G&P Review: Limbs Bin

Limbs Bin
Summertime Blues
Grindcore Karaoke
Limbs Bin make only one mistake on Summertime Blues, but it’s a bit akin to booking your kids for a relaxing August getaway at Camp Crystal Lake. I have a congenital hole in my soul that can only be filled by insane drum machine grind, but the gaps between songs on Summertime Blues are just fucking massive. Just as I’m getting into a song like the excellent “Le Samourai” (somebody has impeccable taste in French gangster films), I slam into the brick wall of silence. I'm waiting four or five seconds for the next hammer to fall. Summertime Blues is only 11 minutes but the lag makes it feel twice as long sometimes.
But I do my best to overlook that because Limbs Bin make very choice drum machine-driven grind madness. It’s somewhere between the earliest Gigantic Brain material and Agoraphobic Nosebleed at their most cybernetically aggressive. The individual songs are fantastic and the drum machine is one of the best sounding I’ve ever heard. The drums just slam into your chest with a palpable force. At its best Limbs Bin just about leaves you gasping for breath from concussive force.
But grind is an apex predator that has to constantly keep moving in search of prey. Lag is its only known rival. If Limbs Bin could go back and retroactively excise the between song gaps on Summertime Blues, they would have a near flawless record on their hands. While my short attention span usually can’t handle a few seconds between songs, the individual tunes Limbs Bin have wired together from broken machinery and volcanic bile are strong enough on an individual basis that I still keep coming back for more.

G&P Review: Daggra

Daggra
Daggra
Grindcore Karaoke
There’s a sweet spot, a musical Lagrange point precariously poised between the twin gravitational tugs of Cellgraft’s slingshot sweep past the sun and Priapus’ bulldozing gas giant mass (yes, that means it kinda sorta sounds like Circle of Dead Children). That’s where Daggra chose to set up shop, in the relatively stability between speed and mass.
Now Daggra won't be knocking any of the aforementioned trio of grinding greats from their laureled perches just yet, but this is a band that shows some promise once they grow into their sound. Daggra keep the fundamentals of their attack simple. Their songs are a full bore charge into your face that seeks to overwhelm with brute force rather than muck about with messy strategy. To that end, they keep the riffs concise and catchy. Songs follow that comfortable formula of short, punky build up into grind explosion, all executed in 100 seconds or left. Six originals and an Insect Warfare cover are enough to convey what Daggra are all about. But that simplicity and familiarity also mean Daggra won’t be blowing you away with originality. This is squarely in the comfort food category of grind, familiar and filling but none too challenging to the palette.
If there’s one other knock on Daggra’s attack it would be the percussion. I can’t tell if it’s an issue of performance or production, but the drums seem divorced from the other instruments at times. It’s like the drums are chasing the song when they should be diesel-spewing engine that powers the whole spiel. A more robust performance there may have been just enough to jump Daggra up from faithful followers of grind’s finer traditions to a band able to inject new blood into a well worn formula.

G&P Review: Detroit

Detroit
Reality Denied
Grindcore Karaoke
Splitting wax with Robocop is proving to have been an instructive, if not pivotal moment, for Alberta’s Detroit. Every release since has been an evolutionary leap as Detroit comes to better grips with their modern twist on grind and power violence. For their first long player, Reality Denied, the band tries their hand at closing with not just one but two different soundscapes, including the title track, that nod back to splitmates Robocop, even if neither really captures that same unsettling Cronenberg/Tsukamoto vibe that undergirds the Maine bastards' best work. Whether it’s the shrieking “Stand In” or the feedback frazzled windup of “Exhaustion,” the extra girth of a full length gives Detroit the space to play and as a result Reality Denied is probably the band’s most assured and confident release to date.
Wonderfully shitty coffee can snare beats rattle against vocals that nibble at the heels of J. Randall and J.R. Hayes. Driving it all, buried in the live in the room mix, is a slashing guitar that whips at the other participants like a dogsled driver bringing the lash. The whole thing rides that kamikaze line between collapsing under its own weight and punching through your wall to grab you by the throat. It’s a precarious position Detroit have staked out, but when they cut loose into the blasting end piece of “Alone” or the way the stumbling, staccato “Passion Devoid” slams into the grinding “Leviathan” synergy elevates their garage punk thrashings. Detroit have always impressed me, but like their namesake city’s finest muscle cars, the band has a found another gear and really revved themselves up for .
Reality Denied

