You Grind...But Why?: Ablach

Why did English explorer George Mallory climb Mt. Everest? "Because it's there," he said. Why do Scottish sextet Ablach bust out exquisitely crusty grind tunes that stripmine their culture for inspiration? Because they can, guitarist Bazz said.

"Personally, I got into grindcore before it was called grindcore. When everything heavier/faster than Slayer, was dubbed Death Metal. When the six of us got into a room, we had no thoughts on what genre we'd emulate. The decisive factor was having a drummer who could play blastbeats. Various types of blast for that matter. So, In short... because we could. It's no deeper than that really."

G&P Review: Ablach

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

T.S. Eliot
"The Hollow Men"
1925

Ablach
Dha
Grindcore Karaoke
Scotland's Ablach no longer reside among the pale shades of the hollow men, having escaped the hollow, reedy production that was first album Aon's only misstep. The crusty grind sextet easily walk away with 2011's most improved award with second album Dha, a burly beast that revels in ferocious guitars and rasping Jeff Walker screams.
As if compensating for the tinny sound of Aon, Dha thrives on that essential sense of desperation -- that rush to make it through a 90 second song without losing the audience's attention -- that makes grind tick. Dha is a fat-free 13 songs (two are covers); all adrenaline, no filler. Right off the hop, "MacPhee" tattoos Scottish lore right across your cranium. But Ablach have also mastered the Terrorizer swing on songs like "From Tillydrone to Obliteration," which not only snarks Napalm Death but tells the tale of an impoverished swatch of the band's native Aberdeen.
Ablach covered Terrorizer last outing and this go-round adds faithful renditions of Phobia and Extreme Noise Terror. Ablach make no bones about being the sum of their influences, but their craftsmanship excuses any overt nods to bands of yore, and their much improved studio presence already has me excited for the inevitable Trí.

Rotten Sound

A good grindcore album is the nexus of two parallel and occasionally competing characteristics. Great songs get you halfway there, but if they don’t have that energetic audio pop, you’re left with a mediocre experience. It’s that interaction between great songs and that abrasive, punky production that makes the greatest grind albums: think of that explosive jolt you get from Abuse, Horrified, or The Inalienable Dreamless.
I think more than any member of metal’s extended family, grindcore lives and dies by its production values (or deliberate lack thereof). Even more so than trve kvlk black metal’s refusal to cave in to niceties like listener’s enjoyment. Given that grind albums are often two or three dozen songs that barely crack a minute each, keeping that emotional energy coming is a must. An album of average songs with a great production is a perfectly acceptable guilty pleasure; an album full of good songs hampered by half-assed production just feels lacking.
In fact, I own a whole stack of albums that I enjoy despite their often wearying, enervated production job. Not surprisingly, Today is the Day’s Steve Austin gets production credit for a statistically significant portion of them. They range from simply being disappointing, The Parallax View’s thin, demo-worthy sound on Destruction of Property; the reedy, hollow guitars that mar Ablach’s Aon, through the outright unlistenable, Joe Pesci’s sonic abomination of At Our Expense! or Converge’s nigh unlistenable When Forever Comes Crashing. Each album sports perfectly acceptable, sometimes extremely enjoyable songs that are weighed down by their horrid production like a Lamborghini towing a horse trailer.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of power they would have conveyed had they sounded better (in Joe Pesci’s case, the band apparently will send you a better mix of At Our Expense! if you just ask). To a lot of bands’ thinking, the album only exists to put butts in the pit they next time they play Waukegan and then hopefully sell enough to pay for gas to Cheboygan. If that’s the case, then recorded music, particularly in this era of digital cornucopia and media overload, should be the best advertisement for your band possible. Chances are you’re not going to get a second chance to snare people’s attention.
Here’s a sampler of some of the unloved and weeded out articles in my collection that fell just short of sonic brilliance. Enjoy.

Where do you draw the line between intelligibility and enjoyability and can they be easily demarcated?

Ablach – “Obar Dheathain”
Kill the Slave Mater – “The Orchestration of Sodom”
Complete Failure – “Gross Negligence”
Converge – “Towing Jehova”
Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation – “Tied Up”
The Parallax View – “Name: Last, First, MI”
Shapes of Misery – “Something to Believe”
Joe Pesci – “Plato Complex”
Torture Incident – “What’s That Mean of Capitalist”

Covered in Napalm

Let’s be honest. Covering Napalm Death is not the most revolutionary idea a grind band can hit upon. In fact, recent research has pretty conclusively proven the correlation between people who love grind and people who love Napalm Death. So covering the band that pretty much wrote the rulebook by which you're playing isn't going to win any prizes for originality. However, Rotten Sound are just joining a well-established fraternity of punks and grinders who have paid tribute to the grindfathers.
Enjoy.

