Burn it Down: The Arson Project Believe in Slow Cooking Their Grind

The Arson Project seemed poised on the cusp of something spectacular in 2008 when they dropped their incendiary debut EP Blood and Locusts. The Swedes combined the best of their homegrown grindcraft with maybe a hint of North American punk bellicosity into 10 songs and 14 minutes of rampaging snarl.
The strength of Blood and Locust earned The Arson Project a split 7-inch on Relapse with critical darlings Noisear and an invitation to play Maryland Deathfest in 2008 (which they had to miss). But since then, the band has been quiet – a handful of tours through Europe and Asia but no new music. That’s about to change as The Arson Project ready their debut LP, which will hopefully ignite their phoenix-like resurgence to Scandinavian grind upstarts.
Here’s hoping this attempt goes better than the band’s first pass at recording a long player.
“In 2010 TAP was still only about touring and to stress out a debut full length wouldn’t have been something which we would have liked to put our names on. We tried it once in 2007 and it ended up with putting all the songs in the bin and starting from the beginning and that’s when we wrote Blood and Locusts,” vocalist and founding member Niklas Larson said. “In contrast with the MCD, we didn’t have enough time when we wrote the songs for the split, and we're not at all happy with the way the songs turned out. But we learned a lot by doing it, so we will without any doubts never release anything by deadline again. TAP songs only come when the inspiration is there.”



Fire Walk With Me.

Patience seems to be a defining theme for The Arson Project. Getting their start in tiny Oskarshamn on Sweden’s southeast coast – poised nearly equidistant between Stockholm and Copenhagen – the band  has never tried to force themselves beyond their comfort points, even if that means letting half a decade slide between releases or watching trends swirl around them.
“This band is my life. I have spent thousands of hours on the road, in our different rehearsal places and on shitty jobs just to afford going on tour or to record like five to six minutes in the studio,” Larson said. “Even though we haven’t been that active the past years, this band reminds me every day that it has made me discover so many great things which have affected me as a person. It doesn’t matter if we play a show every ten years or release albums every twenty. It's not only about being seen everywhere; it's more about not living an ordinary boring life with full time jobs, debts and lots of shit you don’t need. As long as the band exists, it lets me be who I am.”
After years of being spread around Sweden, the majority of The Arson Project is now headquartered in Malmö, which should jolt their productivity as 75 percent of the members are able to physically assemble to prepare new music several times a week. Larson in 2010 even quit his job to make The Arson Project a priority. He’s been chauffeuring other metal and punk bands around Europe the last few years since his own group has been temporarily sidelined from touring.
Larson is cautiously optimistic that The Arson Project’s upcoming album will be the band’s ticket to hit the road and see the world. Until then, it’s just a matter of deciding how they will deliver the new album to the masses once the quartet is satisfied. True to their hardcore punk roots, The Arson Project are considering handling the release in-house.
“We have many contacts and we already know a bunch of labels that are interested to put out TAP releases. But with the things we've been through in mind, we won’t give the recordings or promises to anyone before we're satisfied with the finished result,” Larson said. “We've already had discussions about releasing it ourselves as well, and it's something which I'm finding more and more as an attractive option. I don't care about being associated with respected labels at all. My only concern is that the people who want to get their hands on the vinyl should be able to find it easily without paying shitloads of money.”

G&P Review: Dråp

Dråp
En Naturling Dod
Embrace My Funeral
First off, there’s not much here that you probably didn’t pull out of Anti Cimex’s raped ass 30 years ago. That said, like a high calorie, low nutrition fast food fix, there’s something about Dråp (Manslaughter) that just hits the spot. En Naturling Dod is the Swedish crust punk version of drunkenly plowing through Taco Bell’s drive through window for a quesarito at 2 a.m.
Unlike a lot of their crusty contemporaries, Dråp aren’t appropriating death metal tropes to bulk up and refurbish their punk rawk. They closest these heavily bearded Viking punks come to extra-genre exploration is a nod to thrashtastic chug-a-lug and the occasional squealy guitar solo. So everything barrels along at a more or less consistent head banging nod that makes En Naturling Dod a pretty good driving record. From the black and white artwork straight through the familiarity of the music of itself, Dråp will live and die by how well they can get one more good go-round out of a style that doesn’t lend itself to musical innovation.
With that in mind, the 10 songs on En Naturling Dod are uniformly tight and uniformly ... uniform. (In a rare nod to variety, “Horstmorker” slows down and probably drags out more than is needed.) Dråp have a solid foundation to work with and injecting some solid hooks and a more commanding vocal style could have them nipping at Victims’ heels. What Dråp may lack (or simply not give a fuck about) in originality, they make up for with energy and brevity, pounding through 10 songs in under 25 minutes, playing like the world might end before they finish. It makes En Naturling Dod a head rush of a record and one that can flipped back over for repeated spins. And if you’re asking for more than that from your crust punk records, you’re probably doing it wrong.

