G&P Review: Squash Bowels

Squash Bowels
Grindcoholism
Selfmadegod
Hello, my name is Andrew and I’m a grindcoholic.
It’s been about 15 minutes since my last Squash Bowels marathon. It’s hard, you know? I try to take it one day at a time, but that dive bombing guitar that slashes through “Tastelessness” is just such an awesome album opener. Just thinking about it gives me the jitters and shakes. I thought maybe I could manage my grindcoholism. Take a small taste here and there and move on. But it’s not like that. By the time “Trap” hits, the grisly Jeff Walker bass is rumbling through my brain and I know I’ve lost control again. I’ll be spinning Squash Bowels on endless repeat for most of the afternoon, bobbing along to head-nodder “Surrender,” an excellent early album respite. I won’t be able to control it. The live-in-the-room reverberation of the cymbals and the stuttering blasts just get inside me and I lose all sense of time and place.
I thought I’d hit rock bottom the day some random woman on the Metro was staring at me as I was clutching invisible citrus and making screaming faces during the morning commute. But recovery has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. I’ve come to understand my grindcoholism is not something I can cure. It can only be managed. I’m in a program and I’m working the steps. I hope to one day be able to manage my disease. I’m trying to stay strong and just take it each day as it comes. When I think I can’t manage any more, I call my sponsor for help. But the last time I tried all I could hear over the phone was the stomping tread of “Steering.” Somebody else may have fallen off the wagon.

[Full disclosure: Selfmadegod sent me a download.]

G&P Review: Antigama

Antigama
Meteor
Selfmadegod
Antigama's Meteor crashes through your speakers like that Star Destroyer that eclipsed the screen at the start of the first Star Wars film. The band's implacable intergalactic oddball-core just grows and expands until its futuristic sheen obscures your vision, burning out your retinas with the flare of its receding ion drives.
While Meteor is less immediate and aggressive than immediate predecessor Stop the Chaos (that said, "Prophecy" stalks the feral urban predator vibe sorely missing from Book Burner), it's still a varied, unpredictable skim across the whacko-grind event horizon that's on par with Antigama's better efforts like Warning. Once again the prolific Poles have crammed their space probe grind full of the kind of unexpected, off kilter excursions that will either leaving the marauding Martian hordes plotting our demise rolling with laughter or hopelessly paralyzed with confusion. No matter how well versed you are in Antigama's outré oeuvre, you're probably not going to see the scat breakdown and ZZ Top boogie shuffle of “Fed by the Feeling” coming, even after I just told you that. Ditto the space age keytar breakdown in the middle of  “Turbulence's” intergalactic belly dance gyrations. I also really dug the super reverbed vocals and Swans plod of “Untruth,” which sounds like it was salvaged from the rusted, derelict hulk of Red Harvest's industrial Death Star, that punctuated Meteor's final impact.
Antigama just continue to get better. Where I found their earlier material too scattershot and unfocused, Meteor continues their recent string of bizarre outings that still feel cohesive and purposeful. I may not have a clue where Antigama are about to take me when I hit play, but clearly they've got a course planned. Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it. And I wouldn't want to stop this trip short.

[Full disclosure: Selfmadegod sent me a download.]

G&P Review: Antigama

Antigama
Stop the Chaos
Selfmadegod
Stop the Chaos is a pretty astute title for Antigama's latest EP because the Polish band, while not completely abandoning the trigonometry-core that has been their calling card for the last decade, is probably the most focused and restrained I've heard from them. On a couple of these tracks you could be forgiven for mistaking them for old Rotten Sound outtakes.
The latest incarnation of Antigama (check out VII's kickass interview with guitarist Sebastian Rokicki for all the personell ins and outs) still indulge in all their wonted right brain experimentation and off kilter riffing, but on the whole the five songs (and electronic outro) are firmly chained to a foundation of traditional grindcore that's as familiar as FETO. The result is Antigama have actually plotted a course this time out rather than blasting off into the cosmos to careen recklessly between quasars and black holes. Even "The End," the kind of ambient kiss off track I normally despise, works in context of the EP. It's a claustrophobic sci fi soundtrack that winds up a creeping sense of tension to the point of excruciation before collapsing into the airless vacuum of space.
Over all, Stop the Chaos may be Antigama's most mature effort to date. In 15 minutes the EP is a more provocative and satisfying science fiction experience than the whole two muddled hours of the flatulent Prometheus. Ridley Scott, take notes.

