A Leaden Stride to Nowhere: A (Not So) Brief History of Ending on a Slow Song

Grindcore is hit and run music. Its strength comes from an unrelenting campaign of musical shock and awe, dispensing with songwriting conventions like verses, choruses and all that other assorted folderol to boil tunes down to their atavistic core. And then it pummels you with a dozen songs in a row, often with no pause between to catch your breath. It's that synergistic adrenaline rush that gives the style its power.
So why do so many bands muck it all up by ending albums with drawn out slow songs? What is this inexplicable compulsion to tack on an unnecessary slow song at the end? It doesn't have to be this way. Discordance Axis made "A Leaden Stride to Nowhere" the penultimate song on masterpiece The Inalienable Dreamless, stabbing you in the earholes with the brutalizing "Drowned" as you limp off spent and bloody. Nasum probably wrote the single greatest slow song ever penned by a grind band with the poignant "The Final Sleep" on Helvete, but they recognized the power of what they had in the tune and stuck it in the middle rather than relegating it to the end.
I've mentioned bands throwing unexpected bits of musical failure at the end of albums before, but this ending on a doom song thing is so pervasive to have become a cliche. How did we get to this place, you ask? Here's a quick jog down memory lane.

Don't Fear the Reaper

Probably the first instance of the phenomenon can be traced to arguably the first ever grind album, Siege's 1984 demo Drop Dead. The length and contents have Drop Dead have shifted and grown over the years as bonus tracks have been added and deleted, but one constant remains: it always ends on the seven minute sax-laden freakout that is "Grim Reaper." The band took the training wheels of fast hardcore and set it on the path of the one true grind, but they also inadvertently established the ending on a doom song cliche as well.



Cursed to Crawl

As with any good grindcore cliche, of course Napalm Death has to factor into the script. Though they set into stone what Siege had pressed into clay, Napalm Death took their time to leave their mark on this one. In fact, the Side A Scum lineup went to the opposite extreme, closing out their half of the album with the two second bliss of "You Suffer." No, it wasn't until 1988's From Enslavement to Obliteration that Napalm Death caught the slow song bug, capping off the album with three minutes of fake Swans plod in the form of "The Curse," which served to bookend the album with slow motion starter "Evolved as One."



Another dozen albums and a whole new lineup later, Napalm Death are still pulling this trick out on occasion. In fact, for The Code is Red...Long Live the Code in 2005 Napalm Death pulled the double whammy, closing out with a pair of slow songs (and again shamelessly stealing from Swans) in the shape of "Morale" and "Our Pain is Their Power."





Semper Grind Fidelis

The stylistic tick didn't take long to embed itself in the second wave of grindcore royalty either. Brutal Truth have never had a problem mixing and matching styles and tempos, but they never really fell under the spell of the last song doom phenomenon until 2009's comeback album Evolution Through Revolution and its end piece, the decidedly non-grinding "Grind Fidelity."



Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

While I keep saying Phobia's 1998 album Means of Existence is my favorite album of their extensive catalog, the longer I keep writing about it, the more I keep picking up on irritating little quirks. Like the seven minutes of stumbling doom slumber that are album finisher "Ruined." Obviously, I need to stop thinking critically about this record before I ruin it for myself. However, this does help put drummer John Haddad's later jump to doomsters Eyes of Fire into perspective.



In fact, Phobia pulled the exact same stunt three years later on follow up full length Serenity Through Pain. This time they kept last song "Sovereign" to a more concise four minutes of ambient drone and spoken word mumbling.



Go, Go Gadget

If there's a formula to Gadget albums, it would be this: slam listeners in the face with a crazy intense song off the bat and then chill it all out at the end with a slow song. It's a remarkably potent formula that's apparently served them very well because they've done it twice now. Starting with 2004's Remote, Gadget said fare thee well with the rolling bit of ambient unease that was "Tema: Skit."



They clearly thought the formula worked because they did it again at the end of 2006's The Funeral March. Once again the plodding dirge of " Tingens Föbannelse" calmed everyone out on their way out the door. Unfortunately, this one's not available on YouTube and SoundCloud won't let me upload it. So you'll just have to take my word for it on this one.

Mess With Texas

Kill the Client have a well deserved reputation as unrelenting grind maniacs, but they've also succumbed to the seductive allure of getting all down in the dumps at the end of an album. For 2005's Escalation of Hostility, the Texas chainsaw massacre crew departed from their frothing mouthed style to slow everything down like a sizzling, lethargic Texas panhandle summer on "Negative One." Interestingly, they've not gone back to that move since their first full length. The subsequent two long players have been all grind all the time instead and are probably the better for it.



Rotten to the Core

Rotten Sound are fond of shoving the longest song on the album to the end, but they usually kept it grinding. They never went for the full slow song closer until 2008's Cycles. Five albums in, that's when the Finns decided to mix the formula up a tad and get their doom and gloom on with the four minute plod that is "Trust." This is not what Rotten Sound are known for or what they really do best, but if they keep it to one album out of every five, I'll let it slide.



You Suffer...But Why?