[Full disclosure: I received a review copy.]

Good Reads: Oedipus Wrecks

The book: The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme

Don’t be alarmed. The loud buzzing and the flashing lights you’re experiencing are simply the Very Important Metaphor Early Warning System kicking in. You see, Thomas has a problem with his Dead Father. Thomas, along with his lover Julie and a host of underpaid, alcohol-deprived malcontents, is dragging the city-block sized corpse of his Dead Father across the country in hopes revivifying him. But the Dead Father is not, strictly speaking, dead. The Dead Father can still speak, hand down pronouncements and generally tries to order around everyone’s life. When he doesn’t get his way, the Dead Father has been known to run off into the woods and put various tiny woodland creatures to the sword to vent his rage. The metaphor seems almost insultingly obvious, and in the hands of a lesser craftsman, it would be. But Donald Barthelme wrote the way Monet painted. He steamrolls you with waves of sentence fragments that individually reveal little but taken together weave a pointillist tapestry of vivid, obsessive detail in the mode of David Foster Wallace. Barthelme was a master of ribald absurdity and telling anachronism. He turned Snow White into a farce of sexual mores and inverted King Arthur into a parable of the Cold War. Sure, he was working out some fairly Freudian issues with The Dead Father, but like poor beleaguered Thomas, it’s all about what the journey reveals.

A representative passage:

I don’t like this, said the Dead Father.
What? asked Julie. What, dear old man, don’t you like?
You are killing me.
We? Not we. Not in any sense we. Processes are killing you, not we. Inexorable processes.
Inexorable inapplicable in my case, said the Dead Father. Hopefully.
“Hopefully” cannot be used in that way, grammatically, said Thomas.
You are safe, dear old man, you are safe, temporarily, in the mansuetude of our care, Julie said.
The what?
The mansuetude that is to say mild gentleness of our care.
I am surrounded by creepy murderous pedants! the Dead Father shouted. Unbearable!
Thomas handed the Dead Father the pornographic comic book.
Now now, he said, no outbursts. Read this. It will keep you occupied.
I don’t want to be occupied, said the Dead Father. Children are kept occupied. I want to participate!
Not possible, said Thomas. Thank God for the pornographic comic book. Sit there and read it. Sit there with your back against that rock. Thank the Lord for what is given to you. Others have less. Here is a knapsack to place between your back and the rock. Here is a flashlight to read the comic book by. Edmund will bring your Ovaltine at ten. Count your blessings.

The album: The Jester Race by In Flames

Jumping off the grindcore track briefly, The Jester Race is an album that’s chained to the past and struggles with the way our histories come to define our futures. Each song seems to contain some nugget of the same thought from the backwards looking “Artifacts of the Black Rain” through the inability of mankind to learn from its prior mistakes in “Graveland” or the way “Dead Eternity” promises that “time will be your master in this laborious part of human subsistence.” And perhaps too on the nose for our purposes, there’s “Dead God in Me.”

A representative song: “Dead God in Me”



To slit the grinning wounds
from childhood's seven moons
the palette stained with the ejaculated passions
(of forbidden, hedonistic colors...)

Strike from omnipotence; all-seer, all-deemer
and haunt my severed country with your
dripping, secret games

You pick the unripe lilies
deflored and peeled the bleeding petals
made known to me
the grainy stains, the crimson lotus
of the Black-Ash Inheritance,
the semen feed of gods and masters
The worms still in me,
still a part of me,
racing out from leaking rooms,
swoop from broken lungs to block the transmission
to put an end to the nomad years

Father
you are the
dead god in me

Good Reads: The Pointy End

The book: Piercing by Ryu Murakami


New father Kawashima Masayuki is obsessed with the fear that one day he will stab his infant daughter in her sleep. He stands over her crib many a night contemplating the way the icepick would slice into that tender baby flesh, savoring the horror of it all, questioning whether he could actually commit such a heinous act. He doesn’t really believe he would ever harm his child, but once he gets the idea, it takes over, consuming him. The only way to clear his obsession, he decides, is to murder a prostitute, stabbing her to death to expel his demons. Unfortunately for Kawashima, he picks the wrong hooker. Escort Chiaki is just as tortured and violent as he is. What follows is a meditation on violence, compulsion and how your shitty past inevitably fucks up your future and how we prefer to inflict our shit on others rather than face up to our problems.