[Full disclosure: Selfmadegod sent me a download.]

You Grind…But Why?: Suffering Mind

Suffering Mind guitarist Kuchar is the very reason I started asking this question of people. So thanks for the inspiration, Kuchar. See, last year I interviewed the Polish band, and being a smartass, I thought I’d open the conversation by asking him, “You suffer…but why?” I thought, given the band’s name, it would make an amusing interlude to hang a story on. But he took my question seriously, and that planted the germ of the idea in my head. So what makes him get his grind on?

“I was a young guy that started to explore more brutal genres in punk. I started to listen crust and grindcore,” he said. “I’m not sure which album was my first grindcore one, but I remember that Razor Sharp Daggers made by Agathocles was first one that makes me wanted to listen to it whole day.”

Kuchar went on to explain how grindcore eventually brought Suffering Mind together.

“Our previous band called People Hate (playing grindcore) had just split up and three of five members of the band decided to continue playing together,” he said. “We asked Ulka (vocalist) to join us for a sludge punk project influenced by Dystopia. After a few practices we decided to continue playing grindcore - and that was the birth of Suffering Mind. We decided in that moment that grindcore is the most comfortable genre for us. It's because we listen to many other grindcore bands and when we were making grindcore songs we had the feeling that they are much better than those sludge punk ones. When you do something good enough to feel satisfaction with that fact, it's just all you need at the moment, I guess. So we don't wonder now why we play grindcore. We just love to do that and we are very satisfied with playing, recording and releasing our stuff.”

G&P Review: Selfhate

Selfhate
Debasement
Self released (distributed through Selfmadegod)
The totally unexpected news that seminal Polish grinders Selfhate had reconvened to drop their first passel of new music in a decade made me do my happy dance all through the house.
Yes, I have a happy dance. No, you can’t see it.
Given the improvement in low budget recording options in the last several years, Debasement sounds way more polished and clear than older works like …At the Beginning God Created Fear, which was mired in the scooped out sound of the late ’90s that tended to flatten out recordings.
The band is still in fine playing form even if the blasts aren’t always as fluid as they were when they were young and spry, giving songs a somewhat herky-jerky vibe on occasion. Selfhate still know their way around an engaging tune, though. In fact, that facet has only improved in their absence. The songs on the whole are more grounded and carry more emotional weight than declamations against faceless authority from past releases. That all comes to a head in closer “Dajesz Zycle/You Give Life,” which takes a subject that’s far too often trivialized in metal – child murder – and turns it into an emotional gut punch as they ponder the genuine horror of a recent account in Poland.

Selfhate – “Dajesz Zycle/You Give Life”

And while there are the expected songs about “greed” and politician’s “empty words,” I wish more grind bands would actually take the time to step out of the abstract and find an emotional center for their songs the way Selfhate has. In their original incarnation, Selfhate’s punk blast work ethic ran counter to the metal-inflected flavor of Eastern European grind at the time and I’d wager is directly responsible for younglings like Suffering Mind. Looks like they’ve still got something to teach the next generation.