I'm going to say it. It needs to be said. If you're in a grind band, your strength is probably in writing great grind songs. Doom is not your thing because otherwise you'd be in a doom band. Case in point, Suffering Mind's "Ostateczny Pogrzeb," which puts paid to At War With Mankind. Now Suffering Mind are an excellent grind band and you won't catch me disparaging their way with a blastbeat, but "Ostateczny Pogrzeb" finds one slow motion riff, rides it to death and then takes it out back and pokes with a stick for a couple extra minutes just to be sure. In a shorter, tighter incarnation, I wouldn't have a problem with it. However, I think as is it ultimately deflates the end of At War With Mankind a tad.



Blasphemy Made Flesh

Baltimore's Triac actually pulled off one the better slow song finales on short album Blue Room. The band's signature brew of blasting grind and scrungy power violence came to a nicely fermented hardcore head on last song "My First Blasphemy." Unlike a lot of other grind bands, Triac actually have a way with a slow song that doesn't completely negate the preceding album experience. Ending on a slow song may be a tired cliche, but I wouldn't be as irritated by it if more songs were this good.



Bloody Hell

The slow final song shows no signs of fading into grindcore history, either. Bloody Phoenix got into the act in 2010. The title track of album Death to Everyone, which opened with a rip on Neurosis, closed out with three minutes of slow rolling drums and jabbering about god being dead. Band mainstay Jerry Flores has been kicking around grindcore for 20 years, but as far as I know, this is the first time he's resorted to this particular genre trope.




The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

So after all that bitching, I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm opposed to ending on a slow song entirely. In fact, quite the opposite. Done well, a good slow song at the end lets an album's ideas simmer in the brain, slowly seeping through your cortex to embed themselves in the stuff of your nightmares. Tusk very effectively pulled off that move at the end of 2004 masterwork The Tree of No Return with not one but two slow doom songs at the end. It works largely because the band's cross breeding of Pig Destroyer and Neurosis give them the musical palette to explore wider vistas and the EP's central narrative -- a man gets lost in the wilderness, goes crazy from hunger and thirst and is subsequently eaten by bears -- demands a musical arc that bends from initial grindcore panic to doom metal delirium. So Tusk left us with the twin desolation that was "Starvation Dementia" and "Ursus Arctos -- Walk the Valley." This is how you do ending on a slow song properly.

Grindcore Bracketology 2: Round 2 Week 1

It may have taken extra innings, but we're ready to get back into it. I asked you who made the most persuasive arguments and here's who won the masses over:

Yes I know this wasn't actually Perpetual Strife's vote (actually, he voted the opposite way, but it was enough to get Shane Bywaters thinking:
"I'd totally die before I call Psyopus a grindcore band, but I'm totally enjoying this tom-foolery of fretboard silliness. Reminds me of one of my most hidden dirty secrets: I like Beneath the Massacre's first EP. Something about sterile sounding guitars flipping the fuckout. "

So Arp moves on.

Meanwhile, Will Hubbell got down with Desiccated Veins' reasoning:
"Huh, kind of a tough one. Dick Johnson definitely did his part to shepherd grind safely out of the '90s, and for better or worse, Borja taught us what meaty-as-fuck Discordance Axis riffs sound like. Maybe it's 'cause I'm guilty about sending one Rob Marton worshipper through already, or maybe it's because Fractured Theology is sounding really good right now, but I'm gonna vote Johnson."

So that means Johnson will live to fight another day.

So here's the opening frame of round two. Check out the reseeded brackets here. Here's this week's matchups. As always, you've got until Sunday to make your case.

The Old Guard
1. Olivo/Freeman (Repulsion) v. 4. Pintado (Terrorizer/Napalm Death/Resistant Culture)
Grind from the grave vs. the guy who went to his too soon.

The Innovators
1. Procopio/Baglino (Human Remains) v. 6. Papirmollen (Parlamentarisk Sodomi/PSUDOKU)
I think this might be the most fascinating of the bunch: the guys who pretty much invented grind weirdness vs. the guy who perfected it for the 21st century.

The Punks
1. Burda/McLachlan (Phobia) v. 6. Beau (Insect Warfare)
Classic California punky grind vs. classic sounding Texas punky grind.

The Technicians
1. Matsubara (Mortalized/GridLink/Hayaino Daisuki) v. 7. Rainwater (Noisear/Kill the Client)
You all broke my heart when Rainwater somehow beat Rob Marton (I forgive you). Can the up and coming underdog take it two impossible triumphs in a row by taking out Matsubara as well?

Grindcore Bracketology 2: The 1-8 Matchups

Ok, you bitched, you moaned, you cajoled, you wheedled and you whined. The end result is a stronger faceoff structure. So now it's time to drop the gloves.
Just like the last outing, I'll post the matchups each week and you tell me who should win and, just as importantly, why. In the event of a tie or a really close decision or just because I'm a total dick and I feel like pissing in your eye, a well reasoned argument can carry the day.

So let's get down to it. You've got until Sunday to make your case.