G&P Review: Scum Guilt

Scum Guilt
Enslaved
Grindcore Karaoke/Mannequin Rein
Scum Guilt are exquisite technicians. I don’t mean they’ve spent long hours mastering obscure scales and modes in the name of pointless fretboard wankery. Rather, Scum Guilt show a flair for the very difficult art of composition. Over eight original songs (and a Napalm Death exclamation point), Enslaved takes unrelenting pounding and through sheer repetition and subtle mutation delivers a coherent musical experience that fully develops a single idea and shows it off in many different lights.
There’s nothing subtle about Enslaved: it aims to ram your head into the turnbuckle like you were some professional wrestling upstart taking a run at the title belt before you’ve really earned your shot. Scum Guilt show off the many moods of straight forward aggression, but from every angle their chunky grind hits like a battering ram. “Lung Ripper” takes things relatively slow, wearing you down with its implacable plod while “Gate Keeper” drills in like a diamond bit winding up to speed. The exemplary “Taxi Driver” takes what could have been a throwaway breakdown in any number of generic hardcore songs  and builds an architecture of complimentary moments around it until it’s a fully formed musical expression. But even amid the blunt force trauma, Scum Guilt have buried nuggets of careful composition. “No Trust” pulls a sneaky Discordance Axis trick of playing the blastbeats off of a slower tempo riff, creating dynamic tension in the song.
Scum Guilt can hold their own with the most aggression-focused of the their grindcore peers, but this band is already showing flashes of something more interesting going on behind their lashings. All of the elements are wonderfully familiar, but this is a band that knows how to keep the mix fresh. Of that, this scum is guilty as charged.

G&P Review: Winters in Osaka and Astro/Winters in Osaka

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

William Butler Yeats
"The Second Coming"
1920

Winters in Osaka 
Monuments Collapsing
Grindcore Karaoke

Astro/Winters in Osaka
Reverberating Forest
Phage Tapes/Dismantle Records
Eletromancers Winters in Osaka show off the breadth of their twitchy, witchy, glitchy nightmare noise on a pair of recent releases that delve into all the velvety black and gray and blue shades that color the night. The Chicago electronics outfit conduct symphonies of sound the way Lord Morpheus the shaper would  bend dreamstuff to his will.
Two song album Mutual Collapse, free on Grindcore Karaoke, delivers exactly what it says on the bottle. It's the sound of the slow decay of civilization, a world long bereft of the stain of humanity. It soundtracks the crumbling concrete monuments to our narrow vanity, the gnashing teeth of the Langoliers devouring our history until only sterile silence remains. Winters in Osaka gnaw through two versions of the title song. The first is a concise 12 minute detonation while the sprawling 35 minute deep dive has been recorded using binaural tones that are supposed to produce an added psychological effect. While the pillars of my personality remained solidly in place, the longer version does have a low tone rumble that adds an extra dimension that emphasizes Winters in Osaka's apocalyptic vision.
Winters in Osaka also tag teamed with Japanese noise artist Astro for Reverberating Forest, a single 40-minute song that finds the band working at its most contemplative and introspective. The song's spine is a Sunn O)))-like drone that embodies the cosmic OM (or possibly Ohm), but there's a snake lurking in their silicon paradise. Astro, who is responsible for the album's middle passage, slowly builds unsettling waves of warbling noise and modulating tones that creep in unnoticed at first but get to work on your lizard brain emotions. When the white noise finally breaches like an FX box whale, it shatters the placid atmosphere. When the wonted electronic apocalypse comes crashing in it's as though every communications breakdown in the modern world were suddenly given audible life--every dropped cell call, every autoco-wrecked text message, every email mistakenly sent to reply all. The very means of communication have cut off all meaningful conversation in the face of Astro and Winters in Osaka's digital Babel. Like Monuments Collapsing, the only thing left when humanity's traces are digitally scoured are the faint echoes reverberating through the forest.

[Full disclosure: the band sent me a review copy.]