A representative passage:
Inspired by a magazine article he’d read and photocopied in the library, Kawashima had decided to buy a knife as well as an ice pick. The article was about a thirty-two-year-old ‘soap tart’ who’d been found murdered in a hotel room, with her Achilles tendons severed. An anonymous police detective had volunteered this explanation: “When you cut the Achilles tendon, the sound it makes is as loud and sharp as a gunshot. The killer must have known that and taken pleasure in it.” Kawashima decided that before stabbing the victim’s stomach with an ice pick—or afterwards, if need be—he’d slice her Achilles tendons. He was curious what it would sound like exactly. And he wanted to see the expression on the woman’s face when it happened.

The album: Red on Chrome by Crowpath


There’s a clinical dispassion to Crowpath’s murder metal. They’re a band that understands “The Precise Art of Knives.” But for all its musical ferocity, Red on Chrome feels like one of those true crime reality shows set to music, a cold eyed, objective recitation of the details of the crime. This is far more cold and calculated than the hot blooded second degree murder of something like Rotten Sound's primal Murderworks. Instead, Crowpath mirror the way Kawashima methodically goes about plotting his murder, even writing out his plans extensively in a notebook. It’s not slasher film monsters that are terrifying. It’s that quiet guy next door who just snaps.

A representative song:  “The Precise Art of Knives”




I love how it all came through. It’s amazing how it aims on the target. A dream now in practice, so touching. Hail for the new. This bizarre violent creation speaks volumes. It’s precise and dominating. It clears a path through the everyday madness. An examples has been set, a map to follow. It’s infinite, hard and cold, absolutely brilliant. The new surgery.

Good Reads: Deep Thoughts

The book: The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace


David Foster Wallace published his first novel at an age when most of us are still mastering the art of the keg stand. And if that were enough to make him an overachiever, Mr. Smarty Pants’ debut, The Broom of the System is actually a super meta in-joke about philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the way language mediates our perception of reality. But don’t let that deter you. If it makes you feel less inadequate, it’s obvious Wallace was young and trying just a little too hard and owed a too obvious debt to Thomas Pynchon. The Broom of the System is the convoluted tale of awkward, overly cerebral Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman (a thinly veiled, gender-bent version of the author) and her search for her missing philosopher great-grandmother that careens through fat men determined to eat the world, ominous shadows and a smart mouthed cockatiel in a twisty, hilarious romp through mid-America in the late ‘80s. It’s also an easier entry into Wallace’s oeuvre than the intimidating 1,000 page (+100 more pages of footnotes, some of which have their own footnotes!)  virtuosity of Infinite Jest, which is well worth reading too.

A representative passage:
There were two reliable ways to identify the Bombardini Building, which was where the firm of Frequent and Vigorous made its home. A look from the south at Erieview Tower, high and rectangular not far from the Terminal section of Cleveland’s downtown, reveals that the sun, always at either a right or a left tangent to the placement of the Tower, casts a huge, dark shadow of the Building over the surrounding area—a deep, severely angled shadow that joins the bottom of the Tower in black union but then bends precipitously off to the side, as if the Erieview Plaza section of Cleveland were a still pool of water, into which the Tower had been dipped, the shadow its refracted submergence. In the morning, when the shadow casts from east to west, the Bombardini Building stands sliced by light, white and black, on the Tower’s northern side. As the day swells and the shadow compacts and moves ponderously in and east, and as clouds begin to complicate the shapes of darknesses, the Bombardini Building is slowly eaten by black, the steady suck of the dark broken only by epileptic flashes of light caused by clouds with pollutant bases bending rays of sun as the Bombardini Building flirts ever more seriously with the border of the shadow. By mid-afternoon the Bombardini Building is in complete darkness, the windows glow yellow, cars go by with headlights. The Bombardini Building, then, is easy to find, occurring nowhere other than on the perimeter of the sweeping scythe of the Midwest’s very most spectacular shadow.

The album: Dogma by Asterisk*


Asterisk* is what happens when a philosophy graduate student like Wallace tosses over writing and gets really into Discordance Axis. The Swedish trio followed the Jersey Boys’ lead in elevating the intellectual and emotional aspects of grindcore on their retrospective master's dissertation Dogma. Their weapon of choice was grind that flirted with linguistics, philosophy, literature and pop culture in a way that hadn’t been seen before and rarely rivaled since. While the music may have nodded back to Discordance Axis, Asterisk* established a lyrical identity that was wholly their own.

A representative song: “Phrase Structure Tree”



You'll probably need a phrase structure tree just to keep up with a few of Wallace's more virtuoso sentences.

