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.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Bloody Phoenix

Bloody Phoenix
Death to Everyone
625 Thrash
2010
A spunky epigeneticist looking for an inside track on next year's Nobel Prize could throw the competition a curveball by sequencing drummer Michael Rarubin's DNA. Cuz I'm pretty sure dude is toting an extra arm tucked somewhere on his body or some other drumming-related mutation. That's the only reasonable explanation I can see for a guy who can roll a snare drum and smash a cymbal at the same time.
And Death to Everyone, Bloody Phoenix's second album (which eluded me all through 2010) is Rarubin's time to shine as he dominates songs like "No Conscience," which makes the case that maybe the dude's name should pop up in casual conversation more often when you're bandying around the best drummers in grindcore.
Not that the rest of the quartet is phoning it in. Two decades into a career that started with Excruciating Terror, I was floored to see Jerry Flores mix up the deck by stirring in bits of Neurosis, d-beat, Today is the Day and even some Killing Joke to his repertoire. The confluence makes this probably the strongest album in his unfuckwithable career. "Mast of Deception" is practically uplifting for all of its violence as it twines its way up an escalator guitar riff akin to Napalm Death's "When All is Said and Done."
Quivering vocal cord delivery system Aaron Ramos gets his Steve Austin on with the closing, eponymous song as he rants about the death of god with a single-mindedness you'd expect from one of Today is the Day's more violent revenge tracks.
This may have slipped through my fingers last year, but it's never too late to pay Bloody Phoenix their proper respect.

Through Silver in Bloody Phoenix

I love that Bloody Phoenix mixed up their influences on second album Death to Everyone. Guitarist Jerry Flores is a grindcore old dog and it's cool to see him bust out a few new tricks.
That said...
...one of Bloody Phoenix's new influences sounded awfully...let's call it...familiar.
Let's start with opening number "Marching into a Bottomless Well." It's a wave of tolling bells, rolling and martial drums, implacable bass lurch and funereal guitars.



But doesn't it sound a lot like Neurosis' "Through Silver in Blood," opening song to the essential album of the same name. Same plod, similar tempo, same crushing chin shot.



Am I the only one hearing this?

You Grind…But Why?: Jerry Flores

Some men are born to grind. Some pursue grind. Others have grind thrust upon them. That's pretty much the tale of Excruciating Terror and Bloody Phoenix guitarist Jerry Flores.
Excruciating Terror was one of those transitional artists in my life. Along with Phobia, they represented my first forays into grind beyond the obligatory Napalm Death/Carcass axis. Divided We Fall helped plunge me down the rabbit hole of grindcore, sparking a lifetime addiction. After Excruciating Terror’s dissolution, guitarist Flores kept the grind coming with current outfit Bloody Phoenix.
When I ask Flores why he chose the path of blast beats, his answer is just a pithy and concise as his songwriting.

“I didn't choose grindcore,” he said. “What I was playing was considered grindcore once the term was coined. I just had a need for speed growing up listening to music. Always seeking faster music. You just end up playing what you like.”

Change We Can’t Believe In: Whither Grindcore in an Era of Hope?

