You Grind…But Why?: Richard Johnson

When people call Richard Johnson the Grindfather, they’re not bullshitting. The guy kicked off the drum machine grind phenomenon with the legendary Enemy Soil (midwifing two-thirds of Pig Destroyer in the process), helped drive the sound to perfection in Agoraphobic Nosebleed and can also be spotted getting his grind ’n’ roll on with Drugs of Faith. Johnson has been a pretty integral fixture in modern grind’s evolutionary sweep and ensures its vitality by quietly mentoring young musicians as well. So I was especially interested in hearing his back story.

“I started getting into metal, HC and punk in high school,” Johnson said. “I was less into escapism like comic books and more into the extremes, and I felt that grindcore was more extreme than anything else. I also had a love for HC and punk that was a different love than for metal (death metal), and I could see grind was rooted in the former. Napalm Death became one of my favorite bands—well, in the top five, anyway.
“I used to have the Live Corruption VHS tape in my VCR more than any other video. Nuclear Blast, I think it was, had a cassette bootleg of the audio that they were selling in their catalog. Not the official live album, but the audio of the home video, interviews and all.
“The way I like to put it, and I think I took this from Wadge when that guy said it in my zine, is that sometimes you need a kick in the pants, and World Downfall by Terrorizer will do it for you. I love the feel of the blast beat married with crunching the three-string power chord.”

Blast(beat) from the Past: Nuclear Winter

Nuclear Winter
Abomination Virginborn
Blastbeat Mailmurder
2003
Greek duo Nuclear Winter sound like they’ve been slinking up the same left hand path and chanting the same ultimate incantations that have long driven Entombed and Vader on this 7-inch of old style death murkiness. Another shoot growing off the StraightHate/Dephosphorus family tree, Nuclear Winter paid tribute to the past masters of dismal death over the course of three songs.
Unlike a lot of death metal, which insists on unremitting brutality and technical acumen, Nuclear Winter recognized that atmosphere was often a more important component. The band is perfectly comfortable cranking along at cruising speeds with the top down, enjoying the feel of the wind in their hair. They up the tempo to an organic blastbeat only as an accent rather than the spine of the song. That means they rely on the authentically charnel old school guitar tones to carry the songs. However, there’s a thinness that make the lack of a second guitar or bass palpable. With the added texture additional instrumentation would have provided, these three songs would really crush. But Nuclear Winter make do with what they have available. There are no drum triggers, the blastbeats sound human, the riffs chainsaw, the art is suitably Hellhammered and the guitars are full of those pinched squealy sounds. This is death metal the way I remember it.

[Full disclosure: Blastbeat Mailmurder sent me a review copy.]

Demo-lition Derby: Gozer

Gozer
WARNING: Product May Contain Gozer
As with Mumakil’s Behold the Failure, the title of Gozer’s demo may be all the warning some people need, depending on their taste preferences. The Ohio band starts with an admirable conceit: there’s not nearly enough Bill Murray in grindcore. So they lard their 17 songs with a rash of choice sampled Murray-isms (amusingly, given the name, none from Ghostbusters). It’s a clever enough proposition that further underlines my dismay with how most other bands interweave movie bits into their songs.
So Gozer tee up what should be a fairly fun romp through grinding silliness, but their concept got lost in the execution. Unfortunately, the guitars sound like the demos I used to make by running my amp head straight into a cassette deck and hitting “record.” It’s a buzzy, blurry swamp that wars with the drum (machine?), making it hard to enjoy the music. That’s a shame because Gozer do pull a few neat tricks, such as the hopscotching panning pranks on “When Sweetmeat Met White Trash.” Additionally, Gozer are far too reliant on a tedious, stuttered chugging move to carry their songs forward from one musical idea to the next.
Overall, Gozer is amateurish but inoffensive. It’s a clever conceit that screams for better execution and a little helpful editing. You can check out their demo and a few other efforts for free at their Bandcamp page, but warning: the product may contain Gozer.

You Grind…But Why?: Digby Pearson

There’s a pretty good chance that none of us would be here getting our grind on if Digby Pearson hadn’t stepped up to get the blastbeaten ball rolling. The Earache majordomo is directly responsible for bringing the first, defining wave of grinding goodness to the BPM-starved masses. Napalm Death, Carcass, Terrorizer and Brutal Truth all owe their careers to Pearson’s backing. Regardless of what you may think of his post-grind forays into other musical niches and the public falling out with many of those early bands, the guy was there and played a crucial role at a time when nobody thought there was even a market, let alone a name, for this stuff. So what got his grind gears growling nearly 25 years ago?

