G&P Review: Jesus Cröst

Jesus Cröst
1986
Bones Brigade
The worst aspect of the quadrennial World Cup feets-ball tournament is suffering through that one coworker who has suddenly declared him- or herself grand poobah of all soccer, loudly pontificating on the arcane advancement rules gleaned from Wikipedia. I’ll never understand how the United States was able to lose its way into each round. (And quite honestly I don’t care because, duh, it’s soccer and I’m an American [USA! USA! USA! USA!]). But for those of you with fond memories of Paul the Octopus and a quarter hour to kill, Rotterdam soccer hooligans Jesus Cröst penned an ode to the 1986 World Cup on their third album.
Musically, the dynamic Dutch duo has not advanced the powerviolent arts significantly with 1986. In fact, there’s a monochromatic quality to writing on the 22 songs that blurs them into a somewhat long and confusing whole (Hey, just like a soccer match! Perhaps it’s a meta commentary on the experience of watching the game?).
Taking a cue from Macabre, each song is dedicated to a different footballer of yore, shining 50 second spotlights on players that give the album a strong narrative quality even if the music is frustratingly lacking in diversity. It’s a great idea, but one similar song careens into another. It’s like watching a game from way up in the nosebleeds where you can’t see jersey numbers, so the action all becomes a formless smudge of people milling about way down on the field. Jesus Cröst’s past two albums were hacked from the same blast, pause, scream, blast foundation but they felt more invigorated and propulsive than 1986. So it kind of sucks that this is their farewell effort knowing that they have so much more to give.
America’s periodic, herpes-like flare up of soccer fever has passed, but if you’re a football fan with a passion for powerviolence then Jesus Cröst have the (oddly specific) cultural crossover you’ve been waiting for. 1986 is not a bad album, but you’ve heard this done better, even by this band. 

[Full disclosure: I received a download for review.]

G&P Review:Nashgul/P.L.F.

Nashgul/P.L.F.
Split
Bones Brigade
Nashgul have always had a cinematic quality to their ghoulish grind, whether it's their penchant for sampling horror and action flicks or the flickering celluloid flash of their grisly slasher tunes. El Dia Despues al Fin de la Humanidad was probably the best zombie flick that has yet to crash a cinema near you. But I had never had the same epiphany about Texas' P.L.F. until they paired up with Spain's grind morticians for these seven wonderful inches of madness. Now I'm a willing to drop a few bucks on Kickstarter to roll cameras on their self-professed Texas Grindcore Massacre.
Nashgul know that a good horror flick is much as a matter of anticipation as it is the kills. So they take their sweet time easing you into the proper mood with Blind Dead-paced instrumental opener "The Trip" before they start slitting musical throats. Once they do unleash the beats, they're off at a (heretical to be sure) running zombie canter for the next three jams that pick up right where the last album left off. That should be pretty much all you need to know.
Flipside, P.L.F.'s horror show is certainly more modern in approach, diving camera-first into the ruptured joints and organs of the hapless listeners with two new songs and a seamlessly integrated Phobia cover. They're driven by a guitar tone that skrees like power tools winding up. That tone perfectly serves P.L.F.'s Megadeth on fast forward riffing-- and I mean good Megadave back when he was addicted to heroin instead of Jesus and rightwing crankery. It's good enough to make me overlook the (guest written) lyrics to "Arena of the Gladiator," which are bombastic and bro-tastic enough to make Manowar faint from shame. But dammit this is grindcore Thunderdome and some things just have to be overlooked.
But really, none of the preceding 300 words even should have been necessary. You know god damn well you need this in your life. The cover even features Jesus being crucified in the name of grindcore. How can you pass that up?

Reggae-core: Looking for an Answer

Looking for an Answer
Buscando una Respuesta
Bones Brigade
In retrospect, it probably shouldn’t surprise me that grind bands would want to get up, stand up with reggae’s slow boiling grooves. (I, myself, have felt the seductive pull of its loping rhythms.) Differences in acceleration aside, both genres are protest music at heart. Still, there I was gobsmacked when I hit the end of Looking for an Answer’s 2003 EP Buscando una Respuesta, re-released this year by Bones Brigade, and crashed face first into a fullblown reggae freakout in “Crustafari.” And damn it’s good (and not the only instance of reggae grind I’ve heard this year).

Looking for an Answer – “Crustafari”

Things seem primed for a Looking for the Answer grind explosion. Relapse backed their last 7-inch, Bones Brigade re-released this EP (apparently missing one track from the original, though) and Deep Six just dropped a collection of the band’s splits on to one handy CD for easier consumption, making life that much easier for the LFAA completist.
From day one Looking for an Answer rocked bruising, low slung grind pitched with piss and snarl. “Tierra” rumbles and blasts with a punked out opening like classic Napalm Death while “Caminando En La Dirección Equivocada” pogoes a spiked riff that would put a smile on Rob Marton’s face.
While it’s not as composed as Extincion or as rawly ragged as La Caceria, Buscando una Respuesta proves the band knew its shit right out the gate, which is to be expected from a band that’s half of the almighty Denak reunited.