G&P Review: Water Torture/thedowngoing

Water Torture/thedowngoing
Nerve Altar Split
Grindcore Karaoke/Nerve Altar
If I had my shit together (I know, I know; just pretend, ok?), somebody would have gotten bumped from my best splits of 2012 list because this violent and violenter pairing towers over the landscape like a classic Godzilla/King Ghidorah smackdown. No matter who wins, Tokyo's ass is getting leveled. Water Torture and thedowngoing are two bands at the peak of their abilities arbitrarily laying waste to the landscape.
If you haven't jumped on the Water Torture bandwagon yet (and seriously, what more does VII need to do to get your attention?), this is a perfect entry point because the bass/drum neo-violence duo have never been tighter or more abrasive. This is a bad mood, morning after hangover, waking up with your skanky ex kind of bummer trip, drool faced, red eyed and pissed off at the world. The secret to Water Torture's downtrodden groove is their blend of Iron Lung stumble getting electro shocked to the balls courtesy of The Endless Blockade. It's a devastating, thoroughly modern combination that nods to masters old and new while still leaving its own indelible mark.
Flipside, Aussie dervishes thedowngoing play a cold eyed game of chicken, piling all seven of their songs into a single, unrelenting five minute track. There is no off ramp, no exit and they dare you to blink. Musically, the duo are picking right up from where the awesome ATHOUSANDYEARSOFDARKNESS and their contribution to Monomaniac left off. In Water Torture, thedowngoing have finally found a band that can match their auditory killing spree. These are two of the most hostile, abrasive and uncompromising bands working today and each need only two members to drown out every other band that fancies themselves extreme. So yeah, I was too slow to get this one lined up for 2012, but 2013 isn't so old that we can't fondly look back one more time before we step forward.

G&P Review: Mother Brain

Mother Brain
Straight to Business
Grindcore Karaoke
Mother Brain take their sweet damn time getting down to the grind for an album named Straight to Business. They spend “Introduction,” the album’s first two instrumental minutes, wallowing in sludgy despair. However, I’m willing to let it slide because they didn’t bury it at the end and because their doom haul is actually pretty good. Mother Brain seem to be that rarest of aves that has a firm grasp of what makes a song really click at either end of the speedometer.
Mother Brain, when they do get down to the grinding, recall elements of both Maruta and Pig Destroyer without outright theft. It makes sense because neither of those bands are afraid of varying the acceleration either. The performance is noisy and screeching, with a lived in authenticity to it that upends the trend toward sheeny, shiny production that denudes music of vital energy. Mother Brain also know how to quit when they’re ahead, “Introduction” is the longest track of the lot and when they do blast off into the stratosphere, they keep things exceptionally tight like the 17 raging seconds of “Cut or Uncut.” More often, as with “Old Man,” Mother Brain will mix up the fast with the slow in a single song, refusing the captivity of narrow genre labels. The quality of their craft and the concision of the 11 minute runtime makes Straight to Business compulsively re-listenable and well worth checking out.

G&P Review: Detroit

Detroit
Detroit
Grindcore Karaoke
As if one top 10-worthy album this year in Pusher and a kick ass split with Robocop  weren't enough to crown 2012 already, Canadian power violence overachievers Detroit are rocking your earholes yet again with a tidy self-titled record that may just be their best one yet. Through some power of musical osmosis, Detroit seem to have absorbed the musical violence splitmates Robocop shed on Dead Language, Foreign Bodies, turning in their tightest, most abrasive performance yet.
Their self-titled album, with a new singer in tow, is not a huge departure for the Canadian neo-violence collective. Rather it ups the ante on everything they’ve done before, ruthlessly churning through six new originals and an Infest cover in less than four minutes.
Everything about this effort is raw and burly and noisy and perfectly violent. The new singer is not much of a change, but he brings a tad more muscular delivery to the mic that nicely dovetails the band's more aggressive stance. Album centerpiece "Without" is one of those slow build bits of pyrotechnic brilliance that radiates out in chest-crushing shockwaves. "The Only Itch That Never Needs Scratching" rodeos the kind of slab-sided pounding you expect from Iron Lung in a concise 25 seconds. Waving goodbye with a rousing rip through Infest's "Feeling Mean" just punctuates the tone Detroit set from the album's first note.
Way back at their earliest demo I (half jokingly) dubbed the Detroit guys Robocop Jr. Since then they’ve shared wax with that band and now they’re moving into the same spiky sonic territory as the (now bicoastal) Maine bastards.

G&P Review: Robocop/Detroit

They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow's head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedpida thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner's lead, limp in the young mute's clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus , everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner. Jesus Arrabal would have called it an anarchist miracle. Oedipa, with no name for it, was only demoralized. She curtsied and fled.

Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49
1966

Robocop/Detroit
Dead Language, Foreign Bodies
Grindcore Karaoke
A great split requires a synthesis of disparate musical visions, an unspoken simpatico that's difficult enough to achieve within the competing personalities of a single band, let alone multiple. But 2012 has proven to be a banner year for synergistic tag teams. Dephosphorus and Wake have already made productive musical congress and Priapus stepped out with Old Painless. Now Robocop and Detroit up the bar with one of the most balanced faceoffs you'll hear. This long awaited split finds both bands moving toward a common center. Robocop has cleaned up their sound while Detroit follow up Pusher with another handful of more impassioned songs.
The most intriguing transformation is Robocop, who have never sounded this clean and crystalline. It adds new shadings to a signature song like "Feminism Uber Alles," which gets reinterpreted as a largely instrumental tune with John Zorn-style sax wailing standing in for vocals. I think I miss the loud, violent sound of their past efforts where it sounded like the songs only held together by dint of an anarchist miracle, but nonetheless it's absolutely fascinating to hear the band through new ears. The cleaner production gives more prominence to all the subtleties at play, like the constant background hum that unsettles "Psychic Transferal." Otherwise, Robocop once again indulge in their wonted obsession with how the frighteningly permeable meat we call our bodies interface with the 21st Century.
Detroit's half meshes perfectly with their Pusher material (the song "Pusher" closes out their selections, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear these songs come from that same recording session). The guitars are reedy and needling, insistent and uncomfortable. It provides the perfect platform for the all in conviction of songs like "Day After Day," which captures and embodies the relentless march of time that must drag at and wear down the genuinely depressed. Elsewhere, the mournful, clean-toned dirge of the primarily instrumental "Into You" shows real maturity as it slides into a brief spat of distorted rage and ranting defiance.
Detroit and Robocop are not just two bands thrown together for the sake of mutual promotion. Rather, this is a great pairing of two modern power violence bands take similar routes to entirely different, but still complementary, destinations. This one is a must hear.

G&P Review: Detroit

Detroit
Pusher
Grindcore Karaoke
I fucking hate Detroit. Seriously, I hate Detroit with a cultivated loathing that I acknowledge is most definitely irrational and probably unwarranted. It doesn't matter because I hate everything to do with Detroit.
Oh, I don't mean this Canadian power violence band; they're cool. No, I mean I hate Detroit the city. And when I say I hate Detroit the city, what I really mean is I HATE the fucking Red Wings. Words are not adequate to convey my antipathy. Whole new lexicons of profanity would need to be birthed to express the depths of that nuclear furnace hatred. The eternal debate among St. Louis Blues fans is who we hate more: Detroit or Chicago. Old timers will spin epic yarns of bench-clearing brawls with the Blackhawks from the '70s and '80s, but for those of us a little younger, it's hard to ignore the last 20 years of failure and defeat at the hands of the fucking Red Wings. And the fact that Detroit doesn't even view it as a rivalry only stings more.
But none of that has anything to do with Detroit the band. It's not their fault their chosen appellation is such an emotional trigger for me. However, I'm betting their any-era hardcore shit fits will probably serve as an adequate emotional purgative for everyone else. The five song slugfest that is Pusher slams you with the force of a T.J. Oshie bodycheck. The guitars have a glorious, serrated heft to them as the feral yowling encapsulates the essence of post-adolescent anomie and frustration. Detroit have paradoxically grown by slimming down since their last demo. The 45 second songs just feel tighter and more pinpoint. Rather than trying to jam two or three movements or emotional points into a song, Detroit focus on nailing one perfect moment and then letting it go free when it's run its course on songs like the throttling "White Walls//Good Child" and hammering opener "Smith."
In fact, as I sit here writing this, Detroit perfect encapsulate my rage the morning after St. Louis lost a bad game to the Red Wings. Again.
Oh look, another loss to Chicago too. Now I don't have to chose. FML.

[Detroit (the good Detroit) sent me a download.]

