Interview: ESP Mayhem

Deploying a sonic barrage of culture-jamming ballistics from the savanna of perdition that is Neo-Melbourne, ESP Mayhem is the EVP of the ghost in the machine. On a day like today, and in an age like our own, we are all plugged in like flesh transistors neuralinked into a info-validating supply chain that stamps the leveled realities and hyperreal phantasms auto-generated by smiling maskless faces acting as temporary receivers of a transient silicon-threshed symbolic order with the briefest of imprint of our consciousness before consigning these bubbles of fleeting joy to the abyss along with a fragment of our souls- like gum smeared on plywood. ESP Mayhem extends themselves through the gates, ports and check-passes of the nauseatingly manifold mirage of digital excess and unclarity that define the quicksand-like qualities of the concrete world to bully the leveler pullers and burst the tension of the spell that's been cast over us- finding salvation through sublation and recuperating their humanity through agitated accelerationism. Their latest EP Cyber Bully emerged in 2024 to shake down crypto nerds and relieve them of the burden of their hallucinatory lucre while reshuffling the static of stultifying overexcitement that snow blinds our perception in the hopes that a dose of the right kind of chaos can produce an epiphany of eschatological significance... that and they really just like to fuck shit up. You can check out my interview with the band below; it reads a little like the manifesto of a terrorist sect that Johnny Mnemonic might have had to rely on in a pinch for information and logistics. It gets giga-gonzo, you've been warned. 

Who participates in ESP Mayhem, and how do they contribute?

Bruce - Synth; Clock - Vocals; K@rrl - Synth; Klown - Synth; Ralph - Drums. We might change the names and/or people around in the future.

What is the thesis or animating logic behind the group?

In our view, extreme music is an arms race. It's a race that can never be won because the escalation will never stop. The goal is to make the most unsentimentally rageous [sic] and mechanistically horny music we can. Even if we do something that reaches the goal it’s already history because it’s just a matter of time until it’s surpassed. The only options are to go even further or give up. Hyperextend until you explode.

How did you settle on your name?

We decided our logo should combine a metal band’s logo and a logo from outside that world. The combined logos had to form a phrase or word that worked as a band name independent of the source material, and the component logos had to have finger-snap recognisability. There was a very short list of bands, brands and logos that worked. We appropriated Mayhem and ESPN as a graphic shorthand for sonic extremity on the one hand, and the sublimation of violence through spectacle on the other. We chopped “ESPN” down to “ESP”, in the sense of “Extra-Sensory-Perception”, to underline the psychic dimension. Hence ESP Mayhem. The name means no distinction between our music and everything else in the product-scape, no brakes on our out-of-control hubris, and no limits on what we’re prepared to steal.

Why grindcore?

Grindcore is obsessed with aggressive hyper-velocity, instantaneity and disposability. It’s also very information-dense, lots of notes in a hyper compressed burst. Tension, information overload, everything moving too fast - those are the only things in our lives anyway so it’d be dishonest to fuck around with anything else. It’s no accident that mass-entertainment is taking on more and more grindcore-like proportions and gestures. Because everyone feels and thinks this way now. It’s basically the most realistic music of all time.

Are you inspired by the work of other metal performers, or do your influences lie mainly elsewhere?

Melbourne has produced some great grindcore bands so we were lucky to see the style played by some of the best to do it. That’s the foundation of how we understand fast music and how we think it should feel. But we always want something more absurd and more brain-cracking. So we also plagiarise from the most antisocially jacked up, hyperactive dance music - speedcore, anything out of Newcastle (NSW) etc. There’s some worthless computer-world dross mashed in as well, nightcore and ear-biting 8 bit arpeggiation, high-fructose trash sounds designed to fry your pleasure centres [sic] into pouring more money/time down the shitter. Other than that, we just regurgitate the rising tempo of the sensory pummelling we’ve endured our entire lives, in the same way you might make yourself throw up after ill-advisedly eating a mysterious wrong-address delivery meal you find on your doorstep. IE an unpleasant but necessary action to avoid shitting yourself later on.

Was it a deliberate choice to exclude guitars from your ensemble, and if so, why?