Like any other sane person here in the magic kingdom of DeeCee, I celebrated Barack Obama’s historic inauguration by staying the fuck out of the city.
It’s not that I wasn’t feeling the hope or the change or the changing hope or the hoping change or whatever it was we were celebrating. Hell, despite my reservations about Biden and the most egregious aspects of the drug war he authored, I voted for Obama. (That’s partly thanks to the Greens and Libertarians coughing up two candidates who were so completely antithetical to each party’s stated philosophy that I had no choice but to vote for a major party candidate for the first time in my life.) And if he accomplishes nothing else I’ll raise a toast to Obama for fucking over those goddamned Baby Boomers who have ruined every election in my adult life by turning it into a pointless circle jerk about who did what way back in the ’60s rather than actually leading the country.
No, my reason for skipping the downtown festivities was far more practical. I didn’t feel like being hassled by the Capitol Police when I inevitably kicked some fat Midwestern tourist in a fanny pack and a souvenir FBI shirt down the stairs for violating the Metro’s escalator rules.
So spending a frigid Tuesday watching the inauguration from the warmth and comfort of my couch left me plenty of time to ponder the new era in Washington. Actually, I spent a good bit of time considering that hoary punk and metal truism that Republican administrations make for the best musical inspiration. Even a cursory survey of my music shelf reminded me of the difficulty even some top flight bands had adjusting to the post-Reagan/Thatcher/Cold War era when easy enemies were scarce.
So I started asking some of my favorite political grind frontmen whether they have any concerns about their job security in this new era of hope.
“I don't think it makes much difference,” Bloody Phoenix/ex-Excruciating Terror guitarist Jerry Flores said. “Doesn't matter what party is in office. Look at the Clinton years: plenty of angry bands surfaced during that era. Republicans just make easier targets. Poverty, corruption, etc. It fuels the fire. It's not going to go away. Our problems haven't gone away.”
While Richard Johnson has generally shied away from being overtly political with Drugs of Faith (though they did slap Dubya’s mug on their self-titled EP, a trend I am glad to see peter out),he penned some classic diatribes with drum machine progenitors Enemy Soil back when Bush Sr. was the one leading the ill-conceived Middle East excursions.
And though he may be relieved Sarah Palin is not one geriatric heartbeat away from starting all out nuclear war with Paraguay, Johnson said he will not be letting the ascendant Democrats off the hook so easily either.
“I think the left is resting on its laurels now and it's a grave mistake,” he said. “We are not in a post-race world. And while it is a huge change having Obama in the White House in some areas, and I'm very happy about those aspects of his presidency (global gag rule, fuel economy, Guantanamo, talks with Iran, et cetera), in other areas, nothing has changed at all.”The kind of change Johnson said Obama doesn’t seem to believe in: Bush and Cheney in orange jumpsuits at Leavenworth for shitting on the Constitution, an immediate end to America’s entanglements in foreign wars – including Afghanistan – and Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid pulling their noses out of the latest Rasmussen poll and spontaneously developing functioning vertebrae.
“While I'm ecstatic that McCain didn't get in, I didn't vote for Obama,” Johnson said. “I voted for Nader. As a matter of fact, I voted independent or green only from president down to local school board.”
Which raises a good point: even if you skip the presidential side show, vote your local races. Seriously, that’s where the worst shit that will fuck up your life goes down and since turnout and participation are historically so low for local races, a small, concerted group (*cough* whackjob godbotherers *cough*) can easily sway the vote and before you know it your school kids are being led in unconstitutional school prayer and being taught that unsubstantiated bullshit like intelligent design is just as valid as the theory of evolution.
“Corruption never sleeps,” Kill the Client’s Champ Morgan said. And if you worry changing the drapes in the West Wing means Texas’ finest’s will lack for inspiration, rest easy. Morgan’s libertarian leanings leave him equally dissatisfied with both the conventional left and right.
“Things here are fucked up,” Morgan said. “You cut off the head of the hydra and two more appear. The once greatest country in the world is up to our eyeballs in debt, education and health care barely exist, and we take another goose step towards the police state every day.”
Cynically confident in the fallibility of human nature, Kill the Client will not starve for inspiration regardless of how squeaky clean the current POTUS seems.
“Until the government is dismantled and control is put back in the hands of the people, we will not be truly free,” Morgan said. “There will always be material and inspiration out there. You just may have to dig past the surface to see it.”
Now that’s no change we can believe in.

Max Ward Beyond Thunderdome: Hardcore Road Warrior Refuses to Be One More Capitalist Casualty

