It’s 11:30 and the Grind is Bumpin’ Bumpin’

Because nothing says grindcore like dated R’n’B references.

Now to make a strenuous connection between that headline and what is to follow… uh… well, you could pretty much blast all of these releases on your way to the club, since most of them are really really short, as I repeatedly point out. And time, of course, is always of the essence, so let’s get right down to it.

Altars – Altars

Seems weird to be into this kind of noisy music and then complain about feedback noise, but Altars definitely starts off with too much of it. After a bit of a slow buildup though, we’re off to the races with wonderfully guttural vocals and no-mercy blasting. Amidst this chaotic mire, slower bits manage to stand out all the more for being relatively rare. Moments like that bit shortly after the halfway point of “Ancient Plague” caught me by surprise with their downright headbangability, a trait most prominently on display throughout final song “Black Magic”, which also throws in bizarre but entertaining banshee wails. The four songs are all linked together by – you guessed it – feedback noise and come to a total runtime of about eight minutes or so. I’m gonna have to come up with examples of what you can do in that timespan, cause there’s a lot more like this coming.

Misrule – Forced to Suffer

While we’re dealing with guttural vocals – don’t y’all miss Vermin Womb already? For all the fine work he does in Primitive Man, it’s always a sight to behold when Ethan McCarthy applies his sick mind to grindcore. He’s not involved in this, but all the hallmarks of his latest grind endeavor are here: the lower-than-low grunts, the bludgeoning wall of sound, and not least, the frequent shifts from high-octane grinding to the most miserable of doom. Another release spanning a mere eight minutes, but you can have an existential crisis come on in less time than that; the realization that life is neither fun nor easy most of the time and all your raging is a mere plume of smoke in a vast void manifests during the first two songs and is driven home by the remaining three.

Kluster Fuck – 7” of Fuck

11 songs, seven and a half minutes – are you sensing a pattern yet? Moving away from the gutturals, we go straight to the exact opposite. While these Danish maniacs d-beat and blast their way through a fastcore barrage of utter destruction, singer Tyt accompanies them with a shriek so frantic and high-pitched that it comes off nothing short of inhuman most of the time. While this is occasionally balanced by some lower barks, the intensity is mostly unbroken, and one can’t help the impression that this whole thing has thoroughly gone of the rails. Therein lies the fun though; rather than give in, why not party as hard as you possibly can, to the point where your body’s limits are not only put to the test, but completely exceeded? I’d say these not-quite-eight minutes are best spent simultaneously smoking meth, shotgunning a beer, and punching someone in the face really hard.

Bone Sickness – Theater of Morbidity

Oh hey, it’s an actual full-length! Of course, that still only means that it’s about 20 minutes long, and sadly, five or seven of those minutes are wasted with overlong intro samples that add absolutely nothing and just make the record stop dead in its tracks with annoying frequency. However, once you get past that bullshit, what awaits is a super fun romp through some old-school grind territory. It’s probably safe to call this album Horrified‘s unwashed cousin; the sound is less sharp and there’s far fewer of those blazing guitar leads, but the speed and spirit are wholly intact, and so is the thematic focus on gore rather than politics or beer. And lo, underneath the grime, you might even find that the songwriting is a wee bit more refined.

Morgue Walker – Forage the Ash

Songs clocking in around the three-minute mark? Are we even grinding anymore? Yes we are. Morgue Walker describe themselves as blackened deathgrind, and there certainly is a fair bit of black and death in here, mostly in terms of the vocals. I’d have thought there’s two singers at work, but it looks like singer Justin is handling both the Gollum-esque black metal shrieking and the brutal-death style gutturals all by himself. The former takes some getting used to, but ultimately, both come off as pretty imposing. Black metal doesn’t really come into the mix in any other regard, as the rest of the band mostly sticks to hella solid crusty grinding, but there’s frequent whiffs of death metal and even the occasional knuckle-dragging breakdown. It makes for a great melange that is more than competently exectued.

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