You Suffer; They'll Tell You Why

Every so often as an interviewer it’s instructional to be reminded you’re not half so goddmaned clever as you think you are.
See, given Suffering Mind’s chosen appellation and penchant for punky throwback grindcore, I had thought it would be a humorous icebreaker to ask guitarist Kuchar “You suffer but why?” My thinking being it would make for one of those pun-y, self-satisfied U C WHUT I DID THERE? kind of leads. Instead Kuchar rhetorically handed me my comedy ass as he used the question as a chance to delve into his band’s decidedly jaundiced outlook on life.
“Well I may say about two things causes the suffering: first is an interactional dystopia,” Kuchar explained gamely. “We live in the strange world where even the closest persons make others suffer. Bytheir acts,words,many different things. People are hostile, frustrated, often aggressive… There’s too much ignorance and selfishness which creates sad image of mankind.”
I can’t really argue with that answer. But like Ron Popeil used to said, but wait, there’s more.
“Second thing is a hydra called system, a ruthless monster with government, religion, military, police heads,a monster created by man but now totally under its control,” Kuchar continued. “It’s hard to fight even with one head. A hydra without one head is still strong and dangerous. Cutting off a head will regenerate shortly cause all heads are needed to [ensure the] system works correctly. Authority and religion always go hand in hand enslaving by brutal power and false promises.”
With a killer, crusty full length racking up accolades all around the weberverse since 2008 and a slurry of splits (including a sweet callabo with similarly outfitted boy-girl band Lyncanthropy) to their credit, Suffering Mind are set to spread the pain evenly over the globe in 2010 with a new long player on 625 Thrash and Crucificados Pelo Sistema followed by more tag team efforts with Phobia, Audio Kollaps and possibly Magrudergrind or P.L.F.
That’s a heavy agenda for a band that insists on keeping true to their punk roots. It’s not just Suffering Mind’s crusty sound that sets them apart from their more metallic European peers but also a fierce commitment to handle their own business as well.
“There’s still lot of bands that want to have punk face and prefer to be connected with punk scene,” Kuchar said. “Just like us. In our music you may hear lot of different influences: from grindcore, crust, thrash to metal and sludge. We record all stuff D.I.Y. and we have control of how we sound. It’s lot of work, but after it’s done you’re just happy that you do something from start to end by yourself.”
And while those of us sitting at home brushing Cheeto dust off our keyboards may opine at how vibrant and robust the Polish scene appears from the outside, looks can be deceiving. While the former Eastern Bloc country boasts Squash Bowels, Exit Wounds, Selfhate and the tricksome Antigama to its credit, Kuchar said all is not Zywiec and sunshine from a ground level perspective.
“Well I don’t think that Polish grindcore scene is too big,” he said. “We don’t have too many bands and situation with gigs is not too good in my opinion. If you want to play a gig in Poland it’s only few places where you can play and get more than several people in audience. From time to time there’s some bigger grindcore fest like Mosh It Up for example when more bands play and people come to see them. Smaller gigs have low frequency even when some good grindcore bands play. That’s why Polish people pick also the Czech Republic fests like Obscene Extreme or Play Fast or Don’t. There they can see more bands.”
Suffering Mind’s punk ethic and approach set them apart from their countrymen in more ways than one.
“Mostly Polish bands play gore grind and there’s not too many bands connected strongly to the punk scene. I think that people asked about Polish grindcore bands will name Dead Infection, Squash Bowels and Neuropathia first. What for Suffering Mind: we sound probably bit different to them. Or maybe not? Well everyone can listen and have their own opinion about that.”
We all suffer. Do we really need to ask why? Just listen to some fucking Suffering Mind.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Suffering Mind

Suffering Mind
At War With Mankind
Zaraza
2008
Think I was joking when I said the split with Lycanthropy immediately made me go out and buy more Suffering Mind? A few spins of that was all it took for me to immediately go hunting for 2008’s At War With Mankind, a scabies scab-raw crust platter of squatter grind. Shedding all of the metallic pretensions of modern grindcore, this multi-gendered Polish collaborative are a sterling example of crusty grind’s gloriously reductive joys.
Album standout “Humanitarne Manipulacje” is keenly aware of that crusty majesty, enticing with a simple but weapons grade virulent riff that gets crushed by Bolt Thrower double bass.

Suffering Mind - "Humanitarne Manipulacje"

Suffering Mind have a few other musical tricks rammed like rabbits up their black army jackets like the lepus lope of “Dead Part of Cause” or the timely down tempo passage of “Ekonomiczny Szczyt Bezczelnosci” (Pat, I’d like to buy a vowel, please). And while Suffering Mind are yet another band to close out an album with a doom-paced trudge anthem (“Ostateczny Pogrzeb”), it makes enough of an impression that I don’t mind all that much. It’s an album so good I can excuse yet another fricken bad sampling the “Pain has a face” line from Hellraiser IV (“Dead Part of Cause”). I’ll let it slide with a warning this time, Suffering Mind.
Also, I heartily endorse everything this mind reading, post pre-empting chump had to say.