G&P Review: Jesus Crost

Jesus Crost
010
Bones Brigade
If I’d been more organized (or frankly given a half nickel whorefuck) I’d probably gotten off my ass sooner to have this post coincide with that soccer thingy (scuze me, football for all you dirty foreigners) that had people sending death threats to a harmless mollusk. But America sucked (like usual) and we stopped caring quickly (like usual – USA! USA! USA!). Anyway, I was too busy gloating about the Blues landing Jaroslav Halak for the price of an empty puckbag to a former coworker of Canadien extraction.
So more importantly, power violent Dutch soccer hooligans Jesus Crost, who have a pending split with Phobia, upped their game on second album 010, which nicely continues the themes of previous album Tot. The only major difference is the band does tend to fall slightly more on the side of power violence than the grind this outing. Though the blasting rarely takes a break, Jesus Crost know just when to drop a musical changeup into the mix, whether it’s the chugalug of “Ungehever,” the cocksure strut of “Parasit” or the brain-rending screech of “Fickpisse.”

Jesus Crost – “Fickpisse”

The band even throws a vocal curve ball on “Gonorrhea” and “Battisa,” mixing in some pig squeals with the screeches just to keep things interesting. So if blasting grindy, violency noise is your thing, 010 will ably achieve that GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!

G&P Review: Joe Pesci

Joe Pesci
At Our Expense!
Bones Brigade
Joe Pesci are funny how? I mean, funny like a clown. They amuse you? They make you laugh? Like they’re fucking here to amuse you? What do you mean they’re funny? How are they funny? How the fuck are they funny? What the fuck is so funny about them? Tell me, tell what’s funny?
Oh, you mean these Brits write grindcore with a sly, sarcastic and at times hysterical sheen? Yeah, I can see that. I mean I giggle at “Sticking My Carbon Footprint Up Your Arse” and “Mindless Zombified Fucks” as much as the next guy. And the grind and audio pastiche of “Beating Robert Mugabe to Death…” is not just an amusing listen but also a nice real world recommendation. Grind-wise, “Project 2501” is a Ghost in the Shell referencing bitchslap that sounds like firing high velocity rounds through a too small breach.
What’s not a laughing matter, unfortunately, is the wildly uneven production that’s rather astonishing for a Bones Brigade release. And that’s where At Our Expense! goes horrifically off the rails. Every great moment the band crafts is smothered under sub-demo quality production. The guitars are heavy but lack any texture or nuance. All that’s left is a slurred mess of indecipherable passing trains roar. There very well may be a killer band under all this muck, but damned if you’ll be able to tell by listening to At Our Expense!
Not Narcosis bad, but that’s a pretty low bar. It’s kind of like saying you’re the tallest guy in Munchkin land. Unfortunately, there’s nothing here Jesus Crost didn’t already do better this year. Turns out it was all at my expense.
For a dissenting opinion, see here.

Going Dutch: F.U.B.A.R.

F.U.B.A.R.

Justification of Criminal Behaviour

Bones Brigade

2005

F.U.B.A.R. sound like pissed off (pissed on?) hornets clanging about in a soup pot while Scott Carlson rehearses in the garage next door. More brutal and direct than their countrymen, F.U.B.A.R. blast like a grindcore Man is the Bastard on 2005 album Justification of Criminal Behaviour. Prominent power violence influences and subterranean bass tones are the bulwark to F.U.B.A.R.’s sound on songs like “Behavior” and “Disappear.”

For all their Neanderthal proclivities, these Lascaux cavemen are also capable of staggering moments of beauty and clarity. The triumphant punk contours of “Buy This” mold themselves to a chassis of Converge-style stretch, particularly the You Fail Me-era Jacob Bannon yowling. Not every experiment is as successful thought. “Fucked Up Beyond 7C” is the kind of electronic pounding synth drone beat doom J. Randall stuffs around ANb songs. Seemingly reinterpreting a line from “Hate Filled Screens,” it pretty much brings what you’d expected for some studio frippery tacked on to the end of an album (read: nothing).

Easily ignored misstep aside, the bulk of Justification of Criminal Behaviour pitches to F.U.B.A.R.’s punk wheelhouse. A standout tune like “The National Fear Campaign 2004” hits all the classic punk and grind notes, ticking off the boxes next to driving, ragged guitars, howled vocal phrasings and slamming drum breaks. They’ve shared vinyl with Catheter (and are just as split-happy), which is actually a fairly good comparison point – a more power violence-fueled Preamble to Oblivion. Cliched but true: brutal.