It was an accidental, revelatory, bad, great idea. We happened to plug a synthesizer into a guitar amp and discovered you could make noise that lands like a tungsten cube dropped from orbit. No nuance or warmth, just pure force. But none of us had any experience playing electronic music. We don’t really understand how the instruments work, and we’re all intellectually paralysed from too much high pressure/low duration media (grindcore and grindcore-ized media in general) so it’s nearly impossible for us to learn. But synthesizers are just too loud and we’re addicted to power so we can’t stop. If someone accidentally bumps their instrument it instantly blows everyone’s ears out and we all scream in pain. It’s awful.

What was the thought process going into your latest release, Cyber Bully?

We wanted it to sound like Megatron trying to auto-fellate and accidentally machine-gunning his own head off. More piercing sonic aggression, more jarring speed-to-dance transitions, more blatantly ripping things off, more gleeful mockery and disrespect, just more. There’s no point or really any possibility of subtlety or thoughtfulness now so we always want to go as far and fast in the wrong direction as we can.

What are your thoughts on the circularity of time and history?

Time and history are circular, but also linear. We have no evidence to back this up, we just infer it from the overall feeling of constant upheaval combined with total inertia.

How do the contradictory but intersecting modern phenomena of stultifying boredom and constant excitement and/or agitation play out through your work?

Things are so continuously exciting now that excitement itself has become experientially boring, because it never lets up. Like when was the last time you didn’t feel angry, horny, scared or otherwise wound up. And it’s not just you, everyone is sitting there in a state of private agitation. But it’s not like you can opt out of the situation, so why not go further. There’s an episode of the TV show Max Headroom, where watching a high speed advertisement is found to spike the viewer’s nervous system to the point that they spontaneously combust. Ratchet up the boredom, ratchet up the pressure until the whole thing explodes in media-induced, self-obliterating tedium. You should be trying to cross that line, one way or another. Extreme boredom makes extreme music.

How does your work draw attention to the invasive nature of technology and underscore our intimacy with it?

Our band setup is like reverse-cybergrind, we kept the drummer and replaced all the guitars with prosumer electronic equipment. IE more unwanted and unasked-for change for the sake of it masked as “innovation” and “development”. It’s like what we see with technology, but even more stupid. People don’t really want it but we keep pushing it on them and eventually they give in. A few people might say it’s good, they don’t really think that, we just shoved it in their faces til they thought they did. After we convince them, it's not too long til they think they convinced themselves. But unlike the technologists we make no claim to be improving anything. We’re making things worse and more difficult, so perversely actually making things better.

How do you think our interactions with information technology, particularly social media, transform and augment our sense of identity and place in the world?

The Self As Asset has been realised through social media - the kipple machine that crushes everything into advertising, as it simultaneously crushes advertising into everything. The term Personal Brand used to get thrown around but you don’t hear it now cause the concept has become so internalised that it’s redundant - of course a person is a brand, why bring it up. Between Personal Branding and Corporate Personhood a circle is completed - on the one hand people take on the characteristics of brands, and on the other corporations take the characteristics of people. We’re encouraged to understand ourselves through the language of therapy but we should use the language of marketing instead, it’s more accurate.

How does the concept of "junkspace" relate to your approach, outlook, and output?

Neo-Melbourne is a quintessential junkspace. It’s like living in a big cardboard box full of print-on-demand neon signage. All lowest-bid-contract dross stretched over the skeleton of a failed plan. Nothing rings true here and things don’t work out for the good. So ESPM makes something else from the junk. We grab whatever we like and use it however we can to advance our project. You see the bare bones of everything we ripped off and how starkly we smashed it all together, a junkspace aesthetic. But it conforms to our logic now. The incongruities made sense all along, we are just stacking the pieces up in a way that makes the pattern reveal itself.

What is the value of novelty in popular culture at this moment? Is it still attainable, is it worth pursuing?

It’s not attainable but it’s worth pursuing. With pop culture It’s more straightforward and more rewarding to repeat things, and in life it’s easier to do nothing at all. But tomorrow will arrive whether you want it or not. And you have to put an idea forward if you don’t want more of the same. If we have to live in a bullshit future then we’re gonna try and make it our bullshit, not someone else’s, stinking the place up. And everyone else’s bullshit is ours now anyway. Intellectual property is theft and anyone bristling at their art/bullshit being stolen is dumb for imagining they’re losing something and a cop for caring. All we have ever done is lift so many touchstones from the manic ends of popular culture and music scenes into the one mix, so there’s nothing really new. But on paper ESP Mayhem is a novelty act because of what we steal and why. We would go further and say that now, every act should be a novelty act, and this is the only way to stay ahead of the kipple machine. Realise your own delusions or steal ours and turn it into something else, we don’t care. But you are either a novelty act or you enter the kipple factory, that’s the choice.

