Bump’n’Grind – Just What the Doctor Ordered
What? It’s not? Well, have some anyway.
Is prolonged isolation making your brain feel moldy and dusty? Do you need to purge Disney songs from your head because the kids are watching nothing else? Are you about to mainline bleach out of sheer boredom? Or do you just need to vent some righteous anger? Grindcore is here to help, and for the first time, a guest pops in to support the relief effort!
Vaginal Bear Trap – Stroke
Let’s get right to the tasteful stuff, yeah? Important things to know: 1) This isn’t pornogrind, 2) all of VBT’s releases are currently available for free, and 3) this newest one doesn’t have the greatest production. Is that really important? I suppose it’s up to you, but I think the vocals are way too quiet. Despite this, and despite having shrunken from a three-piece (afaik) down to a one-man operation, the project still delivers its trademark southern-fried, groovy goregrind that always finds the right mixture of blast, d-beat, and dosey doe. If you like anything here, you should also go back to two of my all-time favourites, Slow Jams and Just The Tip.
Collision – The Final Kill
Already teased by our free metal detector Carcassbomb, here now is the new record from the Dutch maniacs, and these dudes don’t pull any punches. With an intensity that sometimes reminds me of Die Choking, Collision blends their grindcore with thrash tropes, and the result is immensely fun. The two elements complement each other well; the thrash side is responsible for the occasional respite and some catchy riffs as well as providing song structures, and whenever needed, the band can kick things into grind mode, be it to just up the violence or strap turbines to parts that would sound boring in the hands of a generic thrash band. “Engine of Execution” and “Savage Executioner” are the best examples of the formula.
Sonic Poison / Axeslaughter – split
I’m happy to report that virtually nothing has changed about Sonic Poison since I gave you ten reasons to listen to them. The band still revel in grindcore’s earliest days and haven’t lost any of their apparent fondness for Repulsion. Thankfully, they don’t see any reason to clean up any of the mess their forefathers made, so they sound just as grimy and primitive. Perhaps even more primitive is Axeslaughter’s part of the split, where the second song is split into roughly three minutes of grind, three minutes of overwhelming, feedback-drenched, free-form noise, and then another minute of grind. That leaves us with a little over four minutes of raw-as-fuck, yet digestible material that I can get behind. I didn’t need to hear any of that experimentation though. The two sides are also available separately here and here.
WVRM – Colony Collapse
It is telling that, for a record titled Colony Collapse, the plagued honeybee survives to alight on a human skull. WVRM’s third full-length is a fearless and thundering refusal to prostrate oneself to the destructive actors of urbanization, the users of harmful pesticides, or the odious, fatal presence of Varroa mites named Lindsay Graham. WVRM is dedicated to the revolutionary removal of global colonial forces that make life unlivable for humans and honeybees alike. To this end, the album samples Fred Hampton, Jr. (“Thorn Palace”), excoriates the religio-political U.S. war machine (“Tank Reaper”), reckons with the band’s home state’s history of brutal racism (“My Fucking Dixie”), and obliquely references the abnegation of Palestinian rights (“Years of Lead”). Colony Collapse is as righteous and politically engaged as one would hope a 2020 grind record would be. The riffs ain’t bad either. –Iron Goddess of Mercy
Medical Negligence – Evil
Perhaps a bit of an outlier for this feature, but I’m getting just enough goregrind vibes that I decided to include it. Apart from that, there’s also a good dose of death and brutal death metal in here, all woven together rather tightly and equipped with a vocalist that can easily follow the band wherever they decide to take things. While he seems most comfortable with a Corpsegrinder-ish bark, he also delivers mean gutturals, shrieks, and occasionally, a shouting style that helps to bring the BDM breakdowns even closer to hardcore territory. Songs 4 through 6 best showcase the full gamut of what these guys are offering, and anybody who doesn’t hate fun should have a hell of a time with this.
Throat Breach – Humiliating Distortion
TSV-approved, brutal one-man grind that’s gotten no less ferocious since I featured the project about a year ago. That’s not to say nothing has changed, though; the 4-part “Identity Distortion” suite, in particular, shows a new propensity to dip into sludge more frequently and even employ a good dose of melody with quite some success. The excursions into mid-tempo parts somehow only serve to make everything feel even more unhinged, thanks in no small part to the tortured yet aggressive vocal approach. All in all, it’s a relentless, harrowing ride through a bleak, machine-controlled present future.
Feastem – Graveyard Earth
Karhu shone a little light on this when it came out last month, and I’d just like to reiterate how this “plutonium-powered grind punk” takes absolutely no prisoners. Everything is wound as tightly as possible, both in terms of sound and musicianship; the blasts and d-beats leave zero margin for sloppiness and the guitars buzz away at dizzying speeds. The almost non-stop intensity achieves exactly the cathartic effect I look for in grind: twenty-some minutes of pouring out all anger to efficiently and effectively clear the head.