They Write the Songs That Make the Whole World Scream

I found it interesting the conversation about my grind mixtape for Invisible Oranges pretty much followed my own thinking when I sat down to pull that together for Cosmo. The process involved three pretty intense weeks of digging through my closet o’ grind to try to winnow down a list of must hear grind to less than an hour. (Cosmo actually asked me to keep it to 45 minutes and do about 150 words of introduction, both of which I completely failed to achieve because I just get so damn excited about this stuff.) But back to the subject at hand, my hardest problem was picking a single song to represent a band, a nation, an album or a songwriting concept. Unlike my punk or straight metal albums, I never pick up a grind record to hear a specific song. Instead, it’s about the overwhelming gestalt of an unrelenting assault upon the senses. Grindcore is synergistic – its sum is greater than its constituent parts. That means I find grind to be more of an overall listening experience than a collection of thematically or musically related songs. I think that insight pretty much defines the difference between an avid grindcore fan and your run of the mill metalhead. However, while I played familiar albums over and over looking for comp-worthy songs, I was forced to really listen to individual tracks and I was struck by how some grind purveyors are able to rise about the sound’s self-imposed limitations to craft genuinely interesting songs that can easily stand on their own.

Squash Bowels?
Carcass have been famously dismissive of Reek of Putrefaction, their (supposedly) malformed firstborn. The band immediately switched playing styles after birthing gore grind, casually moving on to help found the melodic death metal and death ‘n’ roll sounds. But despite their own disavowals, Reek of Putrefaction, for all its under-produced, deliberately low-brow assault, that all barely masks some of the better song writers the earliest grindcore scene produced. “Fermented Innards” is a slow burn masterpiece that allots a full minute –most songs’ runtimes – to build the anxiety and let Bill Steer’s bonesaw leads scrape through gristle and marrow before being blasted away. Far too often grind songs are from the hit it and quit school that giving a song that kind of breathing room is damn near revolutionary. Did I mention the song is more than 20 years old?
Carcass – “Fermenting Innards”

The Sleep of Angels
Can atheists cannonize saints? My crack research staff is telling me no. Well, fuck them because Mieszko Talarczyk should be the patron saint of grindcore. It’s impossible to discuss the style without his name coming up because he was the single greatest songwriter the genre has ever belched up. Nasum had any number of jaw droppers in their back pockets through the course of four full lengths and a bazillion EPs and comp appearances, but when they when they dropped the speed and dimmed the lights on “The Final Sleep” from masterwork Helvete, that’s when their prowess – and their emotional intensity – staked their own square of grind pavement. I love grind, but one thing it doesn’t really do well is emotion. That is, unless you consider “break shit” an emotion. Again, my research staff is saying no. Killjoys. But listen to “The Final Sleep” and you’ll hear anxiety wrapped in a thin pastry of bravado from an artist who swung the kind of sack to let things like insecurity and self-doubt rise to the fore. The only thing more disappointing than Talarczyk’s tragic death is that his emotional honesty is still such a rarity.
Nasum – “The Final Sleep”

Sheet Metal Sheet Music
Scott Hull pretty much perfected the sensory overload style of grind that most people associate with the style between Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope and the absurdly awesome Altered States of America. While that band was pretty much regarded as a curious novelty until it slowed things down enough for the non-grinding masses on Agorapocalypse, Pig Destroyer has pretty much gotten the respect it so obviously deserves from the get-go. In this case get-go means second album Prowler in the Yard where Hull definitely proved himself one of the greatest metal musicians – notice I didn’t just say grind – ever. OK, so when I said I don’t listen to grind albums for one specific song, I lied. Listening to Prowler in the Yard, for me, is all about that sweet anticipation for “Sheet Metal Girl,” easily my favorite Pig Destroyer song. It kicks it with an Exodus-style thrash gallop that’s abraded by JR Hayes’ scathing, psychotic howl. And all that’s before the shrieking harpy guitar leads scythe through the mix sounding as though they had been punched out of sheet metal by some demonic press.
Pig Destroyer – “Sheet Metal Girl”