What if any, are the beneficial and ethical uses for AI in art and creative endeavors at this stage of its technological development?

There’s no ethical use for AI because it’s a big machine for ripping things off. ESPM is in direct competition with AI in that regard. And we are winning. With all the money and raw intellectual horsepower sloshing around in the AI industries it should be the other way around but no, we can rip things off faster, more totally and more fluently than the stupid AIs. That’s where we’re at, historically speaking. The great white hope of technological advancement has been outperformed by a synthgrind band from the Cleveland of the southern hemisphere. It’s a grim outlook.

What does the term "cyberpunk" mean to you in relation to your work, if anything?

“Neo-Melbourne” alludes to the idea that all those old Cyberpunk stories have been more or less realised in our present day. But the term cyberpunk is historical now, it makes sense as a pinterest moodboard but doesn’t quite capture the flavour of this moment. We need a new anachronistic portmanteau to describe a world of grinning human sharks swimming upstream in a sea of techno-garbage. It should keep the “social technics vs music subculture” form of “Cyberpunk”, but instead blend the relentless pumping of uptempo hardcore, with overblown CCRU-style net-mysticism. Something like Xenodonk, or Deus Ex Makina.

What is the most dystopian part of living in Melbourne?

Smelling the countryside burn as you walk past 3-million-dollar townhouses in your old neighbourhood.

Metal Monday: Tzompantli, Dungeon Serpent, Fading Trail, and Brain Tentacles

Wrote a quick and dirty list of some metal I've been enjoying lately. Some new, some old. All brutal and badass in their own right. I know I say this every time, but I'm going to try and do these more often (but I mean it this time!). I have a couple hundred metal releases that I've been meaning to get and I do enjoy making these lists- it's just a matter of finding the time to do them. I'm committed, though. Watch out!  In the meantime, check out what I've got for you below and get ready to roundhouse the hell out of the Monday blues (and the rest of your week!). 

Tzompantli - Tlazcaltiliztli (20 Buck Spin)

I'm starting things off here at a good mid-paced chug by introducing you to Tzompantli's debut LP Tlazcaltiliztli. The band is one of many death metal side projects from Brian "Bigg o)))" Ortiz, who is one of the malevolent forces behind the hardcore band Xibalba. Here he teams up with bassist G-Bone and drummer Erol Ulug to construct a gruesome, towering tribute to Aztec and Mesoamerican cultures. The name of the album, Tlazcaltiliztli, is the Nahuatl word for "nourishing the sun with blood"- I bet you can't guess how that might work.  A fitting title for an album of this style and intensity. Tlazcaltiliztli consists of generally severe and brooding death metal, played as if the Paradice Lost were keeping time, with overt nods to the band's tribal and folkier affiliations, used to illuminate themes and break up the brutality on tracks like "Eltequi" and opener "Yaohuehuetl." It's a very kick-ass way to start things off here tonight and will hopefully teach you a bit about the pre-colonial history of the Americas that they might have glossed over in school. 

Dungeon Serpent - World of Sorrows (Nameless Grave Records)

Leaving the ancient Americas, we now forge ahead to the frigid north of British Columbia, where we will encounter a different but recognizable very menace. Dungeon Serpent owes its origins to one man, Arawn, a guy who pretty much does everything himself, except play live (he has friends to help him with that). Dungeon Serpent released their debut LP World of Sorrows last year with a singular goal- cut against the grain of metal trends. It's a self-consciously traditional, melodic death metal album in the vein of classic Rotting Christ and early Kataklysm, where the incendiary drum patterns scold and pock-mark the skin, low-terrifying-vocals conjure an aura of madness and menace, and the guitars do most of the talking- and they have nary a nice thing to say to the likes of a brigand such as you. World of Sorrows is a stone-cold slay fest that takes zero prisoners. Most surprisingly, it feels more innovative than stuff from other death metal bands who proclaim themselves to be "breakers of the mold," which is nothing if not an endorsement of the passion and anger Arawn brings to the project.

