G&P review: Population Reduction

Population Reduction
Each Birth a New Disaster
Tank Crimes
I want to send Population Reduction’s Peter Svoboda and Dr. X a care package filled with Milwaukee’s Finest and a couple ounces of weed just for penning the ditty “Black Metal Beach Party.”
I’m hard pressed to think of a better way to deflate the oh-so-grim Nordic mopes than to imagine them briefly leaving their troll-ridden forest murk to play volleyball in spike gauntlets or go swimming in corpse paint.
Aside from the well played swipe at the korpsepaint kommandos, Each Birth a New Disaster deftly weaves Cretin’s grotesque aesthetic with the thrashy grind of Pig Destroyer circa Terrifyer or a less spastic Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus. Population Reduction stripmines Fark headlines (“Road-age at the Farmers Market”), bad horror films (“Taking Bong Rips in the Tombs of the Blind Dead”), cheap beer (“Return of the Beast”) and the just plain ridiculous (“Amish Meth Dealer”) into a ribald collection of up tempo absurdist art.
Though the songs may not be as catchy as Cretin or as scathing as Pig Destroyer, Population Reduction’s latest is an exponential improvement in both sound quality and song writing over their muddy sounding previous effort, At the Throats of Man Forever. The thrash swing that infects Each Birth’s 15 tracks gives Svoboda’s chugga-chugga riffs the space they need to breathe, and dude knows his way around slinging a tasty guitar line. A two man operation leaves little room for slack and Dr. X does not disappoint, channeling a pre-suck Lars Ulrich to start a tune and incarnating Pete Sandoval by the time the 90 second song ends. Throw in some hoarse thrash barking and some early Carcass guttural grunts and you’re left with an all around enjoyable album that manages to rage with a well earned smile on its face.
If you need to fix your Cretin jones while newly engendered frontwoman Marissa Martinez adjusts to her new life in heels, Population Reduction can ably fill the grindcore grotesquerie gap.