G&P Review: Kratzer/Kvazar

Kratzer/Kvazar
Split
7 Degrees/Blastbeat Mailmurder
There’s a gray-scale anti-rainbow that haunts the periphery of the visible spectrum and Kratzer and Kvazar divide its hues between them on their fog-colored split effort. The effect is like a reverse Wizard of Oz where all of the color and joy are leached out of a broken and disappointing world.
German crusties Kratzer dwell at the center of a bizarre Goode homolosine projection of the punk rock world in which the sneaky melodicism of Scandinavian d-beat somehow abuts raging Japanese hardcore. Kratzer chip their seven crusted cries from the cracking cement of abandoned playgrounds, ruptured highways and crumbling brutalist highrises, choked in the ash of industrial smog and sickened by the pestilential runoff of industrial waste. It’s the gray grime of our own claustrophobic modernity as its plaster veneer chips away, exposing the flimsy foundation beneath. The moody, mercurial “?/!” glooms its way through the broken landscape, the pivot point of Kratzer’s contribution, a murky slow motion encapsulation of their dimmed horizons and pervasive hopelessness.
After Kratzer managed to paint so evocative a portrait using only monochromatic tools, it’s kind of a bummer that Kvazar’s side is also bogged down in gray. Only this time it is the uniform mush of a bowl of oatmeal.  Apparently the band has been lurking in the Greek grind scene since time immemorial and these, their final songs, were trapped in cryostasis until they recruited Dephosphorus’ Panos Agoros to come in add the missing vocals. Unfortunately, the murky, mushy production that squashes everything together doesn’t play to the astro-grinder’s strengths, burying his distinctive yelp behind flat sounding drums and guitars. The endless gray horizons of one anonymous song after another only makes things worse as Kvazar just slog their way along colorlessly. Where Kratzer’s grays are an accurate snapshot of a black and white world, Kvazar’s contribution is a despondent drone through a missed opportunity. After the intriguing opening half, it’s a shame the second side of this promising split doesn’t live up to its amazing gray art.

[Full disclosure: 7 Degrees sent me a review copy.]

Good Reads: Dark Knight of the Soul

The book: Arkham Aslyum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean

I currently have subscriptions to three separate Batman titles. My home library has a dedicated Batman shelf. I have a different Batman shirt for just about every day of the week (not including my hoodie, pajamas and ubiquitous hat). My only contribution to decorating Lil Grinder’s room was installing a Bat Signal night light. I’ve been known to blow whole weekends watching Batman movies, starting with Adam West and working my way up to Christian Bale, only stirring from the couch as my bladder and stomach demand. I would go gay for Kevin Conroy. What I’m trying to say is I have a thing for Batman. (My wife would say that “thing” is an “obsession,” but what do she and that psychologist at my intervention know?) Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum is my favorite Dark Knight story. No other Batman tale is as visually arresting, artistically dazzling or as thematically rich as the hypnogogic menagerie of Carroll-ian revelry McKean and Morrison magicked up in 1989. The very loose inspiration for the game of the same name, Arkham Asylum locks Batman in the titular madhouse to be h(a)unted by a roster of his most challenging villains after the Joker springs them loose on April Fool’s Day. From there, Morrison weaves a symbolic, psychologically rich story that casts Batman in a whole new light, forcing him on to the path of the hero’s journey as he plumbs the depths of his own fear. Let’s just say it’s not every day you see the Dark Knight crying for his mommy like a little bitch. It also turned the Mad Hatter from a B-list joke to one of the absolutely creepiest villains in the entire rogue’s gallery. McKean's impressionistic, multi-modal art would only intensify the fractured, dreamlike logic that pervaded the entire story. Unlike the Bat-titles Morrison would pen later, here he has no interest in rehashing the mythos of the stoic Caped Crusader and his implacable quest for justice. Instead, Morrison breaks down Batman psychologically, forcing Gotham’s favorite crypto-fascist plutocrat to contemplate the warped motives that would drive a man to dress up in a rubber suit and spend his nights beating up the diseased and deformed, the impoverished and insane.

A representative passage:
“Afraid? Batman’s not afraid of anything. It’s ME. I’M afraid. I’m afraid the Joker may be RIGHT about me. Sometimes I… QUESTION the rationality of my actions. And I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates… When I walk into ARKHAM and the doors close behind me… It’ll be just like coming home.”

The album: Tree of No Return by Tusk


While not Batman themed (and oh does the world ever need a Batman themed grind band!), Tusk’s grind/sludge masterpiece is psychological horror tale about a dude getting lost in the woods, going insane from exposure and dehydration and eventually getting eaten by bears. Both Arkham Asylum and Tree of No Return are possessed by the notion of how your surroundings can affect your outlook (the relevant phobias being claustro- and agora-, respectively), something that has intrigued me since my first visit to the psychological gauntlet of the Holocaust Museum.  The wide open woods have never felt so fraught as they do in the hands of 75 percent of Pelican gone grind. The songs blast and snarl at the start but elongate and warp as the album wears on, drawing out into sludgy psychedelia as our protagonist loses not only his sense of direction but his sense of self. It’s much the same psychological breakdown Batman suffers in the shadow-haunted halls of Arkham.