In the annals of hardcore over the last couple of decades, Max Ward has been there, done that and pressed it on a limited edition 7” split. And if you listen, dude will break down the free market forces that went into making that record.
Though Ward, a.k.a. Hirax Max, a.k.a. Battle Axe Max, has hung up his drum sticks after an accomplished career spent anchoring the likes of Plutocracy, Spazz and Capitalist Casualties, the guy is still giving his all to music as the man behind the consistently awesome 625 Thrash records. Almost 20 years later, the guy still gets off on a good blast beat when he’s not busting his ass in graduate school applying Marxist dialectics to interwar Japan.
With power violence (Ward prefers the term fastcore) enjoying a well-earned renaissance as grinders and hardcore kids who grew up on California’s unique punk twist in the 1990s putting a new spin on an old style, I thought I’d hit up Ward to rehash his salad days as a fixture on the scene and get an update on the latest with 625.What I got instead was an amazingly detailed conversation about the socio-economic state of the world as it trudges toward globalization and how punk has just become one more mall commodity from one of its more insightful practioners.
“Max is one guy I have nothing negative to say about. If you know me, that's very rare,” said Bloody Phoenix guitarist Jerry Flores. “He's a good guy.”
Flores first met Ward when the guitarist was fronting L.A. grinders Excruciating Terror, finding themselves on bills with Spazz and Plutocracy. And when Flores went hunting for a label to back his newest band, he turned to Ward.
“Max has been around,” Flores said. “I'm sure he's had plenty of both positive and negative experiences dealing with different people over the years. I'm sure he's got a pretty good sense of what is fair. Probably a partial reason as to why he started his label.”
But, ya see, Ward never set out to be the P. Diddy of hardcore and grind. He just needed a place to put out records that jazzed him and the guy comes off as downright conflicted about turning music into a consumer product.
“Yeah, music and industry do not belong together, whether that is the home-screen printing bootlegger selling shirts on eBay or the ‘DIY’ label like mine,” Ward said. “I think the minute you start worrying about recovering your expenses on a release than it’s all lost. Music needs to be an experience rather than a commodity, but you can’t really tour and create that experience if you don’t have commodities to sell for food and gas. But yeah, I got really down on the scene by running a label. It’s a fucking disgusting business, even at the small level that I am.”
With the benefit of a decade of hindsight we tend to think of the first wave of power violence and Bay Area hardcore bands now as institutions, demigods who unleashed a fitful racket that immediately changed the course of music as we know it. The truth, natch, is a bit more complicated. We tend to forget that those bands played their share of half empty basement shows and struggled to get a 7 inch pressed. DIY wasn’t necessarily just a political statement; it was a matter of necessity if the aspiring musicians were serious about what they were doing.
“I started putting records out cuz no one would touch Plutocracy, so I released, or help release, the first few EPs,” Ward said. “Later, I wanted to get ETO and No Less out so I started 625 to do that. It just kinda took off from there. I wanted to release bands form the local scene, so I would take 625 records out on tour with me and try to get people turned on to the smaller bands back home, bands that I thought were much bigger than most of the ‘big’ bands that I was in at the time.”
Listen to any band bitch long enough and they’ll whistle you a few bars of the “label done me wrong” blues, but you don’t here that from musicians who’ve partnered with Ward to put out albums.
“Max rules,” Insect Warfare guitarist Beau Beasley said. “He’s one of the only guys I truly trust to release our music. He is incredibly honest and he actually likes a lot of the same bands I do. Also, he picks up his phone and is very considerate of the bands he works with. Money and making it big or definitely not on his agenda. I’ve known Max for a while and I sent him the first IW demo and he wanted to release it. My response was ‘of course.’ I cant think of anyone else I’d want to release our stuff. Dude is legit. Not a piece of shit like all these other jackasses.”
But releasing records by some of the leading lights in modern American grind is just one notch in Ward’s belt.
From the rather prosaic confines of California’s power violence scene in the ‘90s, Ward has turned hardcore ambassador to the world; 625’s signature accomplishment seems to be culling the best hard core has to offer from across the globe. His specialty, in particular, seems to be snagging acts from scenes in burgeoning third world countries (look out for a comp dedicated to South East Asian hardcore later this year) that would never ordinarily get play here in America. That the bands come from countries and regions that have experienced genuine political and cultural repression may not be a coincidence either.
“I mean, I think its rad to be able to check out bands from Indonesia, Singapore, Serbia, Macedonia, even Africa now that all play fastcore, but the same imperialism exists within the scene that ‘globalization’ in general has reproduced.” Ward said. “… I think the geopolitics of the 1980s made things more pressing, so you had European bands singing about NATO, you had Eastern European bands sneaking tapes out of the country to get pressed. Now it’s just Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace and all-over print longsleeves on eBay. … I think the records that I’m proudest of are the EPs like Domestik Doktrin (Indonesia) and Secret 7 (Singapore), or LPs like I Shot Cyrus and Discarga (both Brazil) that would not have happened unless I did it. I think so many people are clamoring to do the next Career Suicide record they lose site that there is a whole world out there - one that would be richer and more diverse if we stopped pandering to bands that played ‘American ’82 HC’ style.”

Toca rapido o muerte: A Look Back at Grind’s Latin Explosion

Pete Sandoval didn’t even know what to call the racket he was kicking out on his first drum set in 1984 in Los Angeles.