Fading Trail - Count The Days (Every Day Hate)

Alright, now we're really picking up the pace. Fading Trail is a grindcore band, who, in grindcore fashion, starts their debut album, Count The Days, with an irreverent audio clip. This selected slice of inanity appears to be from a psychological examination of Jeffery Dahmer, where a doctor is repeating what his patient has just told him: "You're patient, with a good ear, who tries to help people...," to which a man's voice replies, "Yes," promoting the doctor to retort with exacerbation, "... when you're not trying to murder them," followed by the same man's voice replying again, "Yes." A quote like that is like a good couple of pumps of the primer bulb lending extra gusto to the opening riff which takes off like it had started up off the first tug on its pull cord. Fading Trail is a well-oiled death-grinding machine and Count The Days is a beautifully deranged album- a dirty, senseless, bloody chaos without rhyme or reason other than to personify a torrential, surging essence of disorder. Grinding, galloping grooves and toothy vocal performances in line with present-day Napalm Death and Nasum, minus the electronic interference. Count The Days is short, savage and clinically unhinged- it might be over before you can say "25 to life," but the scars it will leave on your psyche will last a lifetime. 

Brain Tentacles - Brain Tentacles (Relapse)

Alright, time to get weird with it as we bring it back home. Brain Tentacles are a three-man crew out of Chicago featuring vocalist Bruce Lamont of Yakuza on saxophone and synths, Dave Witte of Municipal Waste on drums, and Aaron Dillson of Keelhaul on bass and synth (also). Together they perform a warped and often humorous hybrid of death metal, sludge metal, and improvisational jazz. There are no electric guitars on this album- which is an experiment in its own right- but when you layer in those wild synths and sax textures, it's like you're coasting into another reality entirely. The jittering, eastern-influenced sax melodies of "Fruitcake" dance atop deep, tarry bass riffs trying to keep their heads above a black, boiling demise, next, the saxy, death-sludge lurch and discordant hammering of "Cosmic Warriors Girth Curse" ushers forth giggling tides of dissonant, fathomless incongruousness. "The Spoiler" sounds like you're trying to escape from a doomed ship that is halfway down the gullet of a giant wail while you're being prematurely eulogized by some mocking combination of Jesus Lizard and Primus. And, lastly, the smoky, pensive and turbulent, bass-anchored neo-noir soundscape of "Fata Morgana" will leave you feeling forlorn and homesick in a city whose name your forgot after nearly drowning yourself in a river of whisky and regret. Their self-titled squirmed its way out and onto the scene back in 2016 and it still got a grip on me like it was one of the Kraken's own mighty, sucking appendages. This beast has staying power! 

 

New Noise’s Bandcamp Friday Picks: August 2021

Bandcamp Fridays. They are a thing, AGAIN! I've written a variation of this sentence multiple times over the past year because the company keeps suspending them. It's like they don't like doing them or something... I'm not going to read into it more than that. Also, I don't care. I do not care about BC skullduggery. What I do care about is listening to great music, sharing that music with people, and encouraging people to support artists. To further the second two of these goals, I compiled a list of recs for you to check out for New Noise. Get in there and root around. Get a whiff of some new tunes and go buck wild! Any day when you discover a new band is a good day. Happy Friday! 

Check out my list of recs for New Noise here. 

Album Review: Final Exit - ノイズの若大将 (Young Guy of Noize)

ノイズの若大将 may be the most shocking grindcore album I've ever come across. I'm serious. Not shocking in a vulgar sense though. There are plenty of those. Instead, the band is doing something to my brain that I have never witnessed a dyed in the gore grind operation do before. They are tackling banal subject matter without a hint of irony- and it's really working for them.  

The long suffered scourge of Japanese grindcore band Final Exit dates back to 1994, surviving most of that time as a two-man sonic slaughterhouse. They released their twenty-fifth album last year, titled ノイズの若大将 , or Young Guy of Noize in English. I don't read Japanese, so I needed to have it translated for me. But once I Googled their full name It became very apparent what they were going for- this album is an earnest tribute to a series of teen films from the '60s and '70s known as the Wakadaishō series, or Young Ace or Young Guy in English. I've heard of tribute albums before, but this is probably one of the more conceptually challenging ones. Light teen romps shouldn't make for good subject matter for a grindcore album. Thankfully, no one told this to Final Exit. And if they did, they were ignored. 

The Wakadaishō  series, which stared Yūzō Kayama as the "Young Guy," was wildly popular in Japan at one point. You can think of the series as akin to those old Elvis beach party films, where the protagonist is a well-healed and intentioned meaning but salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, who has to rise to the occasion when confronted by an ill-tempered and often litigious villain, in order to win the heart of the film's female lead. 