The Old Guard
1. Olivo/Freeman (Repulsion) v. 8. Dickinson (Heresy/Unseen Terror)
Michigan grave robbers v. an English hardcore hooligan.

The Innovators
1. Procopio/Baglino (Human Remains) v. 8. Kapo (Swarrrm)
Unsung American innovators v. an artistic Japanese oddball. If Kapo loses, Perpetual Strife just might cry.

The Punks
1. Burda/McLachlan (Phobia) v. 8. Martinez (Cretin)
The premier punk duo v. the mistress of the grotesque.

The Technicians
1. Matsubara (GridLink/Mortalized/Hayaino Daisuki) v. 8. Page (Body Hammer/Robocop)
If Matsubara didn't exist, Studio Ghibli would have had to animate him. Page can make music out of toothbrushes and an electric fans. He's also a kick ass young guitarist.

G&P Review: Phobia

“Yes,” interposed Pavel Petrovich, “yes; you were convinced of all this, and decided not to undertake anything seriously, yourselves.”
“We decided not to undertake anything,” repeated Bazarov grimly. He suddenly felt vexed with himself for having, without reason, been so expansive before this gentleman.
“But to confine yourselves to abuse?”
“To confine ourselves to abuse.”
“And that is called nihilism?”
“And that is called nihilism,” Bazarov repeated again, this time with peculiar rudeness.
…
“We shall destroy, because we are a force,” observed Arkady.

Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons
1859

Phobia
Unrelenting
Relapse
Unrelenting, Phobia’s most accurately titled album since Grind Your Fucking Head In, finds the venerable crust/grind institution returning to Relapse’s desolation for the first time in 17 years to spark a late career renaissance. Yes, I’ve been rather down on some of Phobia’s more recent efforts, having developed a taste for their earliest work, and some of you have vociferously disagreed with me. However, I think we can all agree that Unrelenting just slays like it's a man whose job is slaying and he's just invented the McCormick Slayer. Or something.
It combines the best of their earliest, burly confrontation with that sleeker, more nuanced production from their most recent incarnations to just devastating effect. The Steve Burda/Shane McLachlan axis have been honing the art of the gutter punk ode for so long they probably wrote, recorded and self-packaged this EP over a single afternoon before being evicted from whatever moldy squat they’re calling home these days. [Citation needed.] That gives them the kind of lifer cred to spit out a sentiment like “If You Used to be Punk, Then You Never Were” without seeming like pretentious assholes. Though their punk pedigree has never been in doubt, Phobia has evolved far beyond the “three chords and the truth” mentality of their peers, pulling from a grab bag of punk, crust and metal as the music demands. The dive bomb guitars of “Enemy Within” and “Mental State” or shred-ahol of the marathon “Life’s Animosity” (all of 1:48) are a particularly nice touch. And the whole shebang is backstopped by Bryan Fajardo. Nuff said there. The guy’s congenitally incapable of turning in a bad performance even if he were to suffer a double Rick Allen in a car accident.
I was looking around my desk the other day and realized this had somehow, criminally fallen to the bottom of my infamous (and infinitely replenishing) to-do pile for about six months. So, yes, I’m way late to the party, but if you’ve slept on this one, do yourself a favor and snag this one tout de suite. If nothing else, this gives me the opportunity to post this:

Sampler Platter

If, from my perch as a cranky old guy, I could offer you young bands a word of advice, it’s this: I know you think Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now are, like, totally awesome movies ‘n’ shit, but all of the rest of us already know that, too. Please stop sampling them on your albums. I’m just saying Netflix boasted about having 65,000 titles a few years ago, so why not give another movie a try?
I don’t object to samples on albums; I often enjoy them. I just think they’re mostly used haphazardly. I often play the fantasy sampling game when I’m watching a movie. I’ll hear a great bit of dialogue and I’ll ponder how I would apply it to a song. What would it say about the music? Would it influence the lyrics or performance? How would it work in an album context? I don’t think enough people ask themselves those questions when they pull a bit of dialogue from their favorite movie. [Ed. Note: I’m not talking about somebody like Graf Orlock. Their shtick is so total as to place them in a whole ’nother realm.]
I can think of very few examples of bands using samples thoughtfully or for more than a superficial rhetorical point. The first would be Who’s My Saviour’s “Save Your Breath,” an album-closing 90 seconds of sludgy psychedelia that deploys creepy flat toned HAL 9000 from 2001 with expertly counterpointed music to perfectly claustrophobic effect. It’s the kind of song I end up listening to three or four times in a row because it’s so well constructed. The second would be Damad’s second album, Rise and Fall, which trickles bits of dialogue from Swimming With Sharks throughout. The choice to go with a single film and to highlight Kevin Spacey’s relentless asshole boss built a misanthropic theme that jibed with the band’s southern crust style.
I wish more bands were that thoughtful when they reach for their DVD collection. Extreme Noise Terror pretty much admitted the samples for 2010 2009’s return to form Law of Retaliation were largely chosen at random and had no bearing on the songs themselves.
I read an interview with Pig Destroyer’s J.R. Hayes a few years back (I think it was circa Terrifyer) where he talked about why the band decided to stop using movie samples and start creating their own theatrical bits. He said when you hear a sample and identify it, it pulls you out of the music. It adds in other associations that maybe the artist didn’t really intend to be there. I’ve often gone back and thought about that quite a bit since then. Especially after I hear the same samples or the same directors endlessly used to augment a band’s song or aesthetic.
Do I really need to hear the exact same "pain has a face" quote from Hellraiser: Bloodline from both Kataklysm (not a grind band, I know; but they’re a repeat offender so bear with me) and Suffering Mind? Are they trying to imply that their music will cause me pain? Because last I checked I thought they wrote songs for their and my enjoyment.
Maruta and Abstain have both used the – thanks to Glenn Beck – no longer farcical Howard Beale rant from Network in their music. Beale’s character was supposed to be satirical rip on the inanity and venality of television news. Are they asking me to seriously identify with his frothing about being mad as hell and scared of the world? If so, why? According to the FBI violent crime has plummeted over the last decade.
Some movies are just overused to the point of painful cliché. Means of Existence is my favorite Phobia album, but even I have to groan at “Snail,” a midtempo, mid-album instrumental meltdown built around samples describing Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. Audio Kollaps have also pillaged Coppolla’s cursed jungle epic (at least they do it in dubbed German), borrowing the Col. Kilgore hitting the beach scene (but mercifully not "Ride of the Valkyries") on an album that also pays visual homage to the movie. If there’s some sort of take home message from either, I’m not sure what it means. Is there some special commentary about the futility and madness of war (Coppolla’s intended themes) I’m not getting from them.
David Lynch is also a popular target for bands looking to boost their arty, intellectual cred. Remember Hayes said Pig Destroyer decided to stop using movie samples? Cuz they sure didn’t have a problem nicking a line from Twin Peaks for the song “Elfin” on the Explosions in Ward 6 (later 38 Counts of Battery) album. Ditto Circle of Dead Children who decided a bit of the Cowboy’s dialogue from Mulholland Dr. would make a fitting opener for Human Harvest. While the “Let’s get down to it” line does make for a nice bit of intro, am I supposed to glean anything else from their choice? Do they identify with Lynch’s vision or artistry in any significant way? Is Human Harvest informed by the themes of duality, identity and delusion that pervaded the movie? How about the Destroyers of Pigs and Twin Peaks?
So I say this as both an undying fan of film and grind: I get tired hearing the same samples on every fucking album. You wanna surprise me? Next album, sample Steel Magnolias or Terms of Endearment instead and do it in a way that’s honest to the spirit of the music.
I’ve collected some of the more egregious offenders and Who’s My Saviour’s sterling example here. Give it a listen and tell me if I’m completely off base and just a grumpy old man.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Who’s My Saviour – “Save Your Breath”

Dark City
Luddite Clone – “Oratory of the Jigsaw”
Kataklysm – “1999:6661:2000”

Network
Abstain – “Discriminating”
Maruta – “Replicate”

Hellraiser: Bloodline
Suffering Mind – “Dead Part of Cause”
Kataklysm – “Il Diavolo in Me”

Apocalypse Now
Phobia – “Snail”
Audio Kollaps – “Aussent Welt”

David Lynch
Pig Destroyer – “Elfin” (Twin Peaks)
Circle of Dead Children – “A Family Tree to Hang From” (Mulholland Dr.)

Grindcore Bracketology: The 1-8 Matchups

Let round one of the great grindcore faceoff begin. Bring on your best arguments. Winners will be announced next week. You can view the full bracket here. Have at it.

North America
Pig Destroyer (1) vs. Phobia (8)
Though my enjoyment of Pig Destroyer has decreased slightly with every album after Prowler in the Yard, I can’t deny they’re still the most beastly and brutal band working in grind. Scott Hull’s riffs and production are consistently huge, a looming mugger crowding you in a dark alley on the wrong side of town at the worst possible time. And that’s before J.R. Hayes’ emotional violence seethes through lyrics about murder, suicide, emotional abuse and love gone horribly wrong. Fantastic drumming and the recent addition of full time electronics artist Blake Harrison only add to the exquisite torture.
Phobia are grindcore lifers. Part of that second wave that took what Napalm Death and Terrorizer had inspired, the tandem of Shane McLachlan and Steve Burda, regardless of supporting cast, have bashed out a consistent brew of no frills punk-inspired grind. Phobia have always given off the vibe of a band that doesn’t give a fuck whether it's playing in front of a club full of a 800 or a basement show with 12 people in the audience. More of a crust punk band in their infancy, Phobia have evolved into more of a traditional grind as they’ve aged, but their spit and fury have remained unchanged.

