Review: Item 9 – 2

September 12, 2024

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The duo behind Item 9 emerge from a thick cloud of pot smoke to bash out 19 minutes of grinding gorenoise. You can probably already tell if this’ll be your thing.

Before saying anything else, I’d like to thank the Las Vegas duo Item 9 for giving their upcoming album, 2, an album cover free of crime scene photos of a man’s brain splattered across the concrete. I may be a fan of goregrind, but I always appreciate not having to stare at the most horrific images LiveLeak has to offer when listening to a new record. It’s especially relieving in this case, as the duo behind Item 9 cite bands like Last Days of Humanity, Phyllomedusa, and Cystgurgle. All interesting bands in their own right, but you might want to sit records like Hymns of Indigestible Suppuration and Ubi pus, ibi fermento out if you have a weak stomach or aren’t completely desensitized to the violent realities of our existence (seriously, we’re talking really nasty pictures here—I beg you to take my word for it).

I do realize that starting a goregrind album review by praising a safe-for-work/life album cover is kind of like gushing over a black metal album’s rainbow-colored packaging. As any librarian on this side of this mortal coil will tell you, there’s more to a book than its cover (they might also ask you to stop using their computers if this is the shit you’re researching there). Superficialities aside, pretty much every other element of this record fits well into what you’d expect a band citing the above goregrind/gorenoise bands and marijuana as their main influences: presumably uncleared television samples, fast riffs that resemble feedback more so than music, gurgled vocals that will remind you of your morning encounters with mouthwash, blisteringly fast programmed blast beats, and not a single discernible bass note. I’m sure many of you beautiful readers have already scrunched your noses in disgust and gone back to your daily scheduled Alcest or Dream Theater listens, but there has to be at least one passerby I can convince to listen to this.

For one thing, it’s not a huge time commitment. Clocking in at a breezy 19 minutes, the band gives themselves just enough time to grind away mercilessly without getting tiring or trite. Realistically, most gorenoise-adjacent acts only have about 15 or so minutes of song ideas, sometimes even less—making Item 9 a near ELO-level songwriting talent for their genre (low, low bar). You can practically hear tracks like “Isopropyl Waterboard” and “Haunted Basement Rib Replacement” smoldering as they rip their way to the next It’s Always Sunny or Breaking Bad audio snippet. More often than not, Benjamin Tsai’s guitar performance resembles some gnarly, near-technical death metal riffs (when discernible, see above). Similarly, the programmed drums from musician and album mixer/masterer Cameron Beck carry a lot of distortion, helping build a wall of noise that might make The Rita blush. Both band members also perform guttural roars that sit at the top of the mixture like scum at the top of a particularly bacterium-infested swamp.

None of this is necessarily unique in goregrind or gorenoise—Item 9 happen to resemble their favorites just as much as any other social burnout making unlistenable garbage from their weed den. Lucky for these guys, freaks like me will always be ready to drop everything to hear the most repugnant noise imaginable. This duo, especially guitarist Tsai, happens to show a lot more promise than most bands named shit like “Pusfeaster” or “Necrotizing Fasciitis Fetish” (these aren’t real bands to my knowledge but check back in a few years and I’m sure the latter will be at the very bottom of Wacken’s band lineup), which definitely makes 2 an easier sell than most. I could definitely see these guys growing even more as artists, carving out a more unique, standout sound. As it stands now, Item 9 are a crass, violent act for a crass, violent listener base making the early goregrind days of demo-era Carcass and Xysma look like ’60s garage rock. They might be a little derivative of their influences, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a band in the genre that isn’t. Similarly, 2 adds up to an incredibly fun grind record with a really immature sense of humor—what more could you want?