These contests for the clasp and affection of Yūzō's true love usually took the form of a sports competition. However, there is one film (Ereki no Wakadaishō) where Yūzō had to learn to play the guitar to woo the girl (something that he did in real life, as well as the film), and it ended up rocketing him into a very successful music career with his backing band, literally called, The Launchers. 

There are winks and nods to Wakadaishō patterned throughout Young Guy of Noize, mostly in the form of straight-face, surf-rock interludes and bookends, but also a cover of The Launchers' "Black Sand Beach," which feels like it gliding in from a luau two houses over. You can almost smell the pineapple on the grill as its warbling riffs drift beneath your nose, and the crash of the waves on the beach as it bustles between your ears. On the grindery side of things, songs like "Some "Waka" songs #1)" do a remarkably palatable job of thinly layering sunny, strolling guitar lines with gummy wads of gnashing blast parts, and the complex interchange of the stop-start structures and momentum building melodies of tracks like "Running Donkey" are charmingly reminiscent of such technically proficient, and similarly anarchic, output of enigmatic groups like Clown Core. Think of the Ventures in a meth lab fire or Repulsion tooling around with their instruments and feeling the vibe on a deck of a soon to be shipwrecked cruise liner, and you'll be in the right headspace when diving into this album,

As I said, it's kind of shocking how earnestly Final Exit undertakes the subject matter of the album and how thoroughly they integrate the themes of the source material into their joyful, irreverent, pleasantly repugnant approach. Shocking, I would say, but not disappointing. This record gets my highest recommendation! 

You can get ノイズの若大将 (Young Guy of Noize) on vinyl here. 

Album Review: Grog / Namek - Monsters

"There is a lot of heavy, unwholesome records dropping in the month of March. Enforced has a new record out today, as do EYEHATEGOD, Regional Justice Center, and God’s Hate. But before you totally ruin your hearing with any of those releases, might I recommend a way to irrevocably violate your sense of decency as well? You may think I’m asking permission, but I’m not. This is more of a warning than anything." - This is the first gouge of my review of the new Grog / Namek split Monsters. You can read the whole thing over on New Noise. Links below: 

Review of Grog / Namek's split EP Monsters. 

Out now via Helldprod Record. 

Album Review: Bas Rotten - Surge

 When I first saw the name Bas Rotten in a subject line of an email in my inbox, I thought, "Like Rotten Sound? That's got to be a grindcore band." Then I saw the cover art, an impressionist oil painting of two men boxing, their flesh appearing to merge as they batter each other's bodies with fists and force of will, and I thought to myself, "Yeah, that's got to be a hardcore band." And then I read that the band was from Portugal, and found my mind shifting gears, preparing me to evaluate some kind of communally minded crust punk cadre. And then I hit play on the streaming link they provided me, and... Turns out I was right. And wrong. About all of it. And none of it. 

Bas Rotten are a grindcore band. They're also a crust punk group and a hardcore band, who play like they're opening for Iron Reagan. Scratch that; they play like THEY ARE Iron Reagan! A clip from the film Take Shelter greets you in the foyer of the opening track of their album Surge. "The Blow" begins with the dialog above shrieked over a similarly disconcerting clip of Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone discussing his favorite topic, man's folly and penchant for self-delusion. Somehow the layering of these two clips failed to prepare me adequately for the point when the reigns of the track fall into the cruel hands of vocalist Joao. If you are like me, once those locked and loaded, grind-grooves kick into gear under Joao's menacing snarl, you'll feel like a trap has been sprung and like you're now helpless to fight back what's coming your way. Like a garrote had been looped around the base of your neck, you're being to choked into submission, the sound of Joao's gnashing rasp ringing in your ears, and the lash of the band's twin guitars (both performed by different men, also named Joao) churning the air like a blender, just inches away from your face, getting precariously closer to the bridge of your nose as you blackout. 

You're going to want to keep your wits about you, though, because the surfy, side-swipe "Dissociation" is more than capable of bodying your ass into a nearby dumpster, even with less than a minute run time. It's followed in quick succession by the crusty, rust-lined chop of "Prime Cuts," and death-daring, slide and sever, proto-thrash of "Violence." It's amazing how quickly Bas Rotten can pull off some absolutely, heroic thrash riffs, and at bowel loosening, muscle-gelling speeds, shifting between Napalm Death-driven grooves and bone-chilling, doom metal channels, with the best example of this dynamic being possibly, incredibly grim and gnarly "Worth." 

