G&P review: Narcosis

Narcosis
Best Served Cold
Earache
The Narcosis boys could really learn a few lessons in P.R. Slogging through their meandering liner notes to discography Best Served Cold, I’m left with the impression they didn’t particularly care for most of their recordings, they couldn’t hold a line up together and that the band never had a clear identity or vision. But I guess if you’re reading that, they’ve already got your $15 so the joke’s on you.
Time was when Earache equaled quality grind. If you’re nostalgic and think Best Served Cold marks some return to the glory days of 1989, you’re going to be disappointed. I couldn’t tell you the last Earache album I bought and I’m beginning to remember why.
These young Brits clearly imbibed Napalm Death and Unseen Terror with their mother’s milk and a few pints of bitter, and while they make an adequate racket and near sound barrier speeds, I just never get a firm sense of who or what Narcosis were actually trying to be and after reading their liner notes, I’m not sure they ever had a clue either.
While Narcosis in various incarnations was a deliciously bass-heavy grind outfit, they just never gelled as songwriters to make their particular brand of noise compelling, especially on the 10 minutes spent feeding a gerbil into a woodchipper that was “With a Sickening Thud.”
Lame attempts at ha-ha funny song titles that even a post-coma Seth Putnam would leave on the cutting room floor (“If Being a Cunt was People, You’d be China,” “Just Because They Say Christ When You Walk Into a Room Doesn’t Make You Jesus”) just come off as tired and derivative. While, the faux Carcass and Man Is the Bastard artwork inside is indeed clever it’s just one more symptom of the same disease.
Too often this overlong collection becomes the grindcore equivalent of elevator music: something that just buzzes in the background.
While Best Served Cold is certainly economical in these tough times, dishing up nearly 80 minutes of grind over 51 tracks, only the songs from the Romance album, which are smartly placed front and center, are really going to be worth repeated listening. Many of the EP and horrifically tinny live tracks collected here also just regurgitate songs you may or may not have heard the first go round. Really, how many versions of “Screaming I Hate You While I Slit My Own Throat” does one person need?
Money’s tight these days so Brutalex has agreed to share. Save your ducats.

G&P review: Crowpath

Crowpath
One With Filth
Willowtip
It helps to think of One With Filth as the soundtrack to a nonexistent Swedish slasher film, something like Henrik: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Crowpath’s latest longplayer is purported to be a concept album based on a notorious Swedish serial killer, a cop charged with investigating his own crimes.
Thanks to the helpful insistence of Shanetera and Zmaj, I finally filled a rather sizeable hole in my metal listening with Crowpath. Not that I have an excuse for tardiness because Willowtip has never sent me astray.
In between the grinding and the sludging, Crowpath set down spidery guitar work that almost reaches shred speeds when the band suddenly kicks the clutch and jumps from first to fifth gear.
The unexpected drone doom goodness of “Gryningen” boast guitars as heavy as swollen corpse and late album standout, the cacophonous “Cleansed in Chlorine whips like a tornado born of pestilential, subterranean winds, carrying aloft the whiff of discarded human remains. Closer “Retarded Angel” is the sonic equivalent of a house of mirrors, warping and stretching reality in a uniquely grotesque fashion.
My only complaint is One With Filth’s production is just as muted and gray as the album art, blunting the jagged and serrated edges that make the similarly sludgy Maruta or a previous album like Red on Chrome so pointed and enjoyable. But that’s a quibble because Crowpath manage to weld early Alice Cooper’s jaundiced eye for horror to white knuckled grind and sludge.

Blast(beat) From the Past: Kill the Slave Master

Kill the Slave Master
Kill the Slave Master
Cyberdine243
1999
Former Creation is Crucifixion guitar guerilla Karl Hlavinka continued his twisted cybernetic grind experiments with Wisconsin techgrinders Kill the Slave Master after leaving his on again, off again prior band.
Kill the Slave Master’s 11 minute self –titled EP (also known as The Artisans of Dominion: Part 1 in some parts) was a Cenobite-obsessed call to reject all of modern society, ironically brought to the you courtesy the power of modern technology.
While there’s no denying Creation is Crucifixion’s paternity, the offspring sadly did not inherit daddy’s production budget because the band’s only flaw is the EP sounds like it was recorded through a paper towel tube from another room. Which is a shame because the songs slay. “Coenobite (of the Abbatoir)’s” pinch harmonic skin lashings give way to a primativist trudge that stops and stares like a pissed cyclops bestriding the land. The “Orchestration of Sodom” very well could have scored a scene from de Sade-reinterpreted-as-Nazi-fetish flick Salo.
One thing Kill the Slave Master did, unfortunately inherit from Creation is Crucifixion is that band’s inability to keep the music going. Officially listed as on hold, the band’s deleted their MySpace page and after a decade of no new music, I think we can just assume the Cenobites finally took them away.

Blast(beat) From the Past: Creation is Crucifixion

Creation is Crucifixion
Child As Audience
Self-Released
2001
Billed as the nexus “where technology and anarchy fuck,” shadowy hactivists Creation is Crucifixion were the agents provocateur of the early Willotip/ Pittsburgh grind/death scene and this completely unorthodox, self-released bit of agitprop was their apex.
Combining the kind of techno-libertarianism you’d expect from an issue of Wired with a scathing arsenal of unhinged grindcore and circuitry patterned guitar riffs that unscrew the control panels of your mind for a little creative rewiring of the sort that would make Boston Mooninites proud.
Unfortunately, you’ll have to skip the pedantic spoken word bits by the Critical Art Ensemble unless droning postmodern political lectures on autonomy and alienation are your thing, but the three actual songs on this all around impressive release are some of Creation is Crucifixion’s finest work. “Micro-Consuming Machines” is practically operatic in its arc, a sprawling three minute fit of midtempo skronk riffs that give way urgent, unhinged blasts at the end. Final song “Game Boy’s” stutter step drums and circular saw guitars are like a May Day parade march for the impending proletarian robot revolution.
Meanwhile the entire package, featuring a hefty booklet in several languages that shows you step by step how to hack old Gameboy cartridges to install software teaching children the joys of sex and masturbation, beautifully encapsulates CIC’s twisted, subversive M.O.
And if anybody out there has a copy of In_Silico on any format they’re willing to part with, hook a brother up.