Asia and Australia
Wormrot (1) vs. Captain Cleanoff (8)
By now you should be fairly familiar with my thoughts on Wormrot: They kick your favorite band’s ass. The Singapore trio doesn’t waste time trying to reinvent the grindcore wheel so much as reinvigorate it with a streamlined, savage take on the sound that crosses straight ahead aggression with thrashtastic riffing and an unhinged energy. If they had never recorded another note beyond Abuse, that would easily stand as the post-millennial equivalent of Horrified, but the band has Earache’s backing now and their next album won’t find them positioned as upstart outsiders but rather as leaders of a new generation of grinders.
Wormrot square off with Captain Cleanoff, the clear people’s choice for this matchup. The long running Aussies dropped their Carcass-mocking first album in 2008 and people are still talking about it today. Mixing up groove with their grind and adding Bill Steer-ish soloing, Captain Cleanoff are staunchly planted in the past. Like Wormrot (but paying homage to different influences) the band doesn’t advance grindcore so much as hit all the right notes very hard and very quickly.

Scandinavia
Rotten Sound (1) vs. Infanticide (8)
The Scandinavian bracket could just as easily been the Sweden bracket because that country seems to have a grindcore factory tucked away among its fjords. Except across the eastern border Rotten Sound have planted the flag for Finn-core, a rampaging romp of Nasum-quality blasting that centers around that rarest of avi: actual grindcore songs. Armed with a batch of songs mostly titled with a single word, Rotten Sound are a grinding machine, mechanistically beating out high quality noise with a frequency and quality that’s outright stunning 17 years on.
Paired with Rotten Sound quintessence of grind is Sweden’s Infanticide who lard their blasts with a layer of death metal. Just as comfortable working at lower RPMs as they are with blastbeats, Infanticide are part of a new crop of bands that challenge our notions of what grindcore should be. Infanticide’s music is just as likely to reference Entombed and Bolt Thrower as it is Unseen Terror and Brutal Truth. Grind thrives on self-imposed limitations, but Infanticide don’t so much think outside of the box as pop the lid on it and take a look at what the rest of the world is up to.

Continental Europe and the United Kingdom
Napalm Death (1) vs. Agathocles (8)
You can’t have a conversation about grindcore without Napalm Death’s name popping up. The band, through its various incarnations, has pooped out some of the most essential noise the scene has seen. However, for this discussion, you’re limited to the current Greenway/Embury/Harris/Herrera lineup (discussions of Pintado’s contribution will be allowed). Argumentum ad Scum-um is verboten. With an entirely new cast from their glory days and playing a style that eschews straight noisy punk for a casserole of punk, grind, death, crust and thrash, Napalm Death are still innovators and are at once instantly recognizable.
Just as geriatric, if not always as widely lauded, as Napalm Death, Belgium’s Agathocles are probably better known for their colossal back catalogue than they are for the music that comprises it. Led by pivot Jan Frederickx, since 1985 the band has been banging out a punked out brew of anarchistic grind that’s grown even more jaundiced with age. Like Phobia on the left side of the Atlantic, Agathocles are the kind of band that will play a show or split a 7-inch with anybody, anytime anywhere. And it’s a measure of the band’s esteem that sharing wax with them is still considered a rite of passage for many a young grind band a quarter century later.

Holy Terror!

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the five stages of grief. Every huckster, two-bit pop psychologist on the tube is bound to break them out when “diagnosing” some bored, fat haus-frau’s malaise on any number of woo-spewing day time talk shows of the Oprah ilk. But friends, were you aware that there are six stages of grindcore terror? Probably not. But if I’m ever going to make Deepak Chopra-style cash peddling absolute bullshit, I need to get this concept out in the public consciousness. So all of you grab a box of tissues and your teddy bear because we’re going to talk about your feelings.

The first step toward curing your terror-related problem, naturally, is to admit you have a problem. You must admit to your Terrorism, as it were, before you can put yourself back on the path of healing and emotional well being. Terrorism has been known to cause manic behavior such as circlepitting your living room, grasping at citrus no one else can see and breaking out in wordless, animalistic roars that scare pets and small children. All of this is perfectly natural, of course, but you must admit that your Terrorism exists and that it is a problem for any sort of treatment to be successful.

Having admitted to your Terrorism, the second stage of therapy will seek to identify the locus of your terror, the agent acting upon you or Terrorizer. Common fears include heights, kissing grandma, spiders, Tim Curry in It or, often, three Hispanic dudes from Los Angeles and their affirmative action gringo friend grinding your fucking face to a bloody milkshake with one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Who knows what yours might be. These things tend to vary. Pick yours and I’ll proceed to beat it out of you.

The most difficult fears to diagnose are those that lack grounding in concrete reality – an Unseen Terror in professional parlance – because they are often a result of a shock to the psychological system. Like the day you found out that fat, balding guy from Napalm Death used to be a fucking great drummer or further realizing that somebody actually went to the trouble of writing grind songs about Garfield. However, don’t make the Human Error of thinking just because your fear can’t be seen that it can’t be treated.

Now that we’ve identified the source of your terror, we must evaluate its impact on your life to devise an appropriate treatment program. A mild Phobia can generally be effectively managed with a regimen of waterboarding and electric shocks to the genitalia from a car battery. But if you suffer from a more Excruciating Terror we may have to get more … creative … in our therapy choices. Say, a melon baller, the audiobook of Atlas Shrugged and a tube of tennis balls. I’ll let you work that out for yourself.