Napalm Death would obviously win a paternity test if one were administered for Bas Rotten, but so would Trash Talk, DRI, Destroyed in Seconds, and Nuclear Assualt. It's impossible to really distinguish a dominant linage from any of these bands as their attributable genes have fused together into new, horrid hybrid phenotypes in Bas Rotten's sound. The result is, as the opening quote from Take Shelter implies, a storm, like a total force of nature. There really is no containing the belligerent monstrosity that these Portuguese punishers have unleashed. All you can do is watch helplessly from a distance and hope the stampede of sound doesn't abruptly shift trajectory and beeline for your undefended position. You can admire Surge, but I guarantee, you can't outrun it. 

Get a copy of Surge on CD and Cassette here. 

Interview: Duma

Image courtesy of Duma

I caught up with Kenyan grindcore and noise band Duma for a short interview and a track by track breakdown of their new self-titled album. You can read the full interview over on New Noise now. 

Read interview with Duma here. 

Get a copy of Duma's s/t from Nyege Nyege Records.

Album Review: HIRS Collective - Covid Covers Vol. 1

The grindcore collective HIRS released a stellar collection of covers during quarantine that sees collaborations with Marissa Paternoster and Dr. Mace to bring to life new versions of Garbage tracks, Bjork standards, and deep cuts from Enkephalin's back catalog. I did a little write up for this banger over on New Noise today. Links below: 

Write-up of Covid Covers Vol. 1.

Get a copy of the album here. 

Album Review: Napalm Death - Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism

The progenitors of grindcore have cleared their collective throats and let loose another whirlwind of hair greying, polemic angst.  Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism is the British extreme metal pioneer’s sixteenth studio album and follow up to their later career masterstroke, 2015’s Apex Predator – Easy Meat. This album sees the retaining their core line up of Danny Herrera on drums, Shane Embury with his devastating bass, guitarists Mitch Harris and Jesse Pintaob, and good ol' Barney Greenway on vocals, once again combining their talents to unleash powerfully cohesive and well-articulated statement of political extreme metal. 

I've always been attracted to the socio-political aspect of Napalm Death. I identify with many of their positions, from their anti-capitalist scourges to their indictments of the State and its inherent abuses. I've never been a vegan, but I feel they do justice in demonstrating the merits of its political position. Of course, even as a carnivore I've always seen at least some merit in the arguments against the consumption of meat. It's never not been the case that I have been revolted by the way animals are processed to make consumer products. Not that I have an issue with fats and bone in my soaps and other household items. In fact, I think that aspect is pretty cool and that it is ingenious how animal parts find their way into everyday objects. I think the worst thing you can do after killing an animal is to let it go to waste, allow its death to be in vain. But the scale of the slaughter is unconscionable. The waste, in terms of the sheer number of lives sacrificed, the byproducts, and often whole animals, that end up going into landfills to spoil, and the literal oceans of excrement and effluent that poison the land and water around these factory farms, it is all the stuff of nightmares. Not to mention that these operations contribute mightily to the overall green house gas emissions that are thrown up into the air by human industry, contributing daily, and not insignificantly, to a potential future where human civilization collapses in the face of ecological ruin. This is all so that certain corporations can force-feed the market their products, low-grade provisions they've learned how to sell regardless of actual demand for them. Clogging the arteries of not only the consumer but the global supply chain with dead animal flesh. 

You as the consumer of a cheeseburger, whether it be from a drive-in or a chic boutique restaurant, might think that this whole apparatus exists to serve you, but you're wrong. The consumer is also exploited. The consumer may not be the one who is slaughter for meat, but they are the termination point for the cycle of these products that allows the deviation of profit to be possible. The point of a cheeseburger in this system is not to provide a human body with nourishment, it is to derive a profit. And in learning to make the provision of these goods profitable, the companies that sell them, and their allies in the State, have an incentive to eliminate alternatives for the consumer, restrict the range of meaningful options, and undermine self-awareness and self-reliance. The consumer is like a grape that must be squeezed to make a curdled, blood-colored wine. You are a mark, not a human, not even an animal in this system, just a node that needs to be activated in order to complete a cycle. Hence, Apex Predator – Easy Meat.

Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