiece, as well as a swansong for vocalist Arif, a founder member, who left the band after fifteen years behind the mike. They get a lot of coverage and Hiss made at least five best of lists for 2022, as many as Amorphis, Rammstein and Meshuggah.

And I can see why because this is surely the most versatile grindcore album I've ever heard, much of that due to the sheer range of Arif, making his position in the band a particularly tough one to fill. Sure, there's a ten second blitzkrieg song here that does exactly what you expect and nothing more. This one's called Unrecognizable and it's just there, as the nineteen second Shattered Faith is just there later on the album. These aren't anything new and there are precise equivalents on every other grindcore album. The good news is that that's less than half a minute of time wasted, while they get on with the interesting stuff. And there's a lot of that.

In fact, there's so much variety on offer that it'll be hard to cover all of it. Yes, most of these songs are short. Twenty-one of them take up only thirty-three minutes, though the closer, Glass Shards, is an almost unimaginable four and a half minutes all on its own. That's an intro in prog rock but it seems like a sprawling epic in grindcore and the violin of Myra Choo is a standout element, mixing so well with the guitars of Raysid. Yes, most of these songs are fast, with Hatred Transcending the one that screams along so fast it's like Wormrot are riding a lightning bolt, but Pale Moonlight is slow and tribal and All Will Wither is slower still, Arif's snarling calmly over a slow beat, with zero input from guitars, just shimmering cymbals approximating feedback.

But let's talk about Arif, because he's the first reason for this to be so versatile. He pulls out high shrieks and low growls on the opener, The Darkest Burden. Then he adds a surprisingly rich clean voice to Broken Maze, almost like I'd expect to hear from Bucovina. For Behind Closed Doors, he's off into another genre, with old school chanted hardcore vocals before everything went shouty. In When Talking Fails, It's Time for Violence, he shifts again with an anarcho-punk singalong chorus. And that's jut the first four songs, which rack up about six and a half minutes between them.

Guitarist Raysid, now the only founder member left in the band, covers a lot of ground too. He can play incredibly fast, as you'd expect for grindcore, but often he lets Vijesh, who is an insanely tight drummer, run loose and doesn't even attempt to match him, playing much slower riffs in front and sometimes even just power chords. Regardless of how fast Vijesh is blurring, Raysid plays riffs on Behind Closed Doors that wouldn't feel out of place on the Metallica debut, which was really just Diamond Head a little faster.

My favourite songs come late on the album, when he's playing a highly melodic guitar behind Arif. Desolate Landscapes and Vicious Circle both almost sound like two different songs behind played in the same studio at the same time and they sound wonderful. This harmonic work is also there a little earlier on Voiceless Choir, which even adds some divvying up of lyrics that old school hip hop artists used to do. At the other extreme, there's experimental dissonance on Your Dystopian Hell and Hatred Transcending. Nobody here wants to just do the one thing that's always done and I'm unable to conjure up a better approach to take to any genre.

And, talking of things that just aren't done, there's that violin. Whoever came up with the bright idea to add a violin to a grindcore album deserves a prize. Myra Choo isn't omnipresent, like she'd be in a folk metal band, but, whenever she turns up, the music finds a whole new level that's unlike anything I've heard before. Grieve, in particular, is searing. It's a sub-two minute instrumental and it almost finds its way into industrial, because Choo isn't interested in playing sweet on this one. It starts out sounding like the band are in a factory, cutting sheet metal with a chainsaw. Then Choo speeds up and it's fascinating.

She plays much sweeter on Glass Shards, delivering an excellent solo, letting Raysid follow suit on guitar and then combining with him to even greater effect. I assume she's just here as a guest and that may or may not be a one time thing, but I hope she works with Wormrot more and whoever in the Singaporean extreme metal scene might be open to diversifying their sound. I caught a violin moment here and there, on Sea of Disease and Noxious Cloud and especially Weeping Willow, but sometimes so fleeting that I wondered if I was just adding her in my imagination.

All of which adds up to this not being your typical grindcore album, but still delivering the goods in every way that grindcore fans would expect. It's a groundbreaking album. If there's a catch here, it has to be that the few traditional songs suddenly seem like filler because so much else has moved on to new and vibrant territory. And that's the only reason I'm going with an 8/10 instead of a 9/10.