Should more conventional methods of addressing your terror prove ineffective, we can of course step you up to the Extreme Noise Terror protocol. The protocol often involves gathering a couple hundred unsmiling young white men in black shirts in a dank, stinky hole that pretends to be a club and subjecting them to tinnitus-inducing levels of screeching, shrieking noise you have somehow convinced them constitutes music while simultaneously gouging them on food and beer prices. Who said being a humanitarian can’t be profitable? Fun fact: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s fear of air travel was cured by a 72-hour, 300 decibel session of Britney Spears’ greatest hits at our Guantanamo Bay treatment facility. The regimen was not a total success, however. While his fear of flying had been addressed, he also developed a crippling phobia of whorish, washed up teen pop stars. Not that I blame him.

Should we be successful, the terror treatment program should leave you in a state Beyond Terror Beyond Grace. While you’ll likely have overcome your fears (possibly substituting a slew of new phobias in the process, say of sadistic therapists), you’ll also place yourself beyond your chosen deity’s grace and redemption given the treatment often results in patients screaming blasphemies and obscenities throughout (again: melon baller, Ayn Rand, tennis balls). While you’ve likely sacrificed your immortal soul in the process (should you ascribe to such a quaint notion), I guarantee the Andrew Childers treatment process will mean your original fear will be the furthest thing from your mind.

Aftertaste Obliteration

Given that I have square-root-of-negative-1 musical talent my advice may count for little, but grind bands of the world please heed me. I ask two things of you: start your album strong and finish it strong. If you snap our neck from track one and leave us with a steel toed groin shot as a close, you’re about 75 percent of the way to writing a near-classic record. But far too often grind bands get pretentious and clever and decide to erase any good will they’ve earned with a record by trying to end with some “arty” closer that’s supposed to prove they have broader musical influences than humble grindcore. This is even more annoying than the “end with our really slow song” cliché. And since your fan base will generally skip it anyway, why don’t you?
If you’ll turn your reference books to the chapter labeled Discordance Axis you’ll learn how to do it properly. The Inalienable Dreamless’ “Castration Rite” has got to be one of the classic opening screeds. No build up, no bullshit; just grind. And yes, while Discordance Axis did give in to the “let’s write a really slow song” impulse with “Leaden Stride to Nowhere,” they were smart enough to make it the penultimate song rather than the closer. If sludge trudge wasn’t to your taste, they made sure the 40 second amuse-bouche “Drowned” ushered you from the table with a smile Mental exercise: imagine if “Leaden Stride to Nowhere” had actually closed the album: would it still be as effective?
So now that we know how to do it right, let’s learn from a few counter-examples.

Beyond Terror Beyond Grace
Extinction/Salvation
Grindhead
2007
Just. Don’t.
Please, that’s all I’m asking: just don’t. Beyond Terror Beyond Grace are a talented force for swampy, sludgy grindcore, and they should stick to that. Whoever told them they should dabble in electronic pastiche should be bitten by the multifarious venomous atrocities that infest Australia and then fed to dingoes. With its several fake-out endings “022617” is like the M. Night Shyamalan of songs: convinced it’s far more clever than it really is and just a grating disappointment in general. It’s also my new measuring stick for really horrible endings.
Beyond Terror Beyond Grace – “022617”

F.U.B.A.R.
Justification of Criminal Behaviour
Bones Brigade
2005
As Holland’s leading purveyors of power violence, F.U.B.A.R. can bring the noise. Somehow they were deceived into thinking they were the next J. Randall and larded the end of Justification of Criminal Behaviour with the empty calorie synth drone beat doom trifle “Fucked Up Beyond 7C.” Here’s a friendly word of advice: If I’m going to skip Man is the Bastard’s more annoying electronic excursions (and oh you better believe I do), then there’s no way in hell I’m gonna sit through five minutes of you fucking around with your Casio keyboard.
F.U.B.A.R. – “Fucked Up Beyond 7C”

Phobia
Means of Existence
Slap-a-Ham (Reissued by Death Vomit)
1998
Sadly, not even some of my favorite bands and favorite albums are immune from the phenomenon. Phobia have built their much deserved reputation as an unrelenting blastbeat monster gnawing through everything in their path. But for some reason at the end of Means of Existence the band suddenly decided they wanted to be Godflesh. So we’re treated to “Ruined,” an interminable mash of piercing jammed radio skree, inaudible samples that, mercifully, eventually gives way to a serviceable but certainly unnecessary doom song. By then I’ve already lost interest.
Phobia – “Ruined”

Terrorizer
Darker Days Ahead
Century Media
2006
This goes beyond merely asking why Darker Days Ahead needs to exist at all. Say what you will about Jesse Pintado’s half baked Terrorizer reunion, the crap sandwich aftertaste I get from this album rests squarely on the shoulders of Pete Sandoval. It’s courtesy of Commando we’re kissed off with a pointless piano and blastbeat amalgam that, though only 2:35, just seems like it will never end. If Sandoval was looking to evoke the interminable boredom of being stuck on a spectral locomotive that will never reach its destination, he’s succeeded. But as one of my favorite literature professors said of Kerouac’s drug-fueled, nonstop writing session for On the Road: Now you have to ask if it was worth the effort.
No.
Terrorizer – “Ghost Train”