Rotten Sound – “Suffer the Children”
Ablach – “Unchallenged Hate”
Discordance Axis – “The Kill”
Agoraphobic Nosebleed – “Control”
Capitalist Casualties – “From Enslavement to Obliteration”
Xbrainiax – “You Suffer”
Cellgraft - "Scum"

Ablach to the Future: Scottish Grindcore Historians Get Their Learn On

Take out your number 2 lead pencils, boys and girls because this is a test. What exactly to do you know about Scottish history? Bonus points for not referencing either Braveheart or Highlander. Or we could skip all that tedious pedagogy and just headbang to Ablach’s debut EP instead.
Two covers aside, Aon (Gaelic for “one”), is an 18 minute crash course in Hibernian Gaelic [Ed's note: st00pid Americans and their incorrect adjectives] history that clips along at a crusted grindcore pace. Though the uneven production left me a tad cold, I haven’t been able to get the meaty little plastic slab out of my head. In a genre paralyzed by lyrical conceits you can quantify on the digits of a single appendage, to hear a band reach for something personal and meaningful in a grindcore context was startling in its originality. Turns out, that really wasn’t the band’s intention at first.
“There was no premeditation when it came to style of music or indeed lyrical content when the guys first entered a room together,” Ablach guitarist Bazz said. “The noise came naturally and our first batch of songs continued on from where Filthpact was leading in its Scottish tendencies. Once the band name was decided upon the whole concept became a bit more obvious to us.”
And by obvious he means strip mining all eras of Scottish history without wallowing in neo-pagan rejectionism of the modern world or saccharine peons to an era where dying of easily preventable illnesses at 35 was considered a life well lived.
“Lyrically it's about the darker side of reality, but from Scottish sources old and new,” Bazz said. “Personally it's mostly the really old stuff that we know very little about, the ambiguous ‘Picts’ and their carved monuments we still puzzle over.”
Turns out there’s plenty of darkness to puzzle over from a country that coined a word – Ablach – to distinguish mangled corpses from your more run of the mill variety.
“I also thought it was screwed up that one word was created for such an occurrence, but it turns out that Gaelic words are a little broader in definition than in English,” Bazz said. “So the same word would be used in other circumstance, ie. a burned out car, post-wolf attack (when we had such creatures roaming wild) livestock etc.”
With that kind of linguistic brutality near at hand and several centuries worth of atrocities to pull from, Ablach don’t stand to lack for inspiration. Indeed, Bazz said the Scottish sextet is already at work on their second LP, which, naturally, will be named Dha.

G&P Review: Ablach

Ablach
Aon
Blastworks

One summer Earl Thorfinn went raiding in the Hebrides and in various parts of Scotland. He himself lay at anchor off Galloway where Scotland borders on England, but he sent some of this troops south to raid the English coast, as the people had driven all their livestock out of his reach. When the English realized that the vikings had arrived, they gathered together, made a counter-attack, recovered all that had been stolen and killed every able-bodied man among them except for a few they sent back to tell Thorfinn this was how they discouraged the vikings from their raids and looting. The message was put in distinctly abusive terms.

Orkneyinga Saga
Circa 1200

The Icelandic saga writers had such a droll sense of humor, don’t you think?
With so many pressing problems that need to be screamed at and blastbeat into submissions, grindcore has very rarely bothered itself with the past or culture or heritage. Instead those concepts have been left to *shudder* folk metal or black metallers who have embraced their Norse heritage with a fervency that just might get them added to a Southern Poverty Law Center watch list one day.
Scots Ablach (which is Gaelic for “mangled carcass,” according to the band) are the square peg in grindcore’s round hole, crafting crusty 90 second lessons on their nation’s history from the first highland tribes to imperial era scuffles with the English.
So the sextet presents us with songs about Scottish farmers being evicted from their land to make way for sheep (“Na Fuadaichean”), apocryphal wedding night rituals (“Jus Primae Noctis”), witch trials (“Confessit & Declait Furth”), and the national love of the fruits of the grain (“Whiskey Violence”). With only 13 songs in 18 minutes, two covers (Napalm Death’s “Unchallenged Hate” and Terrorizer’s “Corporation Pull In”) feels a bit like padding, however. But the band knows its way around a catchy grindcore tune.
The wild card on Aon, however, is the production. The band seemed to be going from an old school Morrisound scooped guitar tone, but instead it all just sounds very hollow and distant, as though there’s a whole channel missing. While it’s not necessarily a deal breaker, I do think it limits Ablach’s reach. That hiccup aside, Aon is a solid debut from a band that’s actually found a unique identity with something different to say.