G&P review: Exit Wounds

Exit Wounds
Exit Wounds
No Escape
If this whole grindcore thing doesn’t work out, Poland’s Exit Wounds have a bright future working as historical interpreters at any number of battlefield museums.
Their thirty song full length debut is a guided tour of the nascent 21st Century’s already impressive legacy of carnage, conflict and chaos. But rather than Bolt Thrower’s romanticized tales of armies bravely charging into the breach once more, Exit Wounds’ shell cratered landscape is littered with spent brass casings, still steaming warm in the morning chill, and splinters of bone and flecks of gore.
A pressganged platoon of Rotten Sound’s rampant misanthropy, early Nasum hooks (grok the impressive solo on “Hand of the Dictator”) and Retaliation’s fascination with picking apart the human form via modern technology, Exit Wounds search and destroy the metal landscape with cheerily titled songs like “Bombs at the Horizon,” “Rifle Tattooed Temple” and “Annihilated by the Flamethrower.”
To say Exit Wounds are grind traditionalists is no insult. Screams pass by guttural growls while the band eviscerates songs like they’re wired up to some musical version of the Speed bus and will collectively detonate if they drop below 200 bpm (though that kind of sonic terrorism is probably pretty appealing given their jaundiced outlook), cramming 30 songs, including Haymaker and Retaliation covers, into 23 minutes. Exit Wounds may not break new ground but they’re more than happy to landmine the old and laugh as civilization wanders in and sends severed limbs flying.
I slept the band’s debut EP, 17 Wounds of Exit, but you can bet I’m sifting war zone shrapnel looking for that unexploded grenade now.

The Thing That Should Not Be: Carcass

The band: To say you were there when a new musical movement gnawed its way out of the womb like a fetal zombie is a rare accomplishment, but Carcass can claim grindcore, death metal, melodic death and even death ‘n’ roll as progeny. The Liverpuddlians dropped five studio albums over their rather brief career, each an interesting, engaging evolutionary step beyond the previous. But then there was Swansong.

The album: Oh, the album we all love to hate. After Earache and Columbia’s abortive attempt to shove death metal into the mainstream, Swansong became the poster child for perceived efforts to neuter the music and make it more palatable to the MTV set.
Through no fault of his own, Carlo Regadas was no Michael Amott, and nothing he could do would ever win over disaffected fans, especially in the face of Swansong’s awful sounding guitars (though they are heavier than I remember, it’s not the overblown sound I associate with Carcass). Even Ken Owen’s drumming lost all of its verve here, becoming another stale, play-the-beat rock performance. “Corporeal Jigsore Quandray,” this ain’t.
But the largest disappoint, for me, is lyrical. Carcass was the only metal band to really revel in language. They had an almost Dead Kennedys kind of appreciation for witty word play, and Swansong unleashed enough bad puns to fill a respectable episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle. But a decade and a half later, sneering pop culture references to MTV’s lame Rock the Vote, bad Neil Young songs and the marketing phenomenon formerly known as Generation X just come off as incredibly dated and irrelevant.

The verdict: As the recent reunion attests, Swansong was probably not the way Carcass wanted to go out, but with a few years’ perspective, I can see some of the death ‘n’ rollers giving this a second, more charitable listen. But since Heartwork tries my patience these days, I’ll just give Reek of Putrefaction and Symphonies of Sickness another spin.

Blast(beat) From the Past: Vulgar Pigeons

Vulgar Pigeons
Burning Episode
Deepsend
2004
I wish they call could be California... grind.
OK, lame, I know. But the Golden State may be known for surf, sun and silicon(e), and you’d never know it after listening to just about any grind disc out of L.A. Almost to a band (Terrorizer being an obvious exception), California grind is bass heavy, punked out and scummy as all hell. Bass typically gets short shrift in a scene more interested in speed than heft, but Excruciating Terror, Benumb, Phobia and Bloody Phoenix have all cherished their romance with the lower registers.
Born from Benumb (bassist Paul Pontikoff and drummer John Gotelli), Vulgar Pigeons carry over the same four string tom foolery from that band. And though the band’s debut, Summary Execution, has been swallowed by the memory hole that was the great Deathvomit catastrophuck, their vulgar disply of power Burning Episode is still readily available. Summary was a tad overlong and dragged in spots, but Burning Episode goes down smoother with a more varied songwriting repertoire crammed into 18 minutes.
Harking back to Phobia’s debut, Return to Desolation, Vulgar Pigeons don’t look askance as pushing grind’s notoriously short attention spans, pushing songs into the three, four, occasionally even five minute range in between 30 second blasters like “Coffin Honeymoon.” The Pigeons also aren’t afraid to monkey around with tempos as with the Anthrax mosh break of “Compartmentalize.”
If you, like me, have a Benumb fetish (and if you don’t, seriously, WTF?), Vulgar Pigeons should have pride of place in your collection.