A representative song: “Starvation Dementia”



Black swarms cut the moon apart. Leather wings carry rabid heart. Skyward hordes over moon-swept wood. Wraiths of madness fro blackest earth. Lunarscape shown bright, now gone. Nowhere lands orbit on. Unseen vissoth stir about. Hidden something , crawling sounds whipper out there from a rock, scratching round tree bark.
…
No more feeling like a human being. Necron spider limbs rattle along herky jerky from wilderness to beyond. No more feeling like a human being. No more.

G&P Review: Heartless

Heartless
Certain Death
Halo of Flies
Certain Death’s finest moments perch on that nanometer wide precipice that razors anticipation from action. Heartless are a hardcore band that revel in that held-breath moment that comes before unleashing chaos, and their eight song EP is a punk rock pep rally that’s there to prep you for the big game. While this Pittsburgh quartet never quite achieve that orgasmic release they keep building toward, you won’t walk away from Certain Death with your rabbles unroused either.
Like a leaner Black Ships or a less intricate Trap Them, Heartless yank the hardcore rip cord and set off in a straight line to stomp, obstacles be damned. The slow burner “Mute” eventually crashes through the scenery at a near grindcore pace, but Certain Death’s strengths come in the down moments where guitarist Rick Mauck nearly scrapes his knuckles on the pavement trying to get low. It lays a foundation for vocalist Cory Smith to bark his way into your heart has he rends his trachea at the world. Certain Death stumbles to its demise 11 minutes later with the bummer trip of its title track, a chug-a lug-roundabout that takes the peaks Heartless spent the EP cresting and bleeds its out to a gray faced death. But by then you already know that only death is certain.

[Full disclosure: Halo of Flies sent me a download.]

Good Reads: Roommates

The book: The Room by Hubert Selby

A petty criminal, The Room’s only character, sits in a jail cell awaiting his trial. Isolated physically and emotionally, the unnamed narrator spins elaborate fantasies of increasingly violent and depraved revenge for purely imagined slights. He builds himself up as the pure avenger of wholly imagined wrongs, a fantasy paragon at odds with his anonymous, routine criminality. The criminal lashes out against the imaginary strictures that have landed him in jail in a chilling portrait of incoherent violence and the cost of fraying social ties. Like The Catcher in the Rye, The Room is thin on plot, but Selby penned a stunning character study, probing the fragile psyche of a born loser whose egomaniacal rage and incoherence are just as much of a prison as the bars that keep him locked up.

A representative passage:
Just twist it around and shove it up their asses, treading the floor of his cell, nodding his head with strong approval, shove it up and break it off. Those ugly mothers cunts. I dont need no fucking lawyer to make those cocksuckers look like idiots. When I get through I/ll fixem good. I/ll showem. The dumb sonsabitches. Krist, what a bunch of ignorant slobs Filthy, fucking slobs and they can shove people around just because they have a badge. Ignorant fucking okies who dont know their asses from a fucking hole in the ground and they get away with murder because they have that fucking uniform and a crew cut, the flattop bastards. The fucking flattop bastards. Drive around like theyre king shit. Drink coffee and eat donuts like they own the fucking joint. Looking down their noses at people. Who in the fuck do they think they are. Nothin but a bunch of ignorant slobs and they look down their noses at people. Jesus, what a pair of balls they have. What a fucking pair of balls, pounding across the floor, waving his hands, take away their guns and they aint shit. They aint worth a fiddlers fuck. I dont know who in the fuck they think they are, but I/ll be goddamned if theyre going to get away with it. I/ll showem. I/ll be a rotten sonofabitch if I dont showem.

The album: Prowler in the Yard by Pig Destroyer

J.R. Hayes’ head is a Selby-esque place, full of lurking horrors, crippling emotional vacancy and self-inflicted nightmares. Prowler in the Yard’s stalkerriffic story line could easily have been culled from Selby’s work. Transpose it into Selby’s idiosyncratic grammar and you could practically slide it into any number of the Brooklyn author’s works. Selby and Hayes both weave tales of impotent figures who can only take their rage out on imaginary targets, too passive and cowed to act out in life. They’re characters that have regressed into an inner fantasy land because real life has left them beaten and ignored. Both take you deep into the mind of a person you definitely don’t want to be, but, if you’re honest, can probably relate to more than is necessarily comfortable.

A representative song: “Junkyard God”



My knuckles are bleeding on your front door and these flowers are wilting in the rain. They were for you and now they are for no one. They are irrelevant as mercenaries in times of peace. They are smoke twisting off the lips of a movie star. Here is a boy with paper skin who longs to touch the girl of broken glass. She loves it when he wears his skin like that. In tatters.

