Demo-lition Derby: The Rabid Terror

The Rabid Terror
Demo
Is Australia secretly breeding melodic death metal bands as some sort of Blofeldian bid for world domination? Clearly, The Fevered’s secret Dark Tranquillity cloning operation was just the first phase in a much larger, more intricately twined plot that’s hatching before our eyes because The Rabid Terror may have advanced the calendar another decade, ripping out an amalgam of hummable Swede death and breakdowny hardcore, but they’re essentially swiping from the same song book as their countrymen. So now the question has to be asked: fer chrissakes, why?
The Fevered I gave a pass cuz I’m a nostalgic old fuck who remembers the first wave of melodic death with Alzheimery fondness, but I was already over the whole thing before the Kill Switch Engages and Darkest Hours et al began Xeroxing a Photostat of a Polaroid of the original. Another 10 years on, I’m just not sure how much life can be wrung from that desiccated corpse. Now far be it from me to shit on others’ sub-sub-sub-genre preferences (I’ve been listening to Napalm Death clones for 20 years), but melodic hardcore boomed so big and fell so hard, it’s almost impressively stubborn to see a young band try their hand at something so passé.
The Rabid Terror’s four song demo sounds perfectly fine, each instrument and the vocals are clear and meaty and have a nice physical presence. The songs run a tad long for my taste (the 3 to 4 minute range) and just never manage to establish a unique presence. Helen Keller could see the gigantic breakdown in the middle of opener “Eternally Enslaved” coming before the guitarist peels off the first tremolo bar squeal. Otherwise, things careen between In Flames oompah bounce and cargo pantsed circle pitting. This is not to my taste. It's one for the true melodic death/hardcore devotees only. It's free for download on their Facebook page. If that's your thing.

Grindcore Alphabet: O, P

OP
Opie.
The fictional Mayberry, N.C., home of Opie and Andy is smack in the heart of pork BBQ country, and even if those southern heathens slather their pork with mustard sauces (Kansas City style BBQ with a slice of Wonder Bread all the way, baby!), I have to admit it’s hard to fuck up a slow cooked rack of pork ribs sizzling with a tangy sauce. Apparently grindcore likes to dig on the swine as well. While we’ve previously dined on the rare delicacy of long pig way back at L, this time around you’ll be picking gristly bits of Pig Destroyer, Pignation and Pigsty from between your molars (and there’s another slab of pork teed up when we hit the Rs as well).
Here’s your letters O and P mixtape [Mediafire]:

The Orion Code – “The Orion Code” (United States)
Phobia – “Stink Head” (United States)
PSUDOKU – “Big Crunch” (Norway)
Phantomsmasher – “Scrolling Sideways” (United States)
The Oily Menace – “What Are You Fightin’ For? (Phil Ochs cover)” (United States)
Pg. 99 – “We Left as Skeletons” (United States)
Psychoneurosis – “Society” (Poland)
Population Reduction – “Amish Meth Dealer” (United States)
Pigsty – “Demon Alcohol” (Czech Republic)
P.L.F. – “Unseen Deceiver” (United States)
Owen Hart – “You’ll See 8 Years Olds in Hell” (United States)
O.L.D. – “Colostomy Grab Bag” (United States)
Parlamentarisk Sodomi – “Klaebukronikene (De Anarkistke An(n)aller)” (Norway)
The Parallax View – “Armed With Scripture and Functional Rationality” (United States)
Plague Rages – “Ter” (Brazil)
Pig Destroyer – “Preacher Crawling” (United States)
Obligatorisk Tortyr – “Under Ytan” (Sweden)
Psycho – “Nicotine Addiction” (United States)
Ojciec Dyktator – “Love Life of Michael K.” (Poland)
Otophobia – “Hardcore Kids Have the Coolest Tattoos” (United States)
Pignation – “Satan Saves” (Poland)
Plutocracy – “Erupt” (United States)
Poppy Seed Grinder – “Monument of Depravity” (Czech Republic)

Total to date: 290 bands

G&P Review: Noisear [UPDATE]

Update: Blogger's been having some problems the last 24 hours or so. Posts and comments seem to be disappearing. That's not anything I'm doing. Hopefully the blogging overlords get this straightened out soon.

