There is nothing on earth quite like a good grind. Getting up in the morning and pulverizing some beans into a powder for a French press coffee, excellent! Piling up XP so that you can take on the next stage boss and progress in the campaign, that's how you win, baby! Getting down with some hottie, Oh la la! As good as all that is though, I'd say my favorite grind is still of the music variety, which why I've been blasting the latest split from Brain Corrosion and Ripped to Shreds since it dropped this past August. Now I'm going to bite straight to the marrow here and give you all the bloody details.
Brain Corrosion is a Taiwanese group who play absolutely disgusting, revolting, and ignominious sounding death vocals grind. You could compare them to bands like Dead Infected, and in their less coherent moments, Agathocles, but these are mere signs post along the road ahead, grind is about the journey, and on this trip, you'll need snow chains to get over all the gore. Of the eight Brain Corrosion songs on this split, six are original, with two being re-recordings of tracks off their 2017 Legal Innocence EP ("Legal Innocence" and "Death a Go Go."
The A side of the split is in Brain Corrosion's mangled grip and it opens with "Corpse Refining - To Become A Jiangshi," a particularly pulverizing track, that slides through grinder grooves and winds through the gears of an infernal, automated killing machine at alternating tempos, loobing it's mechanisms and increasing its capacity for total domination and slaughter. While Brain Corrosion can take off like a casket downhill during a mudslide when they want to, it's really the groovier sections of their songs that draw me in and hold my attention. "Mondo Ivo's Blood" has a particularly sick, intestine twining riff that feels like it's been nursed directly from the bile of Exhumed's exposed spleen, and the latter half of "Twisted Reflections" has this weird, twisty surf element to it that sounds like a harbinger of a wave of undead shark attacks off the coast of Malibu. Bikini babes and hairless chested hunks beware!
Ripped To Shreds hold things down on the B side with a series of covers rendered in an approximation of their usual death-grind style. These covers lean into a thrashier more sharply melodic territory than we've heard the Andrew Lee before, feeling more like blackened hardcore or crust punk in places than death metal. The contrast of Ripped To Shred's side is a welcome one though. Brain Corrosion's viscera disgorging spew is not an act I'd want to follow and the sharper tones Ripped to Shred adopts for their covers of songs by Assuck and Gridlink helps carve out some breathing room in the heavy bass tone residue left in the A side's wake. The one original song Ripped To Shreds offers for their side of the split, "Rotting Stenches Unknown," does try to keep pace with the first half of the record but changes gears by the midpoint to what feels like a Japenese hardcore version of a Morbid Angel track, a shift that triggers a progressive tightening of the song's melody that makes its muscle rending slither all the more intractable as it penetrates you and makes a nest in the pit of your stomach.
Exhumed From Eastern Tombs will split you open like a jelly-filled walnut and you will only know it is about to end by the number of buzzards that have gathered to swallow the pulp its made of your interior.