G&P Review: Infanticide

Infanticide
Misconception of Hope
Willowtip
I once had a Dodge Neon with a failing transmission. It would whine and strain and huff at low gear, but if you persevered and rode it out, it would eventually lurch into third and you were good to cruise. So that was all good, provided all you wanted to do is cruise around in third. That’s sort of how I feel about Misconception of Hope.
Sweden’s Infanticide have turned in a cruising record the revs past the low gears and never settles down again. But it feels like interstate cruising; it’s two lanes of blurring blacktop anonymity as songs slide into each other like endless highway mile markers. Infanticide are competent composers and performers, but Misconception of Hope is lacking some intangible vitality that would add some interest to this cross-country grindcore road trip. Instead, this feels like a monotone gray bit of background noise to fill the emptiness as you drive between the boundaries of two radio stations. The riffs never rise to the level of memorable and the overall production is missing that gut punch that blastbeat junkies crave. Even on the first listen you can anticipate where the growls will drop out and the shrieks take over. It all just feels so rote.
Infanticide’s prior work put them squarely in the 50th percentile of the grindcore Bell curve, but they were enjoyable efforts nonetheless. Ninety percent of Misconception of Hope evaporates like a gas spill in a hot parking lot the minute I stop listening. I’ll never forget that piece of shit Neon though.

[Full disclosure: Willowtip sent me a download.]

G&P Review: Massgrav

Massgrav
Still the Kings
Selfmadegod
Massgrav toss down the gauntlet to all comers with a simple warning: watch the throne, motherfuckers. The Swedish blastcore kill crew annihilate 19 songs in 18 minutes as they defend their blastbeaten crust punk throne.  Anybody who is the least bit familiar with Massgrav's M.O. already knows that Still the Kings will not be larded down with a single superfluous note, ambient digression or arty farty passage. Instead, this is the sound of pretty much every Swedish d-beat great tossed into a blender set to liquefy. At their most sedate, as with "Brallorna nere igen," Massgrav are still zapping along at clip that would get the skate park popping.
There can be a samey-ness that creeps into Massgrav's sound, but when they hit it and quit in about a quarter of an hour that's a pretty secondary complaint. As one record executive famously said of the Ramones: he would have walked out of their audition but they were done before he could get up. Massgrav probably recognize this so they do break up their punk beatings with the occasional flourish like the minced guitar solo of "Kom ihåg vad du rösta på" in a nod to actually telling the songs apart.
This is the kind of record you reach for when you just want a jolt of pure adrenaline without recourse to subtlety or pretense. Sometimes you just wanna thrash and when you do Massgrav are still the kings.

[Full disclosure: Selfmadegod sent me a download.]

G&P Review: Afgrund

Afgrund
The Age of Dumb
Willowtip
Let's just dispense with the most glaring issue off the top: that title. Yes, for their third album and their first primarily in English, The Age of Dumb is the best Afgrund could come up with, apparently. It's terrible; let's just acknowledge that and move on because, title aside, The Age of Dumb doesn't give you much reason to otherwise question these Swedes' judgment. Simply put this is yet another really good grind album.
The guitars this time are kissed with a touch more of that classic Swedish death sound, but otherwise it's the same propulsive grind you've come to expect from their first two outings. Afgrund hurtle bodily forward, never stopping to catch a breath and (mercifully) not indulging in the halfassed stoner doom excursions that gummed up the middle of Vid Helvetets Grindar. "Repaint the Truth," in particular, is a nice example of the Swedish grind arts, a wound up run through a minefield of blastbeats and razor wire screaming.
At this point in their career, Afgrund have very comfortably mastered their style and sound, and that may be one niggling complaint about The Age of Dumb. Afgrund have not advanced so much as refined their sound over three albums. What you hear with them is pretty much what you get. But I think they're capable of more. Afgrund have given us a series of really good albums, but I believe they are one of those bands with a truly great album lurking in them if they just push themselves. The refining is nearing its completion. The metal is pure. It's time for Afgrund to start forging lasting weapons.
In the mean time, The Age of Dumb will keep them firmly ensconced on many an end of year best of list. Even if that title is just plain dumb.

[Full disclosure: Willowtip sent me a download.]

The Namesake Series: "Mass Hypnosis"

You are NOT getting sleepy. For all the talk about "Mass Hypnosis," there's just no way you can nod off when Nasum and Sepultura, both in their prime, start screaming at you for attention. Thrashin' and grindin' and hypnotisin' your ass with the power of the almighty hooky riff. Two different bands, two different eras, two differing genres, one common objective: your undivided attention. Mass hypnosis!