Napalm Death - Resentment is Always Seismic: A Final Throw of Throes (2022)

Country: UK
Style: Death Metal/Industrial
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 11 Feb 2022
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It still feels strange to realise that Napalm Death are forty years into their career and they have a lucky thirteen studio albums to their name, the most recent of which made a whole slew of end of year charts in 2020 and got an 8/10 from me here at Apocalypse Later. This isn't number fourteen; it's a mini album made up of material that didn't make it onto that album, and it's as inconsistent as that might make it seem, but some of it is powerful stuff indeed, like the blistering two minute punk onslaught that is By Proxy. It isn't the grindcore of their debut album, which was really a pair of mini albums packaged together, but it hearkens back to even earlier anarcho-punk material, as did some of the material on that thirteenth album, Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism.

If that's the best song, there's a whole gradient of material behind it. Narcissus is a strong opener that fits very well with the best of the two covers on the album, Don't Need It, a Bad Brains track from their self-titled debut album back in 1982. It's a frantic but very true take on that original, a more appropriate cover here than the song I remember best from that album, Pay to Cum. Also of note are the two songs that play as a consistent double bill in between the covers. I'd have to give the edge to Man Bites Dogged, a chugger rather than a blisterer with its roots in thrash metal but Slaver Through a Repeat Performance is pretty close.

So far, that's all fairly expected for a band who have morphed over the decades from anarcho-punk to grindcore to death metal. Even when they shift into punk or flirt with thrash, they're immensely recognisable as Napalm Death. That starts to change when they shift into more unusual territory, something that they did on A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen, the closer to Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism and a song that almost felt out of place there. It feels like it has a lot more in common with the various tracks here that also delve deep into industrial.

The best of these, to my ears, is Resentment Always Simmers, a slower song in between Narcissus and the vicious assault of By Proxy, but a heavy one nonetheless. It plays well to me and tells me in no uncertain terms that the Napalms doing industrial can work within the confines of my personal taste, which dabbles in but has never dived into that genre. However, it doesn't work for me on the other cover here, which is of a 1988 single called People Pie by Slab!, a British industrial band. It's easily my least favourite piece of music here, which means that the closer is above it.

I've left that for last not because it's the closer or because I particularly like it, but it's interesting in ways that People Pie isn't. It's called Resentment is Always Seismic (Dark Sky Burial Dirge) and I guess that makes it the surprising title track. It's absolutely the dirge that its name suggests and I was immediately reminded of how Celtic Frost dabbled in industrial way back in the day, but taken to the degree of heaviness they reached much later with Monotheist. I remember mentioning the Frosties in my review of Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism too and it really shouldn't surprise to see them as an influence on Napalm Death. I wonder if they ever delved further back down that path.

So this is a mixed bag, as such collections of extra tracks tend to be, but it's an interesting one. The best songs here are easily worthy of sitting on a regular album and the worst are still unusual enough to be worth a listen, even if they wouldn't remotely fit on a regular release.

Pupil Slicer - Mirrors (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Post-Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Mar 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

I've seen the memorable name of Pupil Slicer—clearly someone stumbled upon Un Chien Andalou, or at least the one famous clip from it—crop up in a few places so I thought I should check out what looks like their debut full length album, following some EPs. They're definitely an interesting band, though they're hardly going to be everyone's tastes. I usually see them defined as post-metal, but I see telling genres listed on their Bandcamp page like grindcore, mathcore and powerviolence. The one that I'm thinking rings truest is "chaotic hardcore".

That's because this is both wild and tight, often delivered at a breakneck speed but with a solid level of technical ability. There's a lot of stop and start with this band but everyone stops and starts at the same time and they shift tempo just as seamlessly. A blisteringly short song like Stabbing Spiders, all over and done with in a mere forty-seven seconds, comes very close to grindcore, but it's performed with guitars tuned in a very modern American metalcore style and there's too much else going on to be pure grindcore.

By the time L'appel du Vide, a much longer three minute song with a further thirty seconds of what is perhaps a manipulated electronic take on the intro to Metallica's Damage, Inc., was over, I'd figured out the obvious comparison and it's a surprising one. Back in 1992, the BRIT Awards, which featured a performing line-up of pop artists like Seal, Simply Red and Lisa Stansfield, opened with the legendary combination of avant garde techno pranksters, the KLF, and crust punk band Extreme Noise Terror. It was an unusual artistic statement, especially given the audience, but it seems to me that Pupil Slicer might just have stumbled onto that on YouTube and been inspired to start a band.

