Grindcore Bracketology 3: The 2-7 Matchups

Round one is in the books, folks. I don't think there were any surprises with this one, but here's who will be hitting the showers early.

I don't  think any serious grind fan will discount just how awesome and quietly underrated Enemy Soil's Casualties of Progress is, but Horrified is a grindcore cornerstone. Repulsion trounced them 20-4.

In a matchup of early punky grind, Napalm Death's Scum ran all over Extreme Noise Terror's A Holocaust in Your Head by 19-5.

We all appreciate what Matt Widener did with Liberteer, but cmon, Discordance Axis' The Inalienable Dreamless is The Inalienable Fucking Dreamless. (I'm kinda a fan of this record). This one wasn't even close at 22-3.

Finally, I was curious how this one would go down since I juiced the rankings to force proteges Cellgraft to square off against masters Insect Warfare. I thought this might be the best chance for a spoiler, but I underestimated your love of World Extermination, which stomped all over External Habitation by 22-2.

So that was round one. You can keep tabs on how the brackets are shaking out here. Meanwhile, here are your 2-7 matchups. Once again, you have until Sunday. You can vote here or at the Facebook page. Have at it.

THE GEEZERS

More Metal
2. Napalm Death-From Enslavement to Obliteration v. 7. Assuck-Misery Index

More Punk
2. Brutal Truth-Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses v. 7. Unseen Terror-Human Error


THE UPSTARTS

More Arty
2. Pig Destroyer-Prowler in the Yard v. 7. Nasum-Helvete

More Farty
2. Womrot-Abuse v. 7. Sakatat-Bir Devrin Sonu

One Album Wonders

Neil Young once said it's "better to burn out than to fade away." I don't know how seriously to take that considering the geriatric fuck never took his own advice. (Kurt Cobain did, though.) That said, there's something intriguing about bands that drop one immaculate album and then choose not to risk their legacy with a second long player (Terrorizer, I'm looking at you). Yes, most of the bands on this list released additional EPs, splits and demo material, but for the most part their fame is built on a single, perfect album.

Repulsion
Horrified
Necrosis Records (reissued by Relapse)
1986
When you think one album grindcore wonder, Repulsion should be the first name that leaps to the forefront of your mind. The Michigan band midwifed grindcore with its sole full length album, Horrified. It's a perfect album: Slayer thrash pushed to the logical limits of extremity, horror film ambiance mixed with a punk-like disdain for the pretty and precise. Thirty Twenty-six years later bands are still shamelessly cloning Horrified's zombie aesthetic and graveyard foetor, and Repulsion, enlisting a few new spare parts, are still touring in support of their landmark album and they are more popular than ever before. With all that going for them, a second album would just be overkill.

Cretin
Freakery
Relapse
2006
Cretin have made no secret of their love for Repulsion (you may have noticed both Freakery and Horrified end on the word "fuck") and both bands are riding a single great album. It took goddess of grotesque Marissa Martinez and her helper monkeys 14 years to release their first album and the trio has been pretty quiet since then. (Granted, Martinez has had a few notable life adjustments during that period.) But even if they never release another album (or take another 14 years for a sequel), Freakery will stand as a modern grindcore masterpiece, the distillation of Tod Browning's Freaks in audio form. The album is a celebration of the oddities, abnormalities and curiosities that make life exciting.

ASRA
The Way of All Flesh
Black Box
2008
ASRA came and went in a flash, almost as quickly as the ridiculous daycare satanic panic that inspired the New York band's name. In their wake they left behind a single grisly, deathy album of scabies-raw grind in The Way of All Flesh. While the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak and ASRA called it quits shortly after dropping their lone longplayer, but it should be enough to warrant a well deserved asterisk on the list of unsung grindcore heroes. ASRA may not have burst into the mass consciousness the way contemporaries like Insect Warfare did, but The Way of All Flesh is an album whose reputation I could see growing with time.

Who's My Saviour?
Glasgow Smile
Power It Up
2007
There is a metric shit-ton of bands out there who released one album and then faded away into well deserved obscurity. But Who's My Saviour? made a bid for certified overlooked gem status with 2007's Glasgow Smile. Featuring members of Cyness and Wojczech, the German band combined genetic strains from their parent collectives to birth something new and unique. Glasgow Smile reveled in a sense of dynamism and artistry rarely seen in grindcore (at least until the advent of Dephosphorus). Who's My Saviour? mix up the grindcore playbook, toying with tempos and atmosphere to create a compelling and, ultimately listenable, grindcore whatsis experience.

Black Army Jacket
222
Chainsaw Safety
1998
Black Army Jacket recorded enough various splits and EPs to stock their hefty discography collection Closed Casket, but the New York power violence purveyors only had one full length album to their credit, 222, which features what may be drumming ubermensch Dave Witte's only known vocal credit in his lengthy recording career ("When I Can't See You Are You There?"). Everything that made power violence/grind/hardcore/thrash/whatever great gets a workout on 222. Pit stirring chugs, blastbeaten brawling and various vocal cord scrapings were lashed together to form the backbone of Black Army Jacket's wrong coast power violence experiment. One album was all they needed to establish themselves.

Disrupt
Unrest
Relapse
1994
In true early -'90s punk fashion, Boston just-short-of-grind-hardcore band Disrupt recorded enough splits and EPs to fill two CDs when Relapse reissued the band's back catalog a few years ago. While all those various odds and bits are worth seeking out, the band's legacy really rests on punk masterpiece Unrest. Featuring three different vocalists, including the incomparable and, unfortunately, underutilized Alyssa Murry, Disrupt spit and snarled their way through 20 tracks of blastbeaten rage and urban angst. "Religion is a Fraud," in particular, is one of the greatest hardcore songs ever written and Murry was at her screaming finest. Feminism, animal rights, religion, war and poverty are pretty common punk and grind topics, but few have screamed about them with the passion of Disrupt.

Unseen Terror
Human Error
Earache
1987
Realistically, what was the shelf life of Garfield grind? Even if Shane Embury hadn't moved on to Napalm Death, Unseen Terror, which also featured Mitch Dickenson of Heresy and occasional vocal contributions from Mick Harris, probably didn't have more than one album in them. But that album was a doozy. Human Error is an early grind landmark, particularly the buzzing bumblebee guitar, which legend has it greatly influenced the sounds of Swedish death metal. And unlike inspiration Garfield, Unseen Terror knew when to hang up the cleats and call it a day. After the 20 tracks that comprise Human Error, Unseen Terror only demoed another six songs. Though they've threatened to reunite several times since, thankfully they've left their legacy to rest to date. Just ask Bill Murray what past-its-prime Garfield can do to an otherwise successful career.

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.

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.