Absolut Country of Sweden

Imagine my surprise when I learned the de facto Swedish national anthem, " Du Gamla, Du Fria," does not actually feature d-beats (though I'm sure as we speak Tomas Lindberg is pulling together a roster of Swedish punk greats to rectify that oversight).
Because in my mind, even beyond the greatness of Scandi-grind, Sweden first and foremost has always stood out to me as a joyous celebration of Discharge's swinging punk legacy just with way more umlauts. It's a story that begins with seminal punk bands like Anti Cimex and continues through .... a whole lot of other bands that also contain ex-members of Anti Cimex and whatever band Tompa hustled into a studio during his free weekend.
Where Discharge were pissed and spitting, the Swedes (while still dealing a decent amount of aggression) also seemed to have realized that a hopping d-beat can actually be fun. They're screaming, sure, but you can just feel the corners of their mouths quirking, fighting to hide back an idiot grin.
Or maybe that's because Swedish punk bands, like a lot of their Scandinavian kin, tend to stick to their native language, so I have no clue what they're saying. As Totalitar said in the liner notes to Ni Mast Bort!, "... I would feel rather stupid if I wrote about these subjects using someone else's language. This has nothing to do with nationalism, to me it's just a simple fact that I react, think and have much more complex knowledge of the language I grew up with." But language has never been a barrier with Swedish punk, the intent comes through in the musical chops and the vocal passion just fine without resorting to Babel Fish.
Since I've been binging on Swedish punk lately, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites. I'm by no means an expert here and compiling this list made me realize my collection is short a few goodies (Krigshot! Svart Sno!), but I haven't made you guys a mixtape in a while and felt the need to share.

Swedish Punk [Mediafire]

Disfear - "Powerload"
Skitsystem - "Det Sociala Arvet"
Avskum - "Masskonsumtions Helvetet"
Victims - "This is the End"
Wolfpack (aka Wolfbrigade) - "Power and Greed"
The Great Deceiver - "Strychnine"
Anti Cimex - "Victims of a Bombraid"
End of All - "Fostrad"
Acursed - "Tunneln I Ljusets Slut Track 13 [Untitled]"
Totalitar - "Mediet Som Vapen"

The Namesake Series: "H5N1"

While I've never had the pleasure of being introduced to bird flu, I have done battle with its cousin H1N1, swine flu. Maybe I'll finally get my chance because bird flu is a serious concern these days thanks to research into H5N1's ability to transmit between mammals. The findings have stirred up controversy among those who say publishing the results, while valuable for researchers seeking effective treatments for the flu strain, could be used to weaponize the virus.
Bird flu is also right in grindcore's wheelhouse because both Sweden's Gadget and Australia's Extortion have dipped into that well.

Panic! At the Discography: Nasum

Grindcore is the petit four of punk and metal. It’s a delicacy best served in small amounts. That’s why when I asked you to name the best band working today, you overwhelmingly went for a group with a penchant for albums shorter than a Harvey Birdman episode. Given that you probably don’t spend as much time woodshopping a song like, say, “You Suffer,” as long as you would something by Atheist or Pestilence or some other technical guitar wanker, that means an average grind band can pretty much poop out a 7-inch’s worth of material a month if quality control isn't a high priority (*cough* Agathocles *cough*). And if your average grind band keeps at it long enough, inevitably somebody is going to step in to collect the far flung singles, splits, and 7-inchers into a massive discography album. But a discography is probably the worst format for grind ever conceived by the diabolical mind of Jesus for a whole host of reasons. So with that in mind, I’m going to periodically dig through my daunting stack of oversized grind compilations to talk about what works well and how they, unfortunately, go tragically wrong more often than not. I could think of no better way to inaugurate the new feature than with probably the gold standard for grindcore discographies.

Nasum
Grind Finale
Relapse
2006
Mieszko Talarczyk’s death during the 2004 Christmas tsunami was the tragic impetus both Relapse and drummer Anders Jakobson needed to get off their asses and finally realize the long simmering Nasum discography, which had been percolating for years under the title Blueprint for Extinction. Two years and a (welcome) name change later and Relapse handed us 152 tracks spread over two discs that spanned Nasum’s amazing career in the form of Grind Finale. Not only was it a tribute to one of the label’s most prolific (and likely most profitable) artists, but Grind Finale was an impressive bit of fan service and an incredible undertaking in its own right. Packaged in a book binding with a forward by metal historian and Decibel EiC Albert Mudrian and featuring extensive liner notes by Jakobson that illuminate all of the band’s non-album releases, Grind Finale is the discography by which every other collection should be judged. The songs, ordered chronologically, begin with the band’s earliest incarnation, before Talarczyk stepped to the mic or manned the mixing board to put his indelible stamp on every facet of Nasum’s identity. Beginning with the sampled secret of the band’s nasal nomenclature straight through the cast off bits that didn’t make their later albums, attentive grindcore archeologists will be able to piece together not only the band’s musical evolution but perhaps psychoanalyze its working methods. Though the non-album and bonus track bits are almost uniformly quality songs in their own right, with enough listens you begin to see why, for instance, the title track for masterwork Helvete got left on the cutting room floor. You sense how the band carefully managed not only the individual songs, but how their albums flowed and the emotional punctuation that delineated them. It’s just one more example of how Talarczyk and Jakobson and their rotating cast of supporting players were master craftsmen whose career was prematurely ended.
Grind Finale is such an impressive package that Relapse’s decision to cough up the slapdash live album Doombringer two years later looks shabby and tacky by comparison, a cheap cash in on a vital band’s legacy. But Grind Finale is a fitting monument to one of the finest grind practitioners to ever grace our stereos and an essential addition to any Nasum fan's collection. Or a great place for n00bs to get introduced to master technicians.