That's because L'appel du Vide, like the rest of the album to varying degrees, is rhythmic in ways that go far beyond the impressive drums of Josh Andrews. The vocals are spat out in rhythmic bursts like a machine gun, the guitar sometimes resembles a cycling siren, and there's artistic manipulation of the song, whether performed live or added in post. There's a fascinating backing vocal partway that's just as melodic as the song itself isn't. It sounds good to me, but it also sounds as much like an artistic statement as a song.

There's performance art here from the outset. Kate Davies delivers the expected screams and other ultra-harsh gutturals but they're far beyond the more straightforward backing vocals of bassist Luke Fabian and there are points where they feel painful. Martys, for example, which opens up the album with a vengeance, features vocals with the expected harshness until, well, they go much further. The intensity level increases until, by the end of the song, it sounds as if she's in actual, serious pain, like she's just swallowed a vial of acid and her throat's dissolving as she performs.

After a few tracks, I started to wonder what this looks like visually. Husk is fast and furious, but it also gets downright sludgy at points and the longer it runs, the sludgier it gets. The last couple of minutes of Mirrors are More Fun Than Television is even sludgier. And what does it look like? There ought to be a visual component to this. What's going on at the beginning of Worthless, when it's just bass under a drone? Then again, what's going on when it gets moving? It sounds utterly destructive. At least Pupil Slicer put a music video together for the minute and change Interlocutor and it's as dark as it sounds, telling quite the self-destructive story in such a short time, but still leaving room for a very impactful ending.

The closest musical comparison I can conjure up is the debut Dillinger Escape Plan album, Calculating Infinity, but that's a slow motion version of this album. It shares the mathcore insanity of a song like 43% Burnt and even a guitar sound, but this is much heavier, the vocals are much more raucous and the stylistic chameleon play is much more extreme. If that sounds like your sort of thing, then this is going to be so your thing that you'll have found a new favourite band. Otherwise, this will probably scare you.

Napalm Death - Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 18 Sep 2020
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Let's wrap up my 2020 coverage at Apocalypse Later with an album I'd have reviewed in September had I not been suffering technical difficulties at the time. It's the new one from Napalm Death, amazingly their sixteenth original studio album, something that I simply wouldn't have believed when I bought Scum in 1987. Of course, that pioneering debut led to quite the career, even though no musician on it lasted past 1991, names like Lee Dorrian, Bill Steer and Mick Harris now known as much for their work after they left as before.

I'd have reviewed this anyway, but I'm doing so now because it was received particularly well and made a strong showing in the end of year lists, topping Decibel's list and coming second at Consequence of Sound. It sounds really good to me too, better than the band last time I saw them live (which I see now was as long ago as 2006, just after Smear Campaign came out). It feels fresh, surprisingly so for an outfit technically celebrating their fortieth anniversary this year (and their thirtieth in this line-up). I haven't heard much from their last couple of decades but what I have heard wasn't this fresh.

Much of that is surely due to the fact that they continue to experiment with their sound. The heart of this is still grindcore heavily infused with death metal, but there's a lot more here than that. It's very punky, hearkening back to the band's roots in the anarcho-punk scene of the day, long before the idea of grindcore had been conjured up. There's a lot of early Discharge here, especially in the way Barney handles the vocals, not in style but in rhythm, intonation and meter. I first noticed this on Contagion and Zero Gravitas Chamber but the intro to the title track underlines it. It's like he's shouting poetry rather than singing and how the words and their syllables sound is important as what they say.

There are also journeys into lands other than grindcore and death. There are other sounds in songs at the beginning of the album, but that becomes impossible to miss once we get to Joie de na pas Vivre, an experimental piece that mixes black metal and industrial. That's followed by Invigorating Clutch, a nod to avant garde Celtic Frost; it's slower but utterly relentless. Because the styles they explore to a deep degree are already present in earlier songs, they don't feel out of place. The only song that does is the last one, the most overtly industrial piece here, A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen, which wisely ends the album. It would have been awkward anywhere else.

I love the sound of this album. I remember listening to Scum in 1987 and struggling to keep up with a pace that exceeded anything I'd heard before. It's easier nowadays, of course, with decades of extreme metal to train my ears, but this is as clear and melodic as I've ever heard grindcore without losing any power whatsoever. It's purple faced angry even as it embraces subtleties and textures. Amoral is like a ruthless punk take on a Depeche Mode song, but it's a highlight here, even if the vehemence and pace of the title track that follows it underlines how different it really was.