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.]

Good Reads: Danger Bird

The book: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle might be the Murakmi-est of Marukami’s novels. It ticks off a list of several recurring motifs in his writing, including vanishing women, passive men, symbolic cats and sudden shifts into the realm of bizarre magic realism. There’s a bone-deep melancholy to the allegorical tale of an unwittingly unraveling marriage. But Murakami makes a fascinating choice to pair the intimate tale of two people falling out of love with a digression into the history of Japan’s atrocities in Manchuria during World War II, something the Japanese tend to gloss over. Early on, the protagonist meets an elderly veteran of Japan’s China campaign who recounts the horrors he’s witnessed committed by every nation involved, the horror of which still haunts him and erodes his confidence in his country and culture. Murakami pairs a couple whose breakdown in communication ruptures their marriage, thematically playing that off of Japan’s unwillingness to face to its own history of atrocities.

A representative passage:
Before long, the entire skin of Yamamoto’s right arm had come off in a single thin sheet. The skinner handed it to the man beside him, who held it open in his fingertips, circulating among the others to give them a good look. All the while, blood kept dripping from the skin. Then the officer turned to Yamamoto’s left arm, repeating the procedure. After that he skinned both legs, cut off the penis and testicles, and removed the ears. Then he skinned the head and the face and everything else. Yamamoto lost consciousness, regained it, and lost it again. The screams would stop whenever he passed out and continue when he came to again. But his voice gradually weakened and finally gave out altogether. All this time, the Russian officer drew meaningless patterns on the ground with the heel of his boot. The Mongolian soldiers watched the procedure in silence. Their faces remained expressionless, showing neither disgust nor excitement nor shock. They watched Yamamoto’s skin being removed a piece at a time with the same kind of faces we might have if we were out for a stroll and stopped to have a look at a construction site.

The album: Forward into Regression by Maruta

Florida’s recently reanimated Maruta take their name for the Japanese word for "log of wood," which was the derogatory term members of the infamous Unit 731 would use for the Chinese prisoners that they experimented on in ways that would appall Joseph Mengele. So that’s the obviously overlap. More importantly, I think, the concept suggested by the title Forward into Regression really captures something about the mindset of someone who is willing to commit the most horrific of atrocities all in the name of advancing their nation. There’s a point where violence becomes to repetitive that it becomes happenstance and that opens the doors to brutality like that committed by Unit 731, whose members never stood trial for their war crimes. The mental compartmentalization necessary to brutalize your fellow human beings while simultaneously sublimating your will to a leader you consider divine really shows the breadth of human insanity.

A representative song: “March Forward (Into Regression)”



Slave driver. Stand forth lead blind-fully, these chains of hope shall drag us with you. Drag us deep, into the ground, into the grave, into blissful obliteration. March without questions. Advance with no objection. Bound to your cables. Embodied entities in chain sequence. Move towards the ash, towards the crimson horizon. Mindless. Obedient. Devoted to follow. We march forward. Onward into regression.

G&P Review:Sick/Tired

Sick/Tired
King of Dirt
Cowabunga Records
Putting on King of Dirt is like boldly striding face first into a tornado of glass shards. It’s a maelstrom of whirling slivers intent on rending your flesh, a vortex of unremitting insanity. Sick/Tired will leave you panting and breathless after all 19 minutes of vertiginous noise lurch to a halt with the groaning lumber of the title track, a five minute mutant that’s not quite grind, not quite sludge and one of the rarest examples of successfully pulling off a slow song at the end in all of grind’s history. But that’s probably to be expected considering it was penned by Adam Jennings who also wrangles sublime noise with electronic neuromancers Winters in Osaka.
I can’t say enough about how Sick/Tired have turned in one of the noisiest, most hostile grind albums I’ve heard since Blood I Bleed’s Gods Out of Monsters. And I fucking love Gods Out of Monsters. This Chicago mob hits somewhere between Threatener's serrated fastcore and Anodyne gone full grind. And I fucking LOVE Anodyne.
King of Dirt snarls away from that precariously balanced perch between unlistenable chaos and production sharp enough to open your veins with the copious amounts of guitar feedback that get unlimbered like audio nooses on a gibbet of blasting death. Every song manages to surprise as the band bashes and hammers away at fragments of grind, beating each splinter of song into a twisted wreck distinct from the others. You won’t be humming along to Sick/Tired’s onslaught, but every song prickles the skin in a different way, giving King of Dirt a constantly evolving personality that staves off boredom even after compulsive re-listens.
This is simply one of the best records I’ve heard in years. It’s absolutely everything you can ask for in a grind album. Even after days spent listening to King of Dirt on endless repeat, Sick/Tired’s twisted hulks of songs have ways of refracting into new and more interesting shapes. Come get your tickets to the car crash.

[Full disclosure: the band sent me a download.]