G&P Review: Sayyadina

Sayyadina
Mourning the Unknown [Reissue]
Nerve Altar
We shouldn’t even be having this conversation. You know that, right? You’re smart people, so you already know Sayyadina hold the post-Nasum Swedecore crown for second album Mourning the Unknown. It’s an album you already know and love, so my work here should be done.
But on the off chance some of you are not among the converted yet [*side eye*], the nice people at Nerve Altar have pressed Mourning the Unknown on a lovely slab o’wax – with three bonus tracks.
While Nerve Altar tells me it hasn’t been remastered, some quirk of the vinyl format seems to have given Mourning the Unknown an extra pop, especially the drums that just explode off the wax. Also, the 12-inch format really highlights the album’s evocative artwork.
But likely the hook here will be the bonus tracks.
The most rounded of the trio is “Like Rhinos,” a whip snapped rip that turns poaching endangered species into a metaphor for human suffering. Unlike the other two bonus tracks, it’s easy to imagine “Like Rhinos” having been included on Mourning the Unknown originally. The remaining two songs, while decent enough, don’t stack up against a modern grind classic. “Come Visit Sometime” rides a loping riff up and down the stairs that could pass on a Victims album with no comment. “Just Like a God” is just a straight up ripper.
It’s been three years since Sayyadina gifted us with Mourning the Unknown and its status as a modern classic is being cemented every day. But if Sayyadina intend to stay at the top of the heap, they may need to hit the studio soon. Afgrund and The Arson Project are nipping at their heels.

[Full disclosure: Nerve Altar sent me a review copy.]

G&P Review: Blood I Bleed/Massgrav

Blood I Bleed/Massgrav
Split
Selfmadegod
What happens when you strike when you strike Swedes Massgrav’s flinty crust grind off of Dutch masters Blood I Bleed’s steely grindcore chops? You’re going to cast enough sparks to set Northern Europe ablaze.
Though constrained by a more muffled production job than on Gods Out of Monsters, Blood I Bleed still circle a carcass like a school of starved bull sharks. Shantia’s songwriting is still leagues ahead of his peers and the white noise scrawls I immediately associate with his work are deployed to devastating effect. “Slow Motion Apocalypse” detonates 30 opening seconds of atonal feedback that screws the song’s tension until it vibrates like a single twanging nerve that has to explode or burst into flame. And “Downfall of the Common Man” bleeds out on the pavement in an arterial spurt of amplifier anguish.

Blood I Bleed – “Downfall of the Common Man”

The band also drills down into their prior incarnation as My Minds Mine, exhuming a trio of oldies but goodies to brutalize all over again.
Over the second half of the 20 minute confab, Sweden’s Massgrav unleash another round of napalm over Stureplan with a multi-throated crust-grind rampage aimed at people who though Anti Cimex were just too damn slow as harrow through hell on “Vagan Till Helvetet.”

Massgrav – “Vagan Till Helvetet”

Courtesy of a slightly more animated production job, Massgrav actually come off a touch more desperate and frenzied than even Blood I Bleed, raving like the Tasmanian Devil on a weeklong crack bender.
While they’re generally more comfortable cruising along at sub-Mick Harris speeds, the blasted, blighted and bastardized 16 seconds of “Lonesamtal – Legal Valdtakt” suggest the band recently pillaged a Stockholm dentist’s office and decided a drill bit would make a valuable addition to their musical repertoire.
Selfmadegod really outdid themselves roping together these two paragons for this split. This is where the 1337 m337 to blastb347.

[Full disclosure: Blood I Bleed sent me a review copy.]

G&P Review: Sayyadina

Sayyadina
The Great Northern Revisited
Relapse
I revisited the Great Northern, myself, recently with a marathon reviewing of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and I can vouchsafe Sayyadina’s odds and sods compilation for Relapse sounds like it came howling out the Black Lodge with murderous lunatic Bob.
Not nearly as fluid as their later work, Sayyadina on The Great Northern Revisited is a more spastic, gangly and all around punk version of the Swedish grind stalwarts. Actually, I was rather startled at how much Sayyadina sounds like Afgrund, particularly on some of the later tracks collected here.
Though not as refined as I would come to expect from them, Sayyadina were flashing all of the hallmarks of master songsmiths fairly early on. “The Awakening” nimbly catapults from punk into drone before caroming into a grindcore spring in a flash forward 74 seconds.