Perhaps the best way to describe this is to suggest that I like grindcore not so much for the music but because that music provides an experience. If the best and fastest thrash cleans me out, leaving me as spiritually refreshed as if I'd spent a day meditating in a sauna, then grindcore does that in blitzkrieg fashion, a more jagged and punctuated route to the same goal. This, however, I'm listening to for the music. It's fascinating to hear this sort of versatility at this sort of speed and it bodes very well for an iconic band entering its fifth decade.

Tristwood - Blackcrowned Majesty (2020)

Country: Austria
Style: Industrial Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 May 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's another submission, one for which I should apologise to Jegger from Tristwood about, because he sent this to me in May 2020, when this was new. I downloaded it but failed to get round to actually listening to it until now. Double shame on me because this is a fascinating feast of uncompromising underground extremity. It's absolutely not going to be for everyone but, if it speaks to you, it may be one of your favourite albums from last year.

Tristwood hail from Innsbruck, which is in Austria but has been historically part of Germany, Italy and France, making it a suitable location for a band who play an unholy mixture of black and death metal, industrial and grindcore. Whatever they are right now on this song, they'll be something else in five minutes on the next one. There's even a neat melodic part in one song but I'd better not mention that or it might get cut back out again, given the neat background to the album's musical direction that's detailed on its Bandcamp page.

Most of my favourite songs arrive late on, whether that's the proto-death of Acherontic Deathcult or the death-infused black metal onslaught of Bone Cathedral, but the title track may well be the key to what they do. It doesn't show up until three songs in, but before it pulls back the curtain and shows us the layers to Tristwood's sound, we're treated to the assault of a couple of others.

Re-Enthronement of the Damned is blisteringly fast, so much so that it's hard to actually listen to the guitars behind a wall of sound. What our ears catch instead are electronic noises that I imagined were aliens trying to communicate with me through the same equipment I'm using to listen to this album. It's black metal mixed with grindcore and it's uncompromising.

The vocals stood out too. I'm used to death growls, black shrieks and hardcore shouts, among others, but these are what I'll now think of as Tristwood barks. Luckily I'm not listening to this on my laptop, because those doglike vocals would send my cats to the high country. The ferret in my office is down, of course, as he'll say hi to anything, even if it'll eat him.

As we roll into He Who Traversed a Greater Oblivion, the wall of sound remains but with many bricks removed. I can hear the guitarwork now behind slower drums. Notably the vocals turn into grindcore gutturals, deep and desolate. It's different but still extreme, death rather than black, a new facet to a band about to kick A Blackcrowned Majesty off with techno beats and atmosphere, like we're in one of those European clubs we see in the movies that only cater to vampires about to be slain.

What this one does is echo both the earlier songs at once but in a mix that highlights the industrial aspects that we were merely glimpsing before. I can almost figure out what those aliens are trying to tell me, enough that I think they may be chatting with the barking dogs. It's well named, because it's a majestic song indeed, successful at combining at least four genres into one. Oh, and there's a flute, just in case we thought the surprises were over. They're not, though perhaps we're now expecting the unexpected and that's why we're not surprised by the further surprises.

Tristwood were formed as long ago as 2001 and they've put out four studio albums before this, plus a couple of EPs and singles. I haven't heard any of those, but the line-up seems to have remained pretty stable so this, as ruthlessly uncompromising as it is—their 2019 single, Crypt of Perennial Whispers, featured a single 22 minute song—is clearly working for them in the Tyrol, even if they're never going to be providing the new theme for Ski Sunday. Their Bandcamp page lists influences from black metal era Bathory and Hellhammer to Skinny Puppy and Killing Joke. They all make sense, even Oxiplegatz, a name I haven't seen in twenty years.

I like this. It's not something I'm going to virtually spin every week but it works well both as music on its own merits and as a reminder that the genre-hopping, avant-garde, uncompromising underground doesn't have to be unlistenable. Hyperspeed blastbeats, industrial drone riffs, electronic noises and a barrage of Tristwood barks remind me of that magic moment in 1987 when Sid put Napalm Death's Scum onto the Groové Records deck in Halifax and I realised I wasn't buying the Faster Pussycat debut that day after all. It's a good reminder that a lot of extreme music just isn't that extreme any more, but the edges still exist and they seem to be in Innsbruck.

