In keeping up with the conversation around cybergrind bands groups like Blind Equation, Zombieshark!, and others, coming across a monstrosity like Bloodbox is analogous to reeling in a "doomsday fish" somewhere in the South Pacific. At first, you're like, is this a cryptid? Is this a sign that the end is nigh? Should I call a priest? Then your frontal cortex kicks in and you realize that you've just hooked a rotted oarfish. It feels like a bit of a letdown until you realize just how weird and uncanny this lanky scallywag of the deep is in its own right. As for Bloodbox... same same in a parallel parade of introspections. Hearing their 2022 Post Human Disorder is an encounter with a creature that seems out of place in the modern world of reason and scientific explanation, but upon closer examination, it reveals itself to be categorizable, if still bizarre. The djenty guitar parts jut out with force like shards from a shattered windshield cutting through the air around your face, and the pained lab-animal-like cries that claw their way over tranquil turquoise-tinted synth melodies are drawn out like a wedge of sandpaper scraped across the ires, combined with other sinister elements, it all is giving off some seriously malevolent shades of violence, heightened by occasional breaks of bone-cracking, beat chiropractics and super-sub-terranean bass bellows that leave one entranced to groove amongst the waves of goreletting. Even though the bombardments of blastbeats, errant electronics, and frantic wreckage of chords is initially confusing and disorienting, a thread of familiarity does eventually emerge- for the better I would say. The more I make sense of what I hear, the more apparent it is that Post Human Disorder emerges as the offspring of warehouse-filling, late-last-century EDM and a wiggly window in the '00s when grindcore and d-beat seemed like constantly scrapping, conjoined twins. You could call it digital hardcore, or the more common parlance now is cybergrind (note, the band refers to themselves as breakbeat-grindcore), but Bloodbox are siphoning inspiration from a very different donor pool and are tuning in with severed ears to a distinctly chimeric chorus of muses from the metalcore and emo that preoccupies today's youths. Bloodbox, instead of synching compatible trends from the past 30 years of extreme music, are contemporaries of many of the artists that inspired today's cohort of techno-terrorizers*, meaning that they are not recycling the past so much as finding points of compromise between genres that did not co-exist happily in decades prior and forcing an accord within their living memory of desperate scenes through the tyrannical will of their maligned genius. In other words, Bloodbox isn't wading into the current flow of interpretation and simulation; they're possessed of a mutant strain of a gene that evolved into its own terrible taxonomic category long before such anomalies were considered theoretically possible by the tastemakers and take-droppers of yore. They are the OG digital debasers.
What the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a Headwound (Recordingz).