“And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled,
maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous
flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the
detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and
absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless,
mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.”— H.P. Lovecraft,
“Nyarlathotep”
It’s time we talk about grindcore’s dirty secret. For 30 years—literally from the very first moment—grind musicians have been cheating on you with the must un-metal of instruments: the saxophone. (Yes, I know, literally, that's it made out of metal. You know what I mean, smart ass!) Saxophone is that instrument your parents tried to foist on you when they misunderstood what exactly you meant when you told them you wanted to join a band. It’s probably not the instrument you picture yourself shredding on a stage in front of throngs of panty-throwing fans.
Ladies.
However, it’s probably got more of a grindcore pedigree than you’d credit it at first blush. Its reedy wail has been adding an extra frisson to the wonted arsenal of slashing guitars and thumping drums for decades. If nothing else, dabbling in odd instrumentation will probably get you street cred as a serious musician who’s not afraid to test barriers. Also expect lazy reviewers to drop the term “jazzy” a lot when describing your song. “Any band with a saxophone that doesn't play ska will eventually be described as jazz,” Dead Neanderthals saxophonist Otto said. “I'm really not into traditional jazz but love free jazz. Maybe we're a little jazz in that sense.” Saxophone grind is still a bit of a novelty, and I’m certainly not advocating making it a full time thing, but maybe it’s time we recognize it’s not as incongruous as it sounds at first blush.
Despite Jon Chang's laughably desperate attempt to stuff the ballot box by voting twice, some of his favorite records just got torched. I call that justice. Everyone savor the tears of his failure. Which sons of bitches met their mortality? Read on.
THE GEEZERS
More Metal S.O.B.'s Gate of Doom met its World Downfall at the hands of Terrorizer, falling by 16-2 (and I only counted one of Jon's votes).
More Punk Disrupt disrupted S.O.B.'s second entry in the contest when Unrest stomped all over Don't Be Swindle by 13-5.
THE UPSTARTS
More Arty No matter who goes down, Takafumi Matsubara won this round, and you guys decided GridLink's Amber Gray was superior to Mortalized's Absolute Mortality 2 by 14-4.
More Farty Kill the Client's Cleptocracy stole the show, outlasting Agoraphobic Nosebleed's PCP Torpedo by 9-6.
As always, the updated brackets are available for your perusal here. So that brings us to the last batch for the first round. Here are the 4-5 matchups. As always, you have until Sunday to vote either here or at the Facebook page, whichever suits you. Just a friendly reminder, you only get to vote once (*cough*Chang*cough).
THE GEEZERS
More Metal 4. Brutal Truth-Need to Control v. 5. Carcass-Reek of Putrefaction
More Punk 4. Siege-Drop Dead v. 5. Assuck-Anticapital
THE UPSTARTS
More Arty 4. Dephosphorus-Night Sky Transform v. 5. Agoraphobic Nosebleed-Altered States of America
More Farty 4. Suffering Mind-Suffering Mind v. 5. 324-Boutoku no Taiyo
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.
Some bands don't even get the benefit of a single full length to make their mark on grindcore. Instead, they have to prove their chops in the space of a single EP. The time constraints inherent in the format seem perfectly suited to melting out the fat, forcing bands to focus on their finest, strongest material. If your band's 7-inch drags in spots, you've got bigger problems. But the bands below needed nothing more than that to stake their claim to grindcore glory.
Siege Drop Dead Deranged (Re-release) 1984 Siege only had nine songs and 16 minutes of material to their credit (and half of that was the saxophone-heavy freak out of "Grim Reaper") but that's all the Boston band needed to lay the cornerstone of what would become grindcore. Siege pushed the tempos of hardcore to nigh-blastbeat territory on Drop Dead and their flailing brand of thrashed out punk is an undeniable influence on Napalm Death's Scum, side A in particular. Everything that would later be associated with grindcore can be spotted on Drop Dead: thrashing drums, tonsil-scraping screaming and punk on speed guitars. Unfortunately, the band would drop dead shortly after recording their demo, but the legacy was just getting started.
Luddite Clone The Arsonist and the Architect Relapse/Cyberdine 243 2000 Coming out of the same New Jersey scene that brought us Human Remains and Burnt by the Sun, Luddite Clone played a shifty brand of hardcore, grind and metal on EP The Arsonist and the Architect. The band's collected works would include a split with Burnt by the Sun and a live split with the hardcore band The Esoteric, but it was their solo six song EP that made their reputation as a tech savvy band with a penchant for ear virus riffs and jazz complexity. Even though it was later re-released by Relapse, The Arsonist and the Architect, out of print again, is a quietly impressive slab of noise that's never quite gotten the respect it desperately deserves.
King Generator King Generator Tankcrimes 2008 If a second collaboration between Dave Witte and Mike Hill doesn't excite you (Witte subbed in on drums for Anodyne's Red Was Her Favorite Color, and tossed in a rare guitar performancee for good measur), then you're reading the wrong goddamn blog. Throw in Jamie Thomson of Shank and you've got a recipe for an asskicking hardcore experience. King Generator gave us seven awesome punk/grind songs as part of one-off collaboration in 2008. There's probably nothing here that you haven't heard before, but in the hands of three punk masters, King Generator bring it with the kind of confidence and panache that a lot of their younger challengers lack.
Hope Collapse Year of the Leper Inkblot Records 2005 Yet another Dave Witte one-off, this time he reunited with Carlos Ramirez and Andrew Orlando of Black Army Jacket to form Hope Collapse. The band banged out an EP of top shelf grind inspired by the likes of Terrorizer, Assuck, Repulsion, Siege, S.O.B, who all get namechecked in the liner notes. For the names involved and quality of musicianship at play, Year of the Leper has been criminally overlooked by too many people in their target demographic. From the start of first true song "Cold Steel Penetrates You Flesh," which is just as piercing as it sounds, the band rages like a post-millennial version of Assuck. They don't let up until the last notes of "Leper Convention" fade into oblivion. More than any other EP on this list, Hope Collapse deserves a sequel.
Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus Simian Hybrid Prototype The Spew 2004 Florida grind mouthful Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus' discography is essentially Simian Hybrid Prototype and a split with Despised Icon, but that's all it took to notch their mark on grindcore. From the Scott Hull production through the Paul Romano art, Simian Hybrid Prototype is a nasty, unnerving nugget of subversive grind that tries to shock like Anal Cunt with a college diploma rather than a handful of homophobic insults or what Agoraphobic Nosebleed used to be before they fell for their own shtick. Either way, the band wasn't able to keep it together beyond one EP and the split. Members went on to Khann and Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky, but neither of those outfits have been able to capture the spark of Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus.
I'm sorry to tell you all, but every single vote you've cast so far has been completely wasted. We're going to have to start over completely from the beginning because we all missed one guitarist who will run away with the whole competition. I don't know how we missed her in the beginning, but bow before your queen.
While you sit there looking ashamed over your inability to remember the complex chord progression of "You Suffer," here's the 3-6 results.
The Old Guard Gurn ran away with it, squashing Toshimi a perfect 10-0.
The Innovators We're all going to infinity and beyond with space grinder Papirmollen, who edged out Talarczyk 7-5.
The Punks No contest, Insect Warfare's Beau ran the table against Kill the Client's Richardson 12-0.
The Technicians Another blowout with Erik Burke taking a 9-0 lead over the Creation is Crucifixion dudes.
So, we're moving on. As always you can check out the updated bracket here. Meanwhile, here's the last batch from round one, on to the 4-5s.
The Old Guard 4. Pintado (Terrorizer/Napalm Death/Resistant Culture) v. 5. Habelt (Siege) Habelt had no clue he was inventing grindcore with Siege. Pintado helped perfect it over the next two decades.
The Innovators 4. Johnson (Enemy Soil/Drugs of Faith) v. 5. Borja (Maruta) I've said this a lot, but Richardson has done a buttload to drag grind kicking and screaming into the future with drum machines and grindcore swing. Borja invented an instantly recognizable guitar tone that perfectly encapsulates grindcore's grizzly edge.
The Punks 4. Aalto (Rotten Sound) v. 5. Rasyid (Wormrot) Finland and its Scandinavian kin represented the best grindcore had to offer during the first decade of the century. The next decade belongs to Southeast Asia. Who rules right now?
The Technicians 4. Rokicki (Antigama) v. 5. Arp (Psyopus) I don't have the foundation in advanced chaos mathematics to keep up with either of these guitarists, but I recognize the insane talent involved.
As always, you've got until Sunday to make your best arguments.
When I started this blog six or so months ago, I assumed a real quick countdown list would help me pad out the posts for the five of six weeks, giving me a ready stock of copy to pull from when I couldn’t write something fresh. Here we are half a year later and it’s finally come to an end after I revised, revisited and rethought the countdown I had hastily assembled in advance. Essentially, I thought this list would help me explain to people (if anyone gives a rosy red rat’s posterior) where I was coming from musically, give you some insight into why I’m likely to praise some albums and pan others. But what I didn’t expect was how much I would learn from this process. (I’m about to get selfish and introspective, so deal with it or just skip ahead.) I’ve spent half of my life obsessively following the purveyors of blast beats, greedily hunting down any album with a completely sick song-to-length ratio to add to my collection, and the reflection this last has forced me to over the last few months has not only reaffirmed my love of grind, but forced me to really listen to some of my favorite albums with fresh ears. Try to think back to the first time you threw on your first Napalm Death album (1992—Utopia Banished on the b-side of a friend’s bootleg copy of Suicidal Tendencies’ debut). Or getting your grindcore cherry handed to you courtesy of the medicinal madmen in Carcass. Now that I’m in my 30s, going back and listening to these albums has allowed me to recapture that youthful sense of rage and abandon that made them so vital and so fresh originally. Hopefully you feel the same. If you’re still reading. If you care. So first, a quick recap:
12. Assuck Misery Index Sound Pollution 1996 Crucial, punk as fuck metal. [OK, in retrospect Anticapital probably deserves this spot. Fuck it. Buy both. They’re equally awesome.]
Siege Drop Dead Originally self released (reissued by Relapse, Deep Six and Deranged) 1984 If you’ve ever wondered whose power Napalm Death was besieging, look no further. The band may never have hit blastbeat velocities, but every other element of what would become grind was already in this Boston quartet’s arsenal. Though the band’s entire discography spans a scant nine songs that can be enjoyed in half the time of your standard sitcom, Siege’s influence is incalculable. Originally released in the Orwellian year 1984, Drop Dead seethes with the frustration and paranoia born of Soviet and American tensions. Song (“Sad but True”) after song (“Cold War”) after song “Armageddon”) rails against the two nation’s seeming glee in bringing the world to the brink of mutually assured destruction in stabbing 60 second blasts of hardcore noise. Racism (“Life of Hate”), world hunger (“Starvation”) and mindless conformity (duh, “Conform”) get a thoroughly scathing rundown as well. From the blunt lyrics to the cro-magnon music and Kevin Mahoney’s distinctive yelp, Siege was never a subtle proposition. But in the face of abject stupidity, it seemed the only approach. Medlied by Anal Cunt, whose Seth Putnam auditioned for a reformed lineup in 1992, and covered by Napalm Death, Siege set the standard for the full steam ahead aggression that would become grindcore.