Anna Pest - Dark Arms Reach Skyward with Bone White Fingers (2021)

Country: Canada
Style: Progressive Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Here's something wild and wonderful. Anna Pest is one woman whose name is not Anna Pest but April Hutchins and she hails from Montreal. She plays all the instruments here and provides the vocals too, with the exception of a few guest appearances. Jason Evans of British death metallers Ingested, sings on one song; Duncan Bentley of the similar South African band Vulvodynia sings on another; and the mysterious d.are sings on a third. A couple of others also provide spoken word.

Initially, I thought it was completely out of control but I didn't want to stop listening. Gradually, the songs started to coalesce into something fascinating and I can't help but wonder about the influences that Hutchins brought to bear. Certainly, they're not all what we might expect because this is appears to be a concept album, based for the most part on the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. And if that has you picturing kawaii pop music, you couldn't be more wrong. This is... well, I'm really not sure what to call it.

There's certainly death metal on the opener, Nadira, though the bass is low in the mix and the drums are high. There's a dissonance that suggests a lot of industrial too, though you're not going to hear this on a dancefloor any time soon. The rhythms are not all straightforward, so I'd throw progressive metal in there too, a mid-period Voivod feel coming out of slower sections. The vocals are interesting too, because I caught three different voices but it seems that they all belong to Hutchins.

I should also mention that Nadira runs four and a half minutes, a standard sort of length for the Anna Pest album that came out five years ago. That was entitled Forlorn and its eight similarly one worded songs ran pretty consistently from four to six minutes. Not so this time around! This second album is only a little longer overall but it boasts fifteen tracks, seven of which are under two minutes and one that wraps in only forty-one seconds, lengths that suggest grindcore and deliver it too. After Nadira, only Of the Black Moon and the Red Earth exceeds four minutes and that runs over eleven.

I wish I had a clue how the concept plays out, because Thundering Angel won't leave me alone. It's an overt industrial death metal song that seems to fall apart completely about half a minute in but still makes it through another fifty seconds, even with a dramatic shift in tempo from near grindcore to almost funeral doom. It makes no sense at all, but it seems to bring its title to life magnificently. It's one of those songs that might be garbage but also might be genius. I loved it.

Skyward follows it with another dramatic shift, moving from the routine industrial death metal to a sweet pop melody. Twice. This time it only threatens to fall apart completely but never does. This is a dangerous form of extreme metal, in the sense that it feels like it was performed in a junkyard amidst piles of metal so tall that the machine gun drums will surely prompt the whole thing to collapse. It's appropriate because, even though the style here seems futuristic, because I can easily believe that the drummer is a killer robot who's beating the shit out of lesser killer robots instead of drums, it's just as out there on the edge as Hellhammer or Bathory were forty years ago.

In lesser hands, this could have been a truly awful album. The core sound that combines death growls, a schizophrenic bass and that insane killer robot drum machine would outstay its welcome in no time flat if the songwriting wasn't versatile enough to keep things interesting. And I think it does. There's a consistency here at the heart of it all, but also a mad genius flicking a radio dial to see what else can be added into the mix. What are those first two seconds of Pathetic Consummation?

At points, this almost becomes a traditional brutal death metal album but, every time it does, there's something new to wake us up from that dream. It might be a military call to arms or a catchy alt rock bridge or a bit of electronic manipulation, maybe even the band who booked the studio space before Hutchins being fed through a woodchipper as she records her next song. Whatever you can say about this, and surely a lot of people will absolutely hate it, not one of you can call it boring.

I should talk about that long song. It's surely the most calculated piece of music here, emphatically a prog metal epic. There are fast sections, slow sections and slower sections, getting downright doomy on occasion. There are clean vocals as well as harsh ones, and there's a gloriously prowling bass that's often a replacement for guitars that are so downtuned they sometimes vanish entirely, only to show back up with emphasis. Yet this song never feels long, even after so many short numbers before it; it lasts a couple minutes longer than the previous five songs put together and arguably does a lot more.

This certainly isn't going to be for everyone, but it's a fantastic reminder that extreme metal can play just as progressively as folk, rock or regular heavy metal.