Two decades on, Terrorizer is synonymous with grindcore, but the "Grind/core/Death/Speed/metal" noise they banged out didn’t even have a name when Sandoval unseated a drummer named Fishe to cement the band’s lineup.
“Finally I could do what I wanted to in a pure Grindeathcore guitar hellstorm! I loved it!” said Commando, who had been playing in a band called Merciless Death Squad at the time.
And while no list of the greatest drummers in metal could overlook the Terrorizer/Morbid Angel skinsman, Sandoval and a small coterie of L.A. bands during grind’s formative years can also be credited with breaking metal’s cultural line.
As uptight crypto-racist demagogues are calling for the roundup and deportation of anybody with more melanin than an Irish albino – regardless of legal status – it’s important to remember how Hispanic musicians helped birth grind. A full 15 years before MTV afflicted us with Ricky Martin, grind had its own Latin explosion going on.
Metal as a whole was just coming into its international own in the mid-80s, but aside from Suicidal Tendencies’ revolving door and the Spanish speaking half of Slayer, it was still very much a middle class high school white guy scene in America.
“Well, I guess most white guys were interested in heavy metal and glam rock while on the other hand the Hispanic musicians were busy writing sick stuff and having gigs anywhere they could,” Sandoval said.
“East L.A. was full of Hispanics before I moved to Tampa in 1988. There were tons of bands from that area and it meant that most bands were made of mostly Latinos and a few white guys that joined the extreme metal scene. I could mention to you bands like Sadistic Intent, Darkness (all Latinos), Terrorizer (all Latinos), F.C.D.N. Tormentor (all Latinos). I mean, I could mention to you at least 15 bands which are formed mostly by Latinos!”
That list would also include Excruciating Terror, Resistant Culture (known as Resistant Militia then) and the mighty Nausea, featuring Terrorizer throat Oscar Garcia.
It seems inevitable L.A.’s racial cauldron would open metal’s narrow doors to new viewpoints and cultural experiences.
“We have a little bit of everything here, a microcosm of the world,” Excruciating Terror guitarist Jerry “Roadkill” Flores said. “We have people here from every part of the world here. It is very segregated though. By government design of coarse. Just like any major city, the government creates ethnic ghettos. The segregation is residential. People do of course interact. It would be impossible not to.”
It was in that “ethnic ghetto” Flores met Martin Alvaro and Victor Garcia, the other two thirds of E.T.’s lineup, which even briefly included a young Dino Cesares of Fear Factory/Brujeria fame.
“We all went to the same schools and are from the same area, North East LA,” said Flores, who is still active with a new band, Bloody Phoenix. “We all lived about 3 miles from each other. I had known most since junior high. Looking back now, it's clear we all had different plans/goals. Speaking only for myself, from day one I just wanted to make music, record it, travel with people I could have fun with and meet all my pen-pals that I had had since I was about 13.”
Grindcore’s hybrid nature also forced upstart bands to mix up their social circles, which helped broaden its appeal and introduce new voices. There was no grind “scene” in L.A., Sandoval and Flores agree. Rather mid-80s grinders, who didn’t really know what to call their hellacious racket, were forced to carve out space on punk and metal bills to get their music heard.
“L.A. has had a steady influx of grind bands since the mid ‘80s. Most of those early bands didn't know what they were playing would eventually be called grindcore,” Flores said. “But at no time during that time would I honestly be able to tell you that there was a huge grindcore scene in L.A. Grindcore bands usually played death metal shows. It was weird. Too punk for metal, too metal for the punks. During that time it was much easier to get on a metal show than a punk show though. A lot of punks, not all, were elitist snobs who wanted nothing to do with us.”
So what are we to take from this little stroll through grind history? Latinos, like all other blast beat junkies, were just looking for an outlet for all the frustrations, petty and cosmic, that come with being part of the human species.
“Maybe it's the purity of it,” Flores said. “It's simplicity. It's intensity. It's anger. Things people from any background can feel and understand. Maybe it's the fact that in grind you don't hear about dragons or about how much money you have or how many women you've abused or Satan. Grind is honest and humble.”
We broach the possibility this whole exercise is just recursive post modern bullshit with Flores and he happily agrees.
“I am Latino,” he said. “I identify with Latinos, obviously. But I consider myself human before anything else. We are all one race, human. By breaking us down into groups you divide us. Division is our downfall as a race.”