Who’s the Master? Shoah Nuff!
While I agree with Zmaj that Magrudergrind aren’t quite strong enough to hold their own against the likes of Kill the Client just yet, the D.C. band’s place on the comp was due to more than my own hometown bias. Magrudergrind made the cut for one reason alone: “Martyrs of the Shoah.” I can’t tell you the last time I heard something as affecting as that ballsy little tune’s mix of grindcore and Yiddish folk music. The juxtaposition of rage and sorrow between those two passages is a bold artistic statement that separates them from their peers. Grindwise, “Martyrs of the Shoah” boasts a slow build opening that ponders the senseless loss of 6 million murdered lives with a brooding power violence soul and stop/start precision. And as the feedback slowly crackles out, rage gets swept away by a cappella folk song sorrow, the only possible response to such an atrocity.
Magrudergrind – “Martyrs of the Shoah”

Freakery on a Leash
Befitting their status as a Repulsion-grade grindcore circus of deliberately low-brow and low-fi intention and execution, Cretin led by mistress Marissa Martinez proudly fly the freak flag for the grotesquerie they set to music. But don’t let the carnival atmosphere blind you to the band’s artistic merits, especially on a song like “Walking a Midget.” These guys (and gal) have put some serious thought into their craft. “Walking a Midget” is a masterpiece of deliberately conservative songwriting. At its core, the song is your basic verse/chorus/solo construction, just scummed up for the grind masses. It’s all driven by an appropriately graven Repulsion meta-thrash riff that gets repurposed and recycled throughout the song. The deftest touch to the deliberately retrograde songsmithy are Col Jones’ half-time cymbals that counterpoint the consistently blasting snare, building tension from the percussion up.
Cretin – “Walking a Midget”

Necrophobic
Between Jon Chang’s hellboy shriek and otaku fanboy enthusiasm and Dave Witte’s penchant for playing in pretty much every band that ever existed, Discordance Axis’ Rob Marton occasionally gets lost in the shuffle. Oh sure, we all talk about the degenerative nerve condition that ultimate stopped him from performing, but the guy hardly gets any credit for being one of the finest songwriters to ever set plectrum to string. But don’t he wasn’t a prime mover in making The Inalienable Dreamless the most unfuckwithable grind album ever set to tape. Song after song the guy just bangs out mindblowingly awesome, catchy riffs that marry punk simplicity with a Tin Pan Alley ear for a virulent tune. Go grab the album and put on “The Necropolitan,” one of my favorites songs from an CD filled with a dozen “favorite song evAR!” candidates that could be argued for decades. Marton’s swirling half time guitars swim almost languidly against the rabbit heart blasts and Chang’s pneumatic trap, creating a churning, tense dynamic. It’s a deft touch from a band of musical visionaries whose contributions to grindcore are only belatedly being fully appreciated.
Discordance Axis – “The Necropolitan”

G&P Review: Squash Bowels

Squash Bowels
Grind Virus
Willowtip
Lucky man that I am, I recently did battle with H1N1, and "Squash Bowels" pretty much sums up how I felt for that week. Not because of the flu, which consisted of a cough, savage fever and a week shambling around the house in a bathrobe like an Ozzy impersonator. No, the intestinal torture was a byproduct of the Tamiflu I was prescribed. What nobody told me was the side effects of Tamiflu include gut wrenching stomach cramps and the kind of projectile vomiting that would do Linda Blair proud.
I would love to have been there for that drug pitch meeting. "Well, we have this amazing flu remedy, but the side effects are worse than having the flu."
Grind Virus, Squash Bowels’ first full length solo effort since 2005’s Love Songs, is a particularly infectious strain because the Polish trio (featuring Arthur, the bass player from Exit Wounds) isn’t determined to break land speed records. Squash Bowels realize it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. So they ease off the accelerate enough to bring the old school crush of Repulsion worshipers Cretin (portions of “Shit Oneself” sound enough like “Cock Fight” a paternity test may be in order) blended with the body horror fixation of Sewn Shut (with whom they’ve shared a split). The loose, relaxed approach gives “Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Ass” – a seminar in grindcore songwriting economy – an almost thrashy tinge and spotlights the brain drill attack of “Two Cows and Monkey.” When Squash Bowels do cute loose with the speed, drummer Marius’ crashing, strident style gives the blasting a sense of impact.
In an era of overblown swine flu panic, Squash Bowels are a very effective curative. Side effects may include nausea, vomiting and a profound sense of satisfaction.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Selfhate