Pig Destroyer - The Octagonal Stairway (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 28 Aug 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia

Variety is the spice of life, I say, not that you hadn't figured out by looking at what I review here. I've listened to a lot of quieter music lately, relatively speaking, prog rock and post-rock and the elegant end of symphonic metal. I felt like a shift into high gear, even further than yesterday's Virus album gave me. So here's Pig Destroyer.

I like grindcore and not only because I was there early-ish trying to fathom out what the heck this new extreme genre was in 1988. Let's just say that my gig list that year started with a-ha and Gypsy Queen, progressed through Rick Wakeman to Metallica and ended up with an indoor festival headlined by a Carcass fresh from their first album release. It was Intense Degree who blew me away on that day (well, them and Paradise Lost, still in their demo days) and I started tuning into John Peel as well as Tommy Vance.

That said, I also know that grindcore is a relatively limited genre and so it's a periodic thing for me. I like getting my system cleaned out by a good grindcore album, but then I'll dive back into traditional genres that are more varied. So, my wishlist here was for something intense enough to really clean my clock after midnight. And, well, I don't think this really delivered, at least on that front.

Sure, it's loud and it's fast and it's heavy, but all grindcore is those things. This is slower than I really expected it to be, with the opening trio of songs a lot closer to later Napalm Death than early. Yeah, I hear punky vocals rather than death growls from J. R. Hayes, but I wanted a blur of speed and I didn't get that, except for about a minute of the opening title track.

This is a truck on a hill without brakes, which is heavy and powerful and destructive, but it isn't close to a rocketship. What's more, these three songs, the others being The Cavalry and Cameraman, total a skimpy ten minutes between them. The final track is longer than that on its own and it isn't remotely like this.

That's because the second half of this 25 minute EP isn't grindcore in the slightest. It comes from the experimental end of industrial, full of static and samples, something I might expect on an old album from Nurse with Wound or Current 93. News Channel 6 is an abrasive intro to Head Cage and they're a mere teaser to Sound Walker, the eleven minute epic that closes this EP out with an industrial drone. Igor Cavalera apparently guests on this one and I wouldn't have recognised that in a hundred years. I couldn't even tell you if he's guesting on drums or vocals or synths or what.

I should praise Pig Destroyer for surprising me. This isn't anything I expected from them and, frankly, it sounds like this is really a split EP with someone else. What's really odd is that the first half plays a lot closer to what I was aiming for, but the second half is what will stay with me. Those slow grindcore songs are decent but they didn't blow me away, though Cameraman is growing on me. Sound Walker, while it's not remotely for everyone, is a piece of music that grabbed my attention and refused to let go. That's a good thing.

And, having sought this out for a whirlwind of energy that I didn't find, I now find myself wondering if there's anything else like Sound Walker in Pig Destroyer's back catalogue. This isn't remotely what I remember from them early on, but they've kept busy since their formation in 1997 and I see an album a couple of years ago named Head Cage, even though there isn't a song of that title on it (though there is here). Maybe that tells me something. Maybe not. I should find out.

Creative Waste - Condemned (2020)

Country: Saudi Arabia
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

If I could be surprised by anything more than the discovery that there's a grindcore band in Saudi Arabia, it's the discovery that they've been doing what they do there for a long time. While the founder members talked about the band at the tail end of the last millennium, they officially formed in 2002 and are based in the gulf coast cities Al Qatif, Dammam and Al Khobar. Whoever's in the latter is actually closer to Smouldering in Forgotten over the bridge in Bahrain as he is to whoever's in Al Qatif. Metal Archives has a note that Creative Waste performed the first metal gig in public in Saudi Arabia, so extra kudos to them. Shake the pillars of the world.

I'm not sure how much material they've issued in the past. Their website, or what passes for one, mentions four albums but Metal Archives only lists two, the first dating back to 2012 and the second being this one. Bandcamp has a short third from 2008 that Metal Archives lists as a demo. I do like the bio the band included on that page: "Creative Waste is a Saudi Arabian grindcore band. That should give you an idea of how horrible we sound." Nice.

Here, they sound pretty damn good. Their sound clearly comes from the early days of grindcore. Condemned is rather like early Napalm Death but not quite as extreme in speed, with riffs that are straight out of the first Discharge album. Other songs aren't quite as reminiscent, but both those bands come up a lot here. The abundant use of samples clearly comes from punk too, given that they're all social in nature, railing against a lot of common bugbears like wealth inequality and racism. I recognised Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky and that idiot at a Virginia public meeting who accused every Muslim of being a terrorist.