Total Doom

The combination of age, apathy, arthritic knuckles and that little problem of zero recognizable musical ability have conspired to keep me from my life’s masterwork: an epic 10 minute drone doom cover of “You Suffer.” I mean, why not? It worked for Sunn 0))) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And with every hipster douchebag who was ironically sporting a trucker hat two years ago swinging from Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s collective sack, I might as well get in on the action too. While my blog may be speed-centric, I have a deep, abiding love from the crustier, sludgier, dronier fringes of the doom-sphere. Frilly shirts, violins, red wine, vampires and tales of lost love need not apply. It’s the same impulse that drives me to obsessively listen to both grind and doom – Extremity of speed, whether up tempo and down. And while that may seem antithetical to some, there’s actually been a pretty steady traffic between the two ends of the pendulum with plenty of grinders leaving the blasts in the past to get down with the doom.

In the Name of the Father and the Son
For a guy who’s been cranking out 8-minute drone pop doom jams for the last decade, young Justin Broadrick famously didn’t have a lot of patience, quitting Napalm Death after the first Scum recording session. Though classic grind tunes like “You Suffer,” “Siege of Power” and “The Kill” have his dexterous fingerprints all over them, fast and blasting just weren’t in Broadrick’s stars. But we all know the man’s true calling lay in meticulously crafted walls of sound, whether they crushed you with their iron shod shoes a la the mighty Godflesh or buried you in suffocating walls of ambience like Jesu. While Broadrick has never helmed what I’d consider a “true” doom band his coattails permeate deep into modern doom. I’m not going to expound on the obvious but will say few before Godflesh were that heavy and Broaderick continues to crack – and drop – jaws with his latest work.

Birmingham Dorrian and the Cathedral of Doom
If there were template for the grind to doom transition, it would be a cutout of Lee Dorrian. Having helped lay a corner stone for grind with Napalm Death, like the aforementioned Broadrick, Dorrian quit that band after burning out on punk and death metal. Of course, we all know what happens next. Dorrian channels his love of Black Sabbath and Pentagram by way of his love for really horrible horror films like Tombs of the Blind Dead (“Templars Arise!” on Endtyme), Witchfinder General (“Hopkins, the Witchfinder General” on Carnival Bizarre) and Hammer horror gems like Night Creatures (Caravan Beyond Redemption’s “Captain Clegg”). From its mouldering bones begin to its increasingly bell-bottomed later offerings, Dorrian and constant companion Gary “Gaz” Jennings pretty much defined the scope of doom in the 1990s and on through the new milennium.

Warrior of Ice
Extreme grindcore demands an extreme drummer and Brutal Truth’s Scott Lewis is a lodestone for extremity. Before being tapped to handle the 'Truth (and later Exit-13), Lewis was the servant of New York warsmen Winter, whose frigid ecological meditations were instrumental to shaping the death doom sound. About as far from blasted beats as you could get, Lewis plowed into the heart of Winter’s mix of To Mega Therion-era Celtic Frost atmosphere and gloom with Amebix-blasted apocalypse crust (that band, of course, had a song called “Winter” on No Sanctuary). So it turns out the planet is destined to fry rather than freeze, but Winter’s end of the world-isms are just as trenchant. That environmental awareness probably didn’t heart when Lewis made the transition to plant-powered Brutal Truth (though lore has it his penchant for byproducts of grain put him at odds with his bush baby cohorts). In a far too common story, Winter never seemed to get their due during their four year existence and Nuclear Blast has let their their sole EP and LP (conveniently collected on one disc) go out of print. But like Otzi the Iceman, Winter remain perfectly preserved in time, a crystalline fossil of doom’s early deathward trudge.
No Fear Before the March of the Eyes of Flame
If I asked to you tick off a list of premier grind drummers, I’d fully expect names like Sandoval, Harris, Witte and Fajardo to immediately come up. But I bet John Haddad would not be the first name to spring to mind, which is fucking shame because there’s not too many people who could ably step into Raymond Herrera’s shoes. After the Fear Factory drummer sat in as a session member on Phobia’s debut EP, Return to Desolation, the Cali-grinders tapped Haddad to man my favorite album from the band to date, Means of Existence. That would be his only outing with the band and after a 6 year period during which not much was heard from Haddad, he resurfaced with Dan Kaufman and Matt Fisher, the musical axis behind the godly Mindrot, in the grumbling and downtrodden Eyes of Fire. The guy seems to have a thing for kick-starting new bands and splitting before the credit rolls in because Haddad left after debut From Ashes to Embers. However, he did reunite with them as an engineer on follow up Prisons, and Haddad’s grind career came full circle in 2008 when he manned the producer’s chair on Phobia’s 22 Random Acts of Violence.