Sayyadina – “The Awakening”

“Nar Jag Faller” is all assault rifle spray and shattered gristle while “All This Fear” is a convulsive purgative exorcising anxiety with an explosive rage.
But all of that is to be expected. What was most intriguing – and most apropos given the David Lynch allusion – was the unexpected jazz excursions of “Retaliation” and “Outrage” which could have not only soundtracked the Lynch film of your choice but key scenes from Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic heist films as well.
At this point Sayyadina is fairly firmly established in the cannon of Swedish grindcore, and that’s what makes The Great Northern Revisited so intriguing and successful. Even bands that stomp the terra with Godzilla sized sneakers started out with baby steps.

G&P Review: Infanticide

Infanticide
From Our Cold, Dead Hands
Willowtip
Sweden’s Infanticide make me want to run through the ObGyn unit of my local hospital with a razor honed Wustof gutting pregnant chicks. Or maybe just ordering a really nice veal parmesan. Either way some fetal blob of barely developed mammal protein will have a bad day with From Our Cold, Dead Hands providing the perfect soundtrack. As your grindcore sommelier, I’d recommend pairing Infanticide with a nice selection from Deathbound because like those ferocious Finns, the Swedes crust their grindcore with a seasoned panko rind of guttural death metal heft, more strategically deploying the blastbeats than their contemporaries.
You take those death metal elements to the grill almost immediately as “Domestic Warfare” scales back the throttle for 75 seconds of Swede death loom before the two beat eruptions place things squarely back in the realm of grind. It’s those kinds of moments – like the way The Fourth Crusade gets a 21st Century panzer sheen on the stunning “Shock and Awe” – that provide tension and dynamism against From Our Cold, Dead Hands’ suitably clanking production.

Infanticide – “Shock and Awe”

But fear not, for all the downbeat chug, those are just the crusted protrusions in Infanticide’s grind freakery. “Militant Resentment” brings all the charm of a rusted dental drill cracking open an abscessed tooth, “A Worse Today” brings the punk banging by way of Entombed and “Crisis Point” is pure cluster bomb annihilation. There's not a damn thing here that hasn't been a few dozen times before, but for what it's worth, Infanticide hit all the comfortable pressure points. You can pry this one … wait for it … from my cold, dead hands.
[Ed’s note: I’m so very, very sorry.]

[Full disclosure: Willotip provided me with a review copy.]

Blast(beat) from the Past: Aztec Two Step

Aztec Two Step

Aztec Two Step

Immigrant Sun

2001

The most remarkable part of Swedish hardcore band Aztec Two Step’s punk assault is how little they sound like a Swedish hardcore band. This is Swedish hardcore that doesn’t beat a d. I think I think my feelings on Swedish punk are pretty clear, but Aztec Two Step are a refreshing change from a nation that seemingly issues its citizens the Discharge box set with their birth certificate. Named for a line in a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem and not to be with a pair of folk rock choades who were last seen swinging from Simon and Garfunkle’s cock, this Aztec Two Step are all machine shop guitars and sheet metal spark vocal thrashings on jaunty red vinyl no less.

“The Death of…,” which kicks off the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-sampling B side, is a masterpiece of farting bass and needle sharp guitars, everything a good hardcore song should be. “Blackmetal,” which pisses all over the early years of Mayhem, vies with Population Reduction’s “Black Metal Beach Party” for the most hilarious takedown of the panda power set ever lashed to a punk beat. And while Aztec Two Step may rage against people who watch too much television, I have to give them a slow golf clap for a song encouraging kids to watch Sesame Street “Bert and Ernie.” Throw in Minor Threat and Mob 47 covers (“Out of Step” and “Dom Ljuger,” respectively) and you’ve got yourself a tidy little 10 minutes or so of balls out punk goodness.

How Swede it is (The Punk Years): Anti Cimex Part 3

Anti Cimex
Scandinavian Jawbreaker
Regain
Anti Cimex would like to remind you the recent rash of hardcore bands getting sleazy with a little Motorhead is no new phenomenon. Like late ’80s TSOL, these Swede punks were surreptitiously sliding some cock in with their rock on 1993 album Scandinavian Jawbreaker when the rest of us were girding up with flannel for half a decade of mopery.