The primary reason that Creative Waste are a lot more like the Napalms than Discharge is the use of particularly wild vocals. They are varied, perhaps because vocal duties are divvied up between the two Al-Shawafs in the band (presumably brothers?), Fawaz and Talal, who were founding members and have kept Creative Waste alive ever since. Fawaz is also the band's guitarist and Talal contributes the drums but I believe it's their voices we're hearing.

I have no idea which is which but one of the voices is old school grindcore, straight out of the Lee Dorrian playbook, hurling deep guttural roars into the microphone, while the other is higher, wilder and punkier and is really a challenge to the the mixer's ability to keep him from blowing out the top end of the spectrum.

What surprised me most is how substantial these songs sounded. Back in those early days in the late eighties, I remember songs not only being very short but feeling very short. They were brief bursts of intense energy without too much of a secondary goal in structure. I remember being surprised when From Enslavement to Obliteration came out and rocked that assumption. These songs are short but not for grindcore, running in the territory of a minute and a half to double that. The New Apartheid, the only song here to make it past three minutes, feels like a more extreme sort of crossover that's far beyond anything Agnostic Front or the Crumbsuckers ever put out.

To me Creative Waste sound like a what if scenario. Imagine if the American authorities had managed to put Jello Biafra behind bars and kicked the rest of the Dead Kennedys out of the US. Imagine if they'd settled in England and got caught up in the early days of grindcore, consequently speeding up and getting more raucous. Imagine if they'd hired a new singer who came out of crust punk and wanted to emulate Lee Dorrian. And imagine if they hung out with a DJ who knew exactly how best to use samples. What you're imagining is something very close to Creative Waste.

Feastem - Graveyard Earth (2020)

Country: Finland
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Knowing I'd be reviewing the new Waltari album today, I looked for something as loud and raucous as possible to balance against it. Feastem looked like a great choice, given that they were formed in 2005 "to play the fastest, most pissed off grindcore imaginable". I wouldn't say that they succeeded but the band are certainly fast and pissed off, even if the quality of musicianship is high.

The downside is quickly obvious, if you'll forgive the pun. Feastem's fourth album is their shortest yet, over in under twenty minutes, which is way too short for an album. Just call it an EP instead, folks, or even a mini-album, anything to highlight that it's really short. Then again, their longest thus far, 2011's World Delirium, was still shorter than Reign in Blood, albeit a little closer. I'm docking a point here as a token complaint about length.

While I've seen both thrash metal and death metal associated with Feastem, I don't hear that here. This is old school punk played fast and ferociously to fit firmly in the grindcore category. There are no guitar solos. Every song here kicks off fast, finds a groove and explores it briefly before wrapping up. There are fourteen tracks here, only one of which makes it past the two minute mark. Two of them don't even get to a minute and the powerelectronics outro is longer at 1:14 than half of the actual songs. It's kind of like DOA on speed or early Discharge with more buried vocals.

Fortunately, the music is excellent. The band don't care about gimmickry, so there's no gore or porngrind here. They're more old school punk politicians, railing against the current state of world affairs, the title track being as telling right now as anything else I've heard during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's certainly pessimistic but, frankly, lyrics like "Mob mentality, a hive mind in frenzy, the corpse of civilization, the wreckage of hope" could have been written about my local Walmart this morning. Then again, that could be Walmart any day, pandemic or not.

Even if this is perfect music for those with attention deficit disorder, the songs don't get old. I enjoyed this as much, if not more, on my fifth listen as on my first. Certainly the riffs, which are all simple but effective, are surprisingly memorable for grindcore. I Will Never Kill manages to cram two such into a minute and both are so simple but so effective that I could well wake up in the morning with them playing in my head.

That's not to say that there aren't more ambitious musical elements here. I rather like Sortovalta, the first of five songs in Finnish, because the riff is rather like a call and response between drums and guitar. It sounds great and it doesn't sound like anything else here, highlighting a variety that I don't often hear in grindcore, where the in your face effect is the one and only point. No, you're not going to hear a sitar or a trombone or something else wildly adventurous for the genre, but you're not going to hear fourteen takes on the same song either.