Selfhate
At the Beginning God Created Fear
Selfmadegod
1998
Self Hate did for Polish grind what Vader were for the country’s death metal rep. At the Beginning God Created Fear is a remarkable time capsule of mid-’90s grind, a cross pollination of Scum and Jouhou that rolls in Horrified’s signature rattling bones and open grave fetor production style.
At the Beginning God Created Fear is a time capsule from an era when grindcore was still a jumped up hybrid of thrash and hardcore that had yet to firmly establish its boundaries and rules. Self Hate lard their blast beat onslaught with nods to European thrash that could have been swiped from just about any early Kreator album such as the stop, start cymbal grabs of “Na Naszych Oczach” or the double kick pitting of “Exterminacja.” At the same time, At the Beginning straddles the line of what we would consider modern day grindcore as Self Hate staggers through the alternating vodka stumble and exfoliating blast wail of “Mundurowe Swinie” and brute bullishness of “Experyment.” “Zaraza” even plays out like an extended, two minute cut of Discordance Axis’ “Dystopia,” complete with Jon Chang bitch screams.
Poland has proven itself to be a grindcore powerhouse in the 21st Century looking back with trad bruisers like Exit Wounds and laying claim to new terrain with grindonauts Antigama, but the country’s contributions to grind go back even further with Self Hate holding a proud place as gatekeepers.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Rzeznia

Rzeznia
Mathematic Grind
Selfmadegod
2003
Remember the first George Bush? A demon to the left at the time, Bush Pere (whose wife would be a shoe in for the Nobel Peace Prize if she had swallowed more often during their early marriage) seems like a downright likeable guy and canny commander in chief in retrospect. And at a time when a neutered Republican Party can’t seem to form a coherent policy position that doesn’t rely on further tax cuts on the plutocracy, it’s especially delicious to hear defunct Poles Rzeznia kick off Mathematic Grind with the classic “Read my lips” sample that sank the elder Bush’s political career.
But don’t worry about the false advertising of the album’s name. Unlike fellow countryment Antigama, Rzeznia will not be asking you to whip out your Texas Instruments T-84 graphing calculators during their half an hour workout of scabbed over Repulsion bass and pathological Carcass gurgles. There’s not too much here that a five year old couldn’t calculate on one hand; and that’s not a pejorative.
Unlike Antigama, whose Large Hadron Collider-core is intent on inverting the laws of physics, Rzeznia spice their traditional grind outbursts with stabs of left field weirdness. “Rzeznik” double-foots the brake to make way for a mid-song atonal a capella break while the band lets off some steam (gas?) with the belched vocals of “Tek-kno L.”
Padding out Mathematic Grind’s brief, to the point 11 song running time, Selfmadegod’s reissue includes a slew of live tracks and cutting room floor tidbits of varying sound quality that capture the essence of the band’s rough throated bass jud assault. Be warned, though, the vocals get obliterated in most of the extras’ murky mix.
Rzeznia could be ferocious when they set their mind to traditional grind (a cover of Brujeria’s “La Mignet” is a bass-led brick bat assault in a blind alley on the wrong side of Krakow) they were a ferocious outfit that more than justified their album’s severed limb artwork. But these clown princes with a conscience also slipped a comedic mickey into the typically dour Eastern European grind scene.

G&P review: Antigama

Antigama
Warning
Relapse
I have never been much of an Antigama fan. I don’t get what most people heard in Resonance. I thought it was an enervated and rather dull collection of songs by musicians who were just trying too hard to be bizarre and lost sight of the art of songwriting and niceties like passion.
But even with that antipathy, I have to admit Warning hooked me from the whipsnap opening of “Disconnected.” I’m starting to get it.
Warning, the band’s second Relapse effort, is far more hungry than anything I’ve heard from the Poles previously as they finally find the delicate balance between the bizarre and the blast. Antigama elevated their game by scuffing up their sound. Where I thought Resonance sounded sterile, Warning’s guitars feel contused and abraded while the snare drum sound captures that perfectly tinny practice room sound.
That rougher feel gives more … err … resonance to the band’s freakier moments like the spiral staircase guitar work of “Jealously” or arresting percussion of “Heartbeat.” Antigama also explore new sonic vistas amid all the grinding. “Lost Skull’s” bent notes and malarial swamp pacing could have be lifted from just about any NOLA great. Patryk Zwolinkski’s raspy vocal take even oozes a young Phil Ansemlo and bassist Szymon Czech’s guitar solo should serve notice to Sebastian Rokicki he faces a serious challenge for six string dominance in the band.
Antigama are testing the limits of my hard won respect ,though. In the middle of the interminable plunking piano and meandering drums of “Paganini Meets Barbapapex” my wife wandered through the room and asked my why I was listening to Spinal Tap’s “Jazz Odyssey.” (Still no word on who gets the big dressing room – the Poles or the puppets.) Ditto on the organ abuse of Sequenzia Dellamorte, which never seems to find a place amid the rest of the album’s twisted bangers.
Other than that, count me converted.