G&P Review: Ablach

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

T.S. Eliot
"The Hollow Men"
1925

Ablach
Dha
Grindcore Karaoke
Scotland's Ablach no longer reside among the pale shades of the hollow men, having escaped the hollow, reedy production that was first album Aon's only misstep. The crusty grind sextet easily walk away with 2011's most improved award with second album Dha, a burly beast that revels in ferocious guitars and rasping Jeff Walker screams.
As if compensating for the tinny sound of Aon, Dha thrives on that essential sense of desperation -- that rush to make it through a 90 second song without losing the audience's attention -- that makes grind tick. Dha is a fat-free 13 songs (two are covers); all adrenaline, no filler. Right off the hop, "MacPhee" tattoos Scottish lore right across your cranium. But Ablach have also mastered the Terrorizer swing on songs like "From Tillydrone to Obliteration," which not only snarks Napalm Death but tells the tale of an impoverished swatch of the band's native Aberdeen.
Ablach covered Terrorizer last outing and this go-round adds faithful renditions of Phobia and Extreme Noise Terror. Ablach make no bones about being the sum of their influences, but their craftsmanship excuses any overt nods to bands of yore, and their much improved studio presence already has me excited for the inevitable Trí.

G&P Review: Chulo

Chulo
Odio a Primera Vista
Grindcore Karaoke
At this point, to proclaim oneself a drug crazed grind freak is not exactly a novel proposition. Plenty of bands have appropriated drug tropes either in praise of their preferred pharmaceutical or to acquire a second hand edge by posing as a latter day Hunter Thompson. But being from a genuine narcostate like Colombia does give Chulo’s “Narcosarcasmo” a cred that their first world peers lack on Odio a Primera Vista (Hatred at First Sight in ’Murican). And like your favorite misused medication, a little bit of Chulo goes a long way with 11 songs of Man is the Bastard filtered through early Agoraphobic Nosebleed dished up in eight minutes. There is zero subtlety to the band’s weapon of choice: it’s blunt edges and relentless in a way that will leaving you craving variety.
I believe a great bass tone can take you far, and Chulo will leave you missing some dentition, but that power never gets harnessed toward any clear goal. The songs, in isolation, have a great suffocating atmosphere, but even in eight minutes they begin to blur into a faceless wall of smashing bass and screaming as each song body slams into the previous. “Puertas” and “Society” are notable simply for easing back the tempos enough to break through the brick wall of noise Chulo has erected.
Odio a Primera Vista is nasty and noisy but ultimately one dimensional. If Chulo hopes to get regular customers hooked on their product, they need to promise a more varied trip next time out.

[Full disclosure: The band requested a review.]

G&P Review: No Gang Colors

No Gang Colors
Honorary Cop
Grindcore Karaoke
Suburban punk and grindcore kids have been appropriating cop-hating hip hop tropes since at least Plutocracy roamed the plains, but it seems like it’s really flourished in recent years with bands like Magrudergrind and Marion Berry swiping urban culture trappings to spruce up their otherwise traditional grind and power violence beatings, making it a permanent part of their aesthetic. The latest three-songs-and-an-intro outing from No Gang Colors revels in mashing up a new wave of power violence/electronics savagery that sears and seethes, using hip hop samples and other urban accoutrements to underscore the EP’s overall anti-cop raison d'etre.
Overall, Honorary Cop is more atmospheric than This is Your God. Instead of beating you about the head and shoulders with digitized Man is the Bastard-style prostrations, No Gang Colors this time out prefer to burrow under the skin with crackling electronic ambiance, seeking out the arterial highway to the cortex to attack your thoughts at the source.
Honorary Cop is nearly synesthetic in approach, approximating sound as a physical force – a buzzing, swarming sound that snaps with washes of overdriven white noise, crackling the edges of the instruments and the vocals, melting all the components into a single, blurred sledge of blunt-edged noise.
I'd have liked for Honorary Cop to be a tad long - a mere five minutes is a bit of a dick tease - but it's another great hint at what this young band is capable of bringing to bear should they break out into long player territory.

[Full disclosure: the band sent me a review copy.]

G&P Review: Wadge

Wadge
Grindcore Lu’au
Grindcore Karaoke
Wadge’s tiki-tickling Grindcore Lu’au is covered in as many layers of deliberately lofi noise and scuzz and Dick Dale’s surfboard was covered in layers of Sex Wax. For all its colorful art and goofball conceits, Grindcore Lu’au is not an overproduced bit of throwaway fluff. Grindcore’s Don Ho starts with a hilarious rip on Napalm Death’s “Multinational Corporations” that extols the virtues of Hawaiian vacations and starts surfing 40 minutes of double picked surf rock grind. The Hawaiian elements and aquatic surf style guitar are organically blended into the grind in a way that makes perfect sense on “Extremity Jet-Planed/Eyes of Crust/Obstinate Erection” and “Drink for a Minute (Suffer the Distilled Men).” Proving the lofi scratch of the sound is purely deliberate, “Frenzied Suffocation” builds to an ear-bleeding static tsunami before the waves crest and break over the sudden clarity of surf-death hybrid “Demon Dogs of Waikiki.”
At nearly 40 minutes, the only criticism of the album is this is a hefty listen. In fact, Wadge could have easily pulled a Solomon and halved Grindcore Lu’au and passed it off as two full lengths of Slayer-approved proportions. I don’t see myself pulling this one out on a regular basis, but there’s no point in bitching about too much of a good thing. Pass the poi.