For a start, while this is generally just as fast as you'd expect, there are songs here that slow down. The title track evolves nicely, benefitting from a whole two minutes and ten seconds of running time, more than anything else on the album. That's not typical, of course, but there are moments in a few other songs that highlight how Feastem don't need to spend all their time at a hundred miles an hour. Terror Balance has a neat section that's far slower than the rest of the song too.

I liked this, even if I wanted a lot more of it than Feastem were willing to give me. I reviewed a few albums last year that are longer than this band's entire back catalogue put together and that includes four albums, a couple of EPs and a couple more split singles. Remembering that Reign in Blood was released on cassette with the entire album on both sides, maybe Feastem can throw out a cassette version of Graveyard Earth with the entire album twice on both sides. I'd still listen through the whole thing.

Exhumed - Horror (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 4 Oct 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

It seems rather appropriate to follow up an Alice Cooper release with a new album simply titled Horror. The band are Exhumed, one of California's finest death metal bands. They founded in 1990, split up in 2005 and got back together in 2010 and this is their fourth album since then, more than they released before they split, if we ignore the gratuitous covers album Garbage Daze Re-Regurgitated, as glorious as its title was.

What seemed immediately obvious was how lo-fi the recording is. It's a much quieter recording than anything else I've heard lately. In fact, everything seems to be buried in the mix. We have to turn up to eleven just to hear the band. However, it has no hesitation about leaping into action at high speed. Exhumed are old school death metal with a heavy side dose of grindcore and I have to admit I haven't delved into that of late, so this seemed fresh.

Even with fifteen songs on offer, this runs shorter than Reign in Blood, the infamously short Slayer album. Like Reign in Blood, this blisters along with hardly a moment to catch our breath and there a couple of screams that feel highly reminiscent of Tom Araya's legendary first take for Angel of Death. I only see five songs over two minutes and none over three. The shortest, as I guess has been traditional for grindcore at least since Napalm Death's You Suffer, is Utter Mutilation of Your Corpse at a mere seven seconds, four of which are fadeout.

There's very little variety here, of course. Mike Hamilton's drum kit is set to ludicrous speed for almost the entire album, a slower section in The Red Death only being slower as a relative concept. The guitars of mainstay Matt Harvey, the sole founder member, and new fish Sebastian Philips are often a blur but, after a while, the riffs start to emerge. So do the solos and I'm still not sure how they find time for two of those into a two minute song like Rabid.

I'm sure the bass of the wonderfully named Matt Sewage is somewhere in there too but I have no idea where. He's more overtly present as one of two voices in play, which offer far more contrast than harsh/harsh might suggest. One's much deeper than the other. Which one's Sewage and which is Harvey I haven't a clue. I'd have to go back to mid-period albums, as Sewage is on his second stint with the band and I really can't remember.

This really takes me back to my youth when grindcore was new and I couldn't tell the difference between most of the tracks but loved the sheer burst of energy that they provided. If thrash metal cleaned me out, grindcore was an evil alternate universe version that shattered me into pieces and then put me back together again, maybe in a different order. Some of those pits were insane and the bands weren't far behind. I don't think I've seen anyone on drums faster than whoever played for Intense Degree.

The challenge, of course, is to maintain that energy spike across an entire album. Exhumed do a pretty good job at that here, benefitting from the short running time and the many gaps between tracks. Songs do blur together but a couple of listens allows some to emerge as favourites. Mine is Ripping Death, without any doubt. Its chorus of "Ripping death, ripping fucking death" is a shopping list for the younger me back in 1989. I like Dead Meat too, a blitz at only 34 seconds, again including fadeout. Its chorus is exactly what you expect: "Dead meat. Dead meat. Dead meat. Dead meat!"

The pros are obvious. This is blitzkrieg stuff, for those who believe that Reign in Blood just wasn't fast or aggressive enough. This feels old school, though, as if it was new when the movie in the faux poster cover came out on VHS. Maybe that comes from them writing what are really pop songs sped up to crazy tempos. There are verses and choruses and hooks and that's not always the case with grindcore.

The cons mostly tie to the genre. I still like grindcore, but I find that I can't immerse myself in it for days any more. While there's variety here, it pales in comparison to what I find in folk metal or even melodic death metal when the band is someone like Insomnium. My biggest criticism here is that the album just ends, as if there might be other tracks coming later but they haven't downloaded yet. But hey, just put the album on repeat to solve that.