“Braincell Battle” or “Only in Dreams” could easily be reckoned as Anti Cimex’s “Ace of Spades” as the band drifted even further from their humble d-beat roots to a verdant pasture of grime and debauchery.
No matter how debauched, though, Anti Cimex never wander too far from their punk roots. So classic Discharge is augmented with nihilistic ZZ Top boogie on “New Blood,” “Nailbiter’s” toasted gruyere horror film keyboards, or even by the surprising delicacy of “Pain (U Bring Me)’s” interlaced acoustic and electric guitars. Central to the album and its bipolar moods is the two part title track. “Scandinavian Jawbreaker Part 1” is a soccer hooligan of a punk tune that’s all pounding drums and scathing guitars while its sleazier twin, “Scandinavian Jawbreaker Part 2” is a biker bro hymn with a catchy “No chicks/Big dicks” refrain.
Anti Cimex’s DNA lurks in the genetic code of just about every punk band to call Sweden home and former band members can be found anchoring current stalwarts like Driller Killer and Wolfbrigade but the band’s influence can be felt even wider (as At the Gates' Alf Svensson, who contributed both album art and riffs to the punktastic “…Of Ice” can attest). Though I don’t think Scandinavian Jawbreaker is as strong or as thoroughly realized as predecessor Absolut Country of Sweden, it’s a vital transition for the worldwide punk scene, paving a greasy biker sound that is only currently being emulated by hardcore kids across the globe.

How Swede it is (The Punk Years): Anti Cimex Part 2

Anti Cimex
Absolut Country of Sweden
Regain
Discharge may have declared they were “Born to Die in the Gutter,” but that was less a cri de coeur than yet another set piece to indict a British society still hung up on Victorian notions of class and propriety. After a short hiatus, 1990 saw Anti Cimex step back into the limelight and out from under Discharge’s lengthy shadow on comeback album Absolut Country of Sweden, less a political manifesto than a realization that the apocalypse will come at an individual scale. Absolut Country of Sweden found Anti Cimex abandoning even-then stale diatribes against the faceless state in favor of something far more honest and personal.
It’s hard not to be struck by Freke’s wailing that “I won’t sleep alone tonight” on “1990,” which comes lead weighted with a decade’s despair, isolation and desperation. While punk’s inherent fuck you attitude has made it an ideal vehicle for antisocial angst for three decades now, it far too often fails to connect on such an honest emotional level.
That emotional honesty would never have been so effective had Anti Cimex also not broadened their songwriting. The spiraling urgency of “Wheel of Life” is majestic and the intricate intro to “Under the Sun” is remarkably delicate when offset by the overall hardcore brutality. “Rose” reaches deep into punk’s roots to exhume fro-ed out MC5 psychedelia.
Absolut Country of Sweden is an absolut masterpiece from the forefathers of Swedish punk, the emotional and songwriting peak of a career that is directly responsible for an entire country’s ongoing love affair with up tempo hardcore.

How Swede it is (The Punk Years): Anti Cimex Part 1

First up, you have no idea how excited this makes me. Regain Records, a label I tend to associate more with Euro death and old In Flames records than gutter punk glory, has snapped up three out of print Swedish crust classics by founding punks Anti Cimex and put them back in circulation. I have been peeing my pants with excitement about this since February when everything was originally slated to hit stores only to watch with dismay as the release dates got shoved further back and two previous orders were cancelled. Even when the release date in June came and went a couple of these albums were still trapped in back order limbo (the Wolfpack reissues that I wanted to include with this have been shoved back into August and I’m not holding my breath Regain will meet that date either). But oh, were the Anti Cimex albums ever worth every minute of kid-before-Christmas anxiety.
Swedish punk begins here.

Anti Cimex
Anti Cimex
Regain
This is ground zero for all of Swedish hardcore.
Anti Cimex, named for a pest control company, is the kind of band for which terms like crucial were coined. Short of the Ramones, Black Sabbath and Napalm Death, I’m at a loss to think of a band that has had a more profound impact on a musical scene. For those of us who can’t claim to own an original copy of the seminal Raped Ass EP (my excuse is I was four and living in the frozen hellscape of North Dakota at the time, which may explain my Swedish fetish, come to think of it), Regain has smartly reissued this collection of early works by the masters, the Rosetta stone of Scandi-crust.
This eponymous collection is Anti Cimex at the peak of their Discharge influence, Ds get beaten and the guitars can barely be contained by the cheap studio job. The early songs are a sonic safari of stampeding wildebeest drums being harried by the kind of rabid wasp guitars Unseen Terror would perfect. And all of that is just a pedestal to display Tomas “Freke” Jonsson’s vodka scarred crocodilian roar.
The songs all touch on the inspirational Brits’ wellworn themes on “Cries of Pain,” “Warmachine” and “Victims of a Bombraid” (or as Freke’s accent puts it, “weektims of a bombraid”). But even when Anti Cimex were beholden to Discharge (and to a lesser extent Amebix’s biker bar ambience), songs like “Smell of Silence,” with its Wayne Kramer freakout guitars, presaged the band’s incredible growth. The guitar trills and cymbal runs of the slow motion collapse of “Painkiller” already showed the kind of songwriting chops the band sprout later.
At time furious, hilarious and unexpectedly deft musically, Anti Cimex and contemporaries like Totalitar built on Discharge’s foundation, assembling the pieces that would become the Swedish punk of Disfear, Acursed, Avskum and a host of others.