G&P review: Total Fucking Destruction

Total Fucking Destruction
Zen and the Art of Total Fucking Destruction
Translation Loss
Don’t look now but somebody’s Violent Femmes is showing like a blister in the sun.
Yes TFD grind like motherfuckers through the first 10 new tracks of their latest disc, Zen and the Art of Total Fucking Destruction. And yes the video section lets you watch the cephalopodic Rich Hoak flail about his kit while screaming out the lyrics to the feel good classic “Kills the Jocks and Eat their Brains.”
But it’s going to be the subdued, stripped down four song acoustic middle section that’s going to start the most conversations and likely turn off grind purists. Yes, the acoustic version of the aforementioned “Kill the Jocks” sounds like an outtake from the first Violent Femmes album, but that’s exactly what makes these performance art terrorists so very interesting.
Proving he didn’t have his fill of the weird during his Brutal Truth tenure, Hoak and his co-conspirators have consistently pushed grind’s humble limits time and time again. Like John Zorn discovering blastbeats 20 years ago, Hoak et al help make the case for grind as art with 20 second blasts of reductio ad absurdum noise and stream of consciousness lyrical dribblings.
Zen’s 10 new tracks, especially standout “Mad Pig Disease,” naturally grind and thrash their way through the desolate America’s fractured mediascape at the start of the 21st Century. The grindcore carnival is capped with video of a nine song live set. We’ll just ignore the copyright warning that kicks of the video and assume that was a label call and not representative of a band that bills itself as subversive artists.
TFD is clearly onto something with this raucous, expectation defying tour de force, and this is clearly one of the grind highlights of 2007.