G&P Review: Eustachian

Eustachian
The Sphagnum Bog
Grindcore Karaoke
The next time your ears pop on a plane, thank your Eustachian tubes for maintaining the pressure equilibrium in your ears. I wish Los Angeles/Antwerp duo Eustachian had just a tad more equilibrium between their grindcore lashings and their electronic adventurism. I wanted to like The Sphagnum Bog more than I did because Eustachian have a deft hand with each, but unlike my chocolate and my peanut butter, I’m just not enjoying them together. But I guess you have to make allowances for an album named after named after peat moss.
When Eustachian hit, they know how to furrow deep down into your lizard brain’s fight or flight functions. Opener “Martinique” sounds like a light saber duel performed by a sheet metal orchestra and clear album standout “Trichopatho Skeleton” sets an exemplary Metallica/NWOBHM riff up against electronically-augmented grindcore corkscrewing. At nearly three and a half minutes, “Martinique II” lounges around a bit more than its otherwise excellent Gigantic Brain-style psychotrip deserves.
And that’s my biggest problem with The Sphagnum Bog. Too many of these songs linger longer than necessary. Tighter songs like the relatively concise “Z,” which tips the scales at 1:46, bear up better under repeated listens, but many of the other moments feel crushed under Eustachian’s everything but the master mixing board approach to songwriting.
Boasting one thoroughly excellent song and a host of other more soundscape-oriented assaults that pay off to a lesser degree, this one is an acquired taste.

G&P Review: Robocop

Robocop
II
Grindcore Karaoke

I eased myself on to the dusty vinyl seat, tipped back by the bowing of the floor. The steering column had reared forward six inches toward my chest. I lifted my nervous legs into the car and placed my feet on the rubber cleats of the pedals, which had been forced out of the engine compartment so that my knees were pressed against my chest. In front of me the instrument panel had been buckled inwards, cracking the clock and speedometer dials. Sitting here in this deformed cabin, filled with dust and damp carpeting, I tried to visualize myself at the moment of collision, the failure of the technical relationship between my own body, the assumptions of the skin, and the engineering structure which supported it.

J.G. Ballard
Crash
1973

There’s a benevolent psychopathology driving Robocop to obliterate that illusory, ephemeral boundary between Meat and Machine. The collision of the twin powers – violence and electronics – is a fertilizing and not a destructive event. It's all sex and car crashes and 90 second shots of intelligent, composed hardcore histrionics.
Anyone who flipped to Robocop’s demo will find II superficially familiar, but the songs have gone through additional destructive bodywork. You can run your fingers down the chassis of “I Hope All Your Friends Die” and “Feminism Uber Alles” and read the most recent dents, dings and abrasions the way a blind man reads Braille. “Feminism Uber Alles” has wrenched metal and fiberglass into something more Slayerly while the titanic cymbal crashes that collapsed “I Hope All Your Friends Die” have been left on the rust heap.
New songs like “Maine is the Bastard” clip a car battery to Man is the Bastard’s signature stomp jolting it into the next decade. The electronic interludes – including a channel changing stutter step wash leading up to a faithful rendition of Napalm Death’s “You Suffer” – are a perfect distillation of modern information overload society. Half heard bits of cinema dialogue are ripped from context, flashed along before you can orient them, get smashed by white noise and immediately discarded. Authorial intent is dead; nothing has inherent meaning. Even when it’s not as successful – the nearly eight minute “Aftermathematics” just doesn't have an emotional payoff – the point comes pounding through.
While the retro power violence style has blossomed in recent years, too many bands are content to simply rehash the ’90s. Robocop are the first nu-power violence (yeah, I hate that term too, but you know what I mean) band I’ve heard that’s made a legitimate case that the violent hardcore sound has a 21st Century future. This is the brave new world of hardcore.