Noisear
Subvert the Dominant Paradigm
Relapse
When Maury Povich reads off the paternity test results, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Lethargy had been sexing up Noisear’s mom before skipping town with the circus to spread the message of calliope-core to the rest of the world. Oh sure, stepdad Discordance Axis did a fine job raising the kid in deadbeat dad's absence, and his influence is pervasive throughout Relapse debut Subvert the Dominant Paradigm (the riffing on “Waiting to Be Born” is pure Rob Marton worship), but that legacy from Lethargy could notbe suppressed forever. That squeaky, squeally, skronky energy is an undeniable recessive gene.
So given the band’s influences are blindingly obvious, the dominant paradigms are going to walk away a bit less subverted than advertised. However, after standing out as the darlings of This Comp Kills Fascists Vol. 2, Noisear have bent their influences into something identifiably their own. Sleek Discordance Axis icepicks like “Global Warning” swap in and out with angular freakouts like “Fraudulent,” which sways and bounces like a snake charming tune penned by Lethargy.
The only thing that could derail Noisear’s bid to permanently join the grindcore aristocracy is one of the worst cases of the Curse of the Final Song in recent memory. Closing out the album, “Noisearuption,” which gobbles up half the album’s 40 minute run time with an excruciatingly awful , pointless, grating wipeout of electronic superfluity. When you’re on the cusp of a defining musical statement, do not squander half your audience’s allotted attention with something deliberately designed to piss them the fuck off. Stop one song short and enjoy.

G&P Review: Winters in Osaka

Winters in Osaka
Mutual Collapse
WKFEWR
Mutual Collapse, Winters in Osaka’s latest static-stained assault on your higher rational functions, is like listening to EVP recordings made in Hell. Ghastly voices and groans creak by amid scouring waves of tortured FX box noise and fast, fleeting glimpses of tortured-souled humanity. I bet “Baby Pop” is the kind of jam Pinhead the Cennobite likes to put on when he wants to relax after a long day of showing people what pain’s face really looks like.
I bought Winters in Osaka’s Swarm of Witches a few years ago by happy accident because of its list of collaborators from bands like Spazz and Brutal Truth (who return this outing as well), mistakenly assuming it would be more power of the violence rather than electronics persuasion. Mistaken conceptions aside, I found myself enjoying it more than I would have expected. Not that it’s a regular listen or anything. Mutual Collapse improves the plot with a less directly abrasive sound. Instead, it relies on subtly satanic machinations, attacking through indirection and slowly suffocating atmosphere. It’s a far more effective approach, in my opinion. The almost languorous atmosphere, building up to the 20 minute “Stairwell,” reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson saying in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that he would tune a TV to a dead channel and chill out to the white noise when riding out a bad trip. “Toll” sounds like field recordings of some disaster made through a fog of dreamy distance and fading memory. The anxiety is there, but it’s less immediate, the dangers unknown and only marginally understood.
There’s a lot of ways power electronics albums can go horrifically wrong, overstaying its welcome being chief among the most common sins. But Mutual Collapse hovers at a friendly half an hour or so and keeps most songs tight and focused. It knows the horror you see from the corner of your eye is far more evocative than the bloody wreckage splashed up for close perusal.

[Full disclosure: WiO sent me a review copy.]

Grindcore Alphabet: N

How to deal with Napalm Death? Arguably, the band has two (possibly three or four) distinct incarnations of various grindiness. I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume most of you are intimately familiar with grind’s first family, but in the interest of completeness, Napalm will be the only the second band to get double billing in a mixtape (Repulsion also got a shoutout to their early Genocide incarnation). The title track of From Enslavement to Obliteration will represent the early years while my favorite Utopia Banished tune should do the Barney years justice.
Oh, and there’s also a shitload of other great bands whose names start with N. And a lot of them are really, really fucking weird.
Here’s your letter N mixtape [Mediafire]:

Non Compos Mentis – “Come on In” (United States)
Nyia – “Of Power” (Poland)
N.I.B.I.R.U. – “The History of Enslavement” (United States)
No Gang Colors – “This Jug Kills Fascists” (United States)
Napalm Death – “Dementia Access” (England)
Nothing More to Eat – “Crackwhore Zombies” (Finland)
Neurosis – “Training” (United States)
Noisear – “Fraudulent” (United States)
Nasum – “I See Lies” (Sweden)
Nashgul – “Crematorio” (Spain)
Naked City – “Osaka Bondage” (United States)
Noism – “Computer Illiterate” (Japan)
Negligent Collateral Collapse – “The Facts” (Czech Republic)
Narcosis – “It’s Not a Birthmark, It’s a Bruise” (England)
Nyctophobic – “Restless” (Germany)
Napalm Death – “From Enslavement to Obliteration” (England)
Nuclear Death “Lurker in the Closet: A ‘Fairy’ Tale” (United States)
No Comment – “A Mother’s Crime” (United States)

Total to date: 267 bands

G&P Review: Cellgraft

Cellgraft
Deception Schematic
No Reprieve
After I’d carefully re-applied the socks that Florida’s Cellgraft had knocked off with last year’s top-10 worthy External Habitation, the band comes roaring back into 2011 with a new 7-inch’s worth of music that’s even better. Deception Schematic is more ferocious, more densely knotted, more aggressively abrasive than before. Cellgraft hasn’t deviated a micron from their Assuck-by-way-of-Discordance Axis frenzy. Rather, they’ve turned in an album that verily bleeds adrenaline. It’s hard to sit still listening to Deception Schematic.
Cellgraft have clearly grown in the last year both in the rehearsal room and in the recording studio. The guitar tone that had been a tad thin and trebly on External Habitation — the only weak point to the whole outing — is now a scooped out, refined weapon of skull destruction that roars at the forefront of the songs, jockeying with the full-throated growls and wipe out wails for dominance. Songwise, Cellgraft also continue to stun whether it’s the ominously building funnel cloud that is “To Achieve the Lesser Stone” – the only of the 11 songs to crack a minute – or the sucker punch seven seconds of “Gestalt Paroxysm.” The closing blastbeat from “Civilization Comes, Civilization Goes” is a candidate for one of the seven wonders of the grindcore world.
You can snap up the physical copy from the good people at No Reprieve records, but both the band and label are just as content for you to head straight to Mediafire for a nice, high quality download. Either way, this one’s a must. Look for Cellgraft to crack the top 10 again this year and a take a run at the upper echelon.
[Full disclosure: No Reprieve sent me a download.]

G&P Review: Total Fucking Destruction

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…. And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1971

Total Fucking Destruction
Hater
Translation Loss
Three albums in, Total Fucking Destruction have established themselves as grindcore trickster messiahs. Shifty shamans dealing slippery truths, the band has evolved far beyond being Rich Hoak’s yoga routine during Brutal Truth hiatuses (hiati?). So the most surprising curveball served up by third album Hater is just how straightforward it is. No acoustic odes. No yoga-jazz freakouts. Just 27 spastic lashings of freakazoid Hunter Thompson grind that burrow straight for the pineal gland. Total Fucking Destruction has always relied on sly, snide social commentary draped in a near-Buddhist need for repetition and mantra. Hater finds the band slimming everything down to the deceptively simple koan at each song’s core. The only digression from the grindcore center is a distinct rock swing that propels songs like “Hate Mongering Pig Pandemonium” and “Everything You Need But Nothing You Want.” “I Not Pose” gets that droney, repetition thing just right while “Time Theft” is the auditory distillation of the schizophrenic hallucination that perfectly represents Hater’s amazing charms.
Where too many bands are content to wallow in unimaginative repetition of grindcore tropes past, there’s always something expansive, explosive and challenging about Total Fucking Destruction’s full commitment, body bomb art. While they may have finished dead last in the grindcore tournament, TFD’s all gonzo assaults have resonated (resin-ated?) with me more than Brutal Truth’s post-reunion offerings. If you’ve panned them in the past, Hater could be the gateway drug to Total Fucking Destruction’s grindfreak railroad.

[Full disclosure: the label provided me with a download.]