Cerulean Transience of all my Imagined Grindcore
Remember what I said about hipsters swinging from O’Malley and Anderson’s ball bag? What goes around comes around. In addition to fellating Earth’s Dylan Carlson for most the millennia, that pair has also been lovingly stroking Aussies Disembowelment’s shaft. Earth may have birthed the drone, but Disembowelment brought the atmosphere and gloom that shadow Sunn 0))). But before they transcended into the ambient peripheral, Disembowelment started out as a Napalm Death cover band (named Scum, natch) and death/grinders Bacteria. Apparently for drummer Paul Mazziota old habits die hard. Right off the top of the Transcendence into the Peripheral, their sole album from 1993 (available in awesome two- and three-disc versions via Relapse), Disembowelment open “The Tree of Life and Death” with blastbeats. I’m going to repeat that to make sure it sinks in: Disembowelment were a funeral doom band that wrote songs full of blastbeats. Disembowelment may be better remembered for their spooky reverbed guitars, chanted vocals and unique visual aesthetic but their willingness to shatter what by then were already fossilized doom conventions can’t be overlooked either.


Do Not Deny the First Stage of Grief
Disrupt was the greatest haHHdcore band from Boston not named Siege. Can we all agree with that? Despite its constantly shifting, rent-a-member line up, Disrupt cohesively melded d-beat, scabies-afflicted crust and flashes of grindcore impatience into a pissed bunny hugging kill machine. It was also home to Randy Odierno, who drummed on a bulk of the band’s discography (which if you haven’t purchased from Relapse, then you suck) as well as guitarist Terry Savastano, who was also briefly in the band for a few early EPs. But the duo were doomed to live miserably ever after in sludge mongers Grief, who, along with Eyehategod, pretty much defined crusty, junkie doom. Rather than the flights of fancy – or Lee Dorrian’s flights of Video Nasties – that typically defined doom, Grief never left the crumbling confines of their collectively miserable skulls. Addiction, dementia, misery and depression were the staples of the band’s monochromatic palette. Aptly named Grief, the band’s songs wallowed in such misery it was impossible for them to move at more than a shuffle.

Little Old Lady from Bergenfield, New Jersey
At this point James Plotkin is so well known for his bpm-challenged work with Khanate and Khlyst younger ’heads may not even know the guy was tooling around the Earache stable at the dawn of grind and speedy punk. While not necessarily a grind fixture, musical visionary Plotkin was not averse to speed, whether it was with Old Lady Drivers, who scored a spot on the classic Combat/Earache Grind Crusher comp nearly 20 years ago, or when he recruited human drive shaft Dave Witte to back up slantwise spazz freakazoids Phantomsmasher. Armed with a bent sense of humor and a willingness to challenge grind and punk’s self-imposed limitations, the only constant in Plotkin’s career is his protean willingness to constantly explore new vistas whether it was the punk and industrial poundings of O.L.D., the spazzercized DJ-driven downbeat of Phantomsmasher or the slo-mo meltdown of his recent drone work. Regardless, Plotkin’s work has consistently crushed with the force of a Florida geezer mowing down a farmers market with his car.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Phobia

Phobia

Means of Existence

Slap-a-Ham (Reissued by Death Vomit)

1998

Ok, so 22 Random Acts of Violence and Cruel didn’t light my fire, but I submit that Phobia are likely America’s greatest gutter grind band. Where the earliest British grind was hopped up hardcore and continental Europeans trended toward a sleeker, more refined attack, it was that initial wave of Americans who were responsible for the burliest, street level grindcore and Phobia lead that pack.

While plenty of pixels have been spilled in praise of Phobia’s awesome debut, Return to Desolation, Means of Existence’s tighter, more visceral attack has always had the pride of place in my heart, partly for being my first Phobia record. It all starts with Paul Miner’s engineering and the band’s production efforts. Means of Existence sounds huge, elephantine, dinosauric, colossal, cyclopean even. Everything is panned to the lower registers and you can practically feel the reverberations coming off Steve Burda (guitar) and Luis Pereya’s (bass) amps. It’s a monstrous, violent, physical wall of rough faced-brick grating across exposed flesh. Shane McLachlan spits and snarls a litany of the world’s sins, his righteous indignation elevating him to the post of pitiless judge, unsympathetic jury and enthusiastic executioner. Backing it all up are John Haddad’s steam hammer blasts.

Means of Existence is From Enslavement to Obliteration filtered through Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Response’s recording session. “Scars” stalks your stereo like a caged feral animal biding its time until a careless zoo keeper forgets to lock the dog. Much mauling will ensue. The spiraling, sample-heavy “Snail” is yet another fine example of the Apocalypse Now principle of metal.

Two labels have fallen out from under this album, and it and its successor, Serenity Through Pain, are both currently out of print, which is fucking travesty because this is a looser, less polished Phobia than what you’ll hear on the Willowtip albums. There’s a sense of impending calamity and danger you just don’t get from the current generation of super clean, click tracked precision of modern production values and I think we’re all the poorer for it.