“The motive for what the bands created and what Earache supported in the early days was pretty much just to inflict the maximum NOISE possible onto the general public,” Pearson said. “Maybe even cause the demise of all ‘normal’ music, that would have been a bonus. I had some lofty, crazy ideas back then, to be sure, and was very single-minded and obsessive about it, even with scant resources.
“At no point was a recognised genre that would become highly popular envisioned. That was a laughable concept in 1986-8.
“People forget it was more or less avant-garde, highly experimental music during that explosive first couple of years. From Godflesh to Carcass, the motive was to warp minds.
“There were some ‘noisy’ atonal anarcho/HC punk bands around, even some extremely noisy indie acts...but Earache encouraged its bands to push the envelope way further into extreme metallised noise --and to hell with the consequences.
“Scum itself was described as ‘hyperspeed thrash’ by me on its release in 1987 (because thrash was the then-current most extreme form of metal).
“ ‘Grindcore’ first appeared as a genre description in September 1989 on the sticker on Earache’s Grindcrusher comp.”

Demo-lition Derby: Per Capita

Per Capita
The Damage Done
Bands like Germany’s Per Capita are the reason I keep blogging. This band has its shit nicely together on demo The Damage Done. They lead with a chipped-tooth bass that rocks a distinctive, crusty Vulgar Pigeons kinda vibe. It’s a perfect pinpoint that comes flying out the gate on the Dawkins-checking “The God Delusion.” It both propels and defines Per Capita’s brash confrontation.
But what makes me happiest is that just as soon as you think you’ve got a handle on Per Capita, they start tossing in d-beat theatrics stolen from any number of bands that may have once counted Tomas Lindberg among their membership. “Resignation” liberally borrows from Skitsystem while the gang choruses of “No White Supremacy” could have been lifted from “Dead Weight” on Disfear’s Live the Storm.
Mixing up d-beat and grind is not going to win any prizes for originality, but Per Capita have a firm grasp on what makes each sub-genre work and how they can best be blended. With 10 rocking originals and a spot on Dropdead cover, The Damage Done is definitely a demo I’d recommend downloading.

G&P Review: GROG

Women’s lack of rights has nothing to do with not being allowed to vote or to be judges – those matters don’t constitute any sort of right. No, it has to do with the fact that in sexual relations she’s not the man’s equal. She doesn’t have the right to avail herself of the man or abstain from him, according to her desire, to select the man she wants rather than be the one who’s selected. You may say that would be monstrous. Very well. Then the man shouldn’t have these rights, either. The way things are at present, the woman is deprived of the rights possessed by the man. And, in order to compensate for this, she acts on the man’s sensuality, forces him into subjection by means of sensuality, so that he’s only formally the one who chooses – in actual fact it’s she who does the choosing. And once she has mastered this technique, she abuses it and acquires terrible power over men.

Leo Tolstoy
“The Kreutzer Sonata”
1887

GROG
Scooping the Cranial Insides
Murder Records
I’m always am/conf-used by porno/gore bands that thank their wives and girlfriends in the liner notes. I try to imagine how I would react to having songs about gang rape and bukkake dedicated to me, but it’s a wonderfully bizarre world and I’m sure there’s someone out there who finds it flattering. Assuming the Sofia that GROG-ster Alexandre Ribeiro thanks “for what was, what is, and what shall be” in the liner notes is the same Sofia who contributes orgasmic groans to the rectal violation tale “Anal Core,” I’m just going to concede that Rule 34 is still in effect and then try to scrub that image from my cortex.
Portugual’s GROG grind with a brutal death edge (the chestburster vocals and unrelenting/monotonous double bass) and they wouldn’t be half bad if they weren’t perverting all that talent in services of songs named “10 Cummandments,” “Sphincterized (Materialized in Shit)” and “Hanged by the Cojones,” which comes closest to something identifiable as humor.
Because the band clearly has the chops to aspire to better. Witness the opener “Toia Mai,” a Maori tribal chant/percussion number that sounds like something Sepultura or Neurosis would have experimented with in the 1990s before exploding into first true song “Beyond the Freakish Scene,” a slippery sinuous slash of grind and death pounding. But the retardedly juvenile lyrical detritus and a bit of same-iness to the songs (just about every one ends with the same resonating cymbal crash) does wear over 37 minutes.
GROG can blast with the pack and can bust out a decent tune (“Acephalic Meatgrind Orgy Hibernation” sneaks and snarls in a way that sets it apart from the album’s all-blast ethos) and that best that can be said about their lyrical content is that the vocals render them completely unintelligible.

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

You Grind…But Why?: Takafumi Matsubara

No guitarist in recent years has proved more challenging, more intriguing and generally more awesome than Takafumi Matsubara who made a name for himself in Mortalized before tag-teaming with Jon Chang for GridLink and Hayaino Daisuki. His playing is relentlessly technical and endlessly intricate but never loses sight of the musical endgame. This is the musician Chang, a notorious perfectionist, told me has pushed him further and more relentlessly than any other in his career. The guy has also given one of the most insightful and inspiring odes to grind and all of its possibilities you’re likely to hear.

“I love speed,” Matsubara-san said. “And grindcore is free music for me. So it is the best way for me to make something. I hope my songs are art. I cannot write novels and cannot make movies. So I write songs and play the guitar.”