Going Dutch: Collision

Collision
Roadkiller
Bones Brigade
2006

Unable to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of himself and takes care of it accordingly.

Sir James George Frazer
The Golden Bough
1922

Names have power, according to our primitive ancestors. If true, I’ve always thought the single most powerful name in all of hardcore or grind had to go to Boston’s Siege. It’s just an explosive monosyllabic burst that perfectly summarizes the mindset and power of the band. Just saying it invokes an impressive feat of linguistic legerdemain, with the seething sibilant of the S and the full stop affricative G. You’re practically forced to grit your teeth in rage as you say it.
With Siege as the Platonic ideal, I’d have to say Holland’s Collision come pretty damn close to achieving that same transcendence through nomenclature. Collision pretty must sums up not only the band’s body bomb assault on second album Roadkiller but also their musical pedigree, which rests securely at the nexus where grind sideswiped the circle pit punk that birthed it. Look no further than the band’s bull in a Faberge shop cover of Bad Brains’ “Attitude.”
Despite being Dutch, Collision have a singular focus on the excesses of American popular and political culture as they mercilessly mock our questionable subcultures (“Oh My Goth), our colorful peasant class (“Redneck Rampage”), our self help obsession (“Kill Phil”) and even our propensity for expecting bloated, aging action film stars to cleave our political morasses with the same ease with which they dispatched any number of low rent Columbian mercenaries (“Body Building Blowout”). Pop culture gets punk’d by a series of fluid punk beat to blast transitions, foam flecked gang vocals (“Drama Queen”), ominous building chug interludes and punk rock solos (“On the Loose to Reproduce”).
The only crack in Collision’s grind edifice would be the questionable dual vocalists. Bjorn and Wouter both bring an impressive pitbull bark, but their styles are so similar as to be redundant. But that’s a quibble against a backdrop of enjoyable punk madness.

G&P Review: Spoonful of Vicodin

Spoonful of Vicodin
Rotcore
Bones Brigade
Everybody sing along now: Just a spoonful of vicodin helps the power-violence-inflected-with-thrash-shriek-and-grindcore-gurgle go down.
OK, so I’m no Julie Andrews, but for the authentic article spin Spoonful of Vicodin’s “Paved Paradise,” which deftly interweaves the Disney ditty with intermittent blasts of crusty noise. No mean sample, the two components trade off of each other, creating a wholly unique song from their disparate parts.
Terrible New York twosome Tim (drums) and Sarah (guitars) conjure the chaos that ensues after a suicide bomb goes off in a crowded market with the compilation Rotcore. The vocals careen between a manic 12 latte chatter and a starvation stomach rumble grunt and the production is just as punk as fuck.
A majority of Rotcore’s collected songs, 27 tunes in a whisker under 15 minutes, come with authentic “Smoke, Grind, and Sleep Production” courtesy of Danny Lilker. How you respond to semper lo-fidelis production will largely determine how you respond to Spoonful of Vicodin’s strain of rotcore. However, deliberately crude the music and production may be, the band carefully honed the exquisite sarcasm of their songs. “My Idea of Anarchy is Taking a Dump on Company Time,” “God Wins at Everything” and “Tapeworms in Punk, a Documentary” pretty much demand you pore over the lyric sheet.
Spoonful of Vicodin have the tunes and the sarcasm to make it all go down. No extra sugar needed.

G&P Review: Jesus Crost

Jesus Crost
Tot
Bones Brigade
There’s no drum machine in Jesus Crost’s arsenal but the Dutch duo channel the mechanically-enhanced vibe of recent Agoraphobic Nosebleed or Enemy Soil on Tot. Even the artwork has a Prosthetic Cunt’s Eurotrash cousin vibe to it. But nope, no drum machine. Just a guy in a lucha libre mask who calls himself 10 beat blasts in time with a guitarist known only as 13.
While Jesus Crost, on balance, may not have honed their songwriting chops to the scalpel edge of the aforementioned, Tot boasts a raw, wood shop guitar tone and “Geheimfavorit” could have been lifted off of just about any era Enemy Soil 7-inches. There are other flashes that hint at the band’s gestational potential to grow into a respected player in the Euro grind realm as well. The bouncing opening of “Der Schnock” will get your wooden shoes tapping and “Milevsky” slo-mo wades through 30 seconds of the same quicksand murk that defined Nasum’s “The Final Sleep” before being tattooed by relentless blastbeats.
Things do go off the rails late in the album, though. The band squander whatever good will they’ve accumulated, unfortunately, as they close out their album anticlimactically with their live appearance at the 2008 Obscene Extreme Festival, 10 minutes of the worst live recordings you’ve ever heard. Seriously, the first couple of listens, I actually thought it was some sort of lofi electronics dickery.
But that’s easily ignored. While Jesus Crost may need to invest in a better live sound engineer, Tot shows the band already has a confident handle on its studio sound.