Beyond Terror Beyond Grace Extinction/Salvation
Grindhead
2007
There seems to have been a flowering the last couple of years of what I think of as the “Maruta sound.” Not because the Floridians were the first to conjure up swampy sludge and power violence assault with their grindcore (Crowpath has them by a few years), but simply because they are the best at it right now. Give Beyond Terror Beyond Grace a better production budget and they can take a run at the crown. Extinction/Salvation suffers from overly thin production and a few questionable songwriting choices, but it’s enough of a cheap buzz to hold you over until your next Maruta fix.
“Ultimatum” draws a line in the sand with midtempo foreshadowings of doom and post-apocalyptic quiet, like Mad Max reflecting on the mohawked, football padded lives he’s taken. While drummer Steve is no slouch at acceleration, Beyond Terror Beyond Grace as a whole are at their peak when they crouch into a power violence crush on “Surveillance,” a potent laxative of Bolt Thrower chug cross bred with Man is the Bastard glower.
Beyond Terror Beyond Grace – “Surveillance”
Not that there aren’t plenty of beautiful blasters to behold; “Defeated” will strip the siding from your house at 100 yards, and “Erosion” is mined with high, grating guitar tones that cut cross-grain against the blast beats.
And then Beyond Terror Beyond Grace have to go and squander all that accumulated goodwill with one of my least favorite quirks of grind bands: the overlong electronic close out song. “022617” is an inexcusably long, insufferably irritating blob of electronic twaddle that’s all the more excruciating for its several false ends. But bitching aside, stop Extinction/Salvation one song short and you’ve got a satisfying listening experience.
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