G&P review: Exit Wounds

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

G&P review: F.A.M.

F.A.M.
Bullet(in)
Scrotum Jus
Despite what I hear about Tina Fey’s dead on Sara Palin, I haven’t wasted 90 minutes of my life being bored by Saturday Night Live since Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey were both on staff (which, in itself, dates me in ways almost as frightening as the amount of hair I find in my comb every morning). All that pointless prologue is merely my way of excusing myself should anybody think I’m trying to make some trendy-four-years-ago observation when I say, was that just a fucking cowbell I heard in the middle of “Driller,” an otherwise respectable grindcore tune from Poland’s F.A.M.?
It takes a lot to distinguish yourself in a musical scene as whose frontiers are as deliberately limited as grindcore. In a vain bid to somehow distinguish their unique strain of punk-meets-metal-in-a-basement noise from everyone else with the same idea, some bands simply rename the style, as though we wouldn’t notice. Agathocles pass off their Napalmisms as mincecore; Japan’s leading grind export, 324, dub their music darkness grind; and Kataklysm remain the sole purveyors of northern hyperblast. Furor Arma Ministrat, as they call themselves, bill their particular brand of blastbeat racket as “Panzer Grind” (an odd notion given Poland's 20th Century history with panzers). But it’s just grind and it will take more than a new nomenclature to separate F.A.M.’s love of pig squeal vocals and beer hall drum beats from the crowded hordes. Compounding the problem, there are occasional flashes of crafty songwriting that leave me salivating like Pavlov’s proverbial pup. The skipping riff that propels the latter half of “Tapping Nerves” is more catching than ebola at a Jack in the Box drive through window. When they click, as with their savage cover of The Exploited’s “Beat the Bastards,” F.A.M. begin to live up to their panzer grind tag.
If F.A.M. could trim the lard and double down their effort to write decent songs (lose the cowbell), I could be all over this. For now, it’ll land in my occasional listen pile.

G&P review: Antigama/Nyia split

Antigama/Nyia
Split
Selfmadegod Records
Smoking Poles Antigama and Nyia hopped into the creative sack on this split, but this slight EP somehow fails to build up to a satisfying climax.
Antigama follow up their solid but occasionally grating Relapse debut, Resonance, with six more tracks of twitchy, electrocuted grind but fail to deliver anything substantially different from what we’ve heard from them before.
“Torture’s” title comes off as more warning than advertisement as its 90 seconds of blurring electro babble seem to drag on interminably before giving way to the satisfying, blast beat laden “ADV.” That song, with its stop/start tempos, is one of the EP’s easy highlights, but unfortunately, it gives way to more pointless rambling in “The Trio Infernal,” a pointless mix of jazzy bass, cymbal rolls and twittering birds. Song birds are many things, but infernal they are not.
Antigama, with their clear willingness to experiment, have true potential to give the staid grind scene a much needed jolt to the ‘nads, but the trio just never seems to fully incorporate their left field potential into consistently listenable tunes.
Fellow travelers Nyia suffer from the same affliction. The Polish band’s three tracks meander all over the musical landscape, channeling Justin Broadrick circa Messiah (“Of the Will”) and otherwise sounding like a cut rate Antigama.
Both bands feature talented musicians capable of wringing impressive skronks and screeches from their instruments, but the bleeps, bloops and blasts fail to gel into a listenable whole.