Viva la Revolucion: Five Mandatory Latino Grind Albums

Terrorizer
World Downfall
Earache
1989
We’ve already deemed this the seventh greatest grind album of all time, so not too much more needs to be said.
World Downfall is a blistering tour de force of straight forward punk guitar over blast beat goodness. Almost as famous for the band members’ subsequent bands, Terrorizer were not only L.A.’s premiere grinders, but America’s best entry into the blast beat sweepstakes during the 1980s as well.
Terrorizer’s influence is undeniable. You can hear World Downfall’s influence in every straight forward, grimy grind band that came after them.

Nausea
Crime Against Humanity
Wild Rags
1991
After Terrorizer posthumously recorded World Downfall, frontman Oscar Garcia leaped into his new project. Rounding up members of Majesty and other local bands, Nausea crossed up proto-grind with bits of crust and a few industrial flourishes to firmly establish Garcia was not about to rest on his Terrorizer laurels. Though Crime Against Humanity is the band’s only full length to date, Garcia and Co. remain active, periodically playing along side like minded bangers such as Venomous Concept and Phobia.

Resistant Culture
Welcome to Reality
S.O.S. Records
2005
The first album G&P set its hand to reviewing. After a not so amicable parting of the ways with Napalm Death, guitarist Jesse Pintado hooked up with this all Latino ensemble, formerly known as Resistant Militia and featuring Tony Rezhawk, who would stand in for Oscar Garcia when Pintado reunited Terrorizer just before his untimely death. While Darker Days Ahead failed to revive Terrorizer’s glory days, Welcome to Reality is a stunning bit of forward looking metal noise, mixing prime grind with native chants and rhythms to create a startling original sound. The band’s lyrical concepts and political stances on the behalf of America’s marginalized native peoples are also refreshing.
If your ancestors sold small box infected blankets to indigenous peoples, Resistant Culture would like to have a word with you.

Excruciating Terror
Divided We Fall
Pessimiser
1997
Other than Phobia, no other first wave grind band was nearly as crusty and punked out as Excruciating Terror. This trio blasted out bass-heavy, primal thumpings that could peel the siding off your house from a couple blocks over.
Though they only recorded a couple of albums during their brief lifespan, Excruciating Terror went out on a high note with 1997’s Divided We Fall, a pissed off diatribe about the world’s many failings spread over 21 60-second outbursts. This is a band that has never gotten the proper credit for their place in grindcore’s annals, and Divided We Fall is an excellent place to get acquainted with one of the scene’s elder statesmen.

Bloody Phoenix
War, Hate and Misery
625 Thrash
2007
After Excruciating Terror fizzled, guitarist Jerry Flores roared right back with another largely-Latino ensemble that whips out snarling, stabbing bursts of grindcore bliss.
Picking up where his last band left off, Flores and his team are setting the bar even higher with a new batch of songs that easily rival the genre’s forerunners.
We’re all for seeing grind mutate and explore new possibilities, but it’s also nice to see someone keeping the home fires of the old school burning.

G&P review: Bloody Phoenix

Bloody Phoenix
War, Hate & Misery
625 Thrash
Guitarist Jerry Flores manned the barricades at grindcore’s inception with Excruciating Terror, but he girds Bloody Phoenix’s grind with a layer of d-beat goodness.
Through 26 tracks, Flores and associates -- a pair of vocalists in tow -- spit venom on debut War, Hate & Misery. (Spoiler alert: BP think they’re all bad.)
The album’s woofer rumbling production is blown out and bass heavy and shot through with that punk sense of desperation. Pay attention because they’re serious, dammit.
Like follower lifers Phobia, Bloody Phoenix are the kind of band you can throw on just about any metal or punk bill and guarantee a raging show.
Check out “I Understand” for a perfect example of the band’s hydra-headed assault, harking back to d-beat progenitors Disrupt with the pass the mic male and female vocals.
Bloody Phoenix are an excellent time capsule of grind’s formative years when hardcore ran face first into metal and birthed legions of basement speedfreaks. This album also makes a great gateway drug for one of grind’s early and underappreciated practitioners.
Hell, the nice people over at Interpunk are practically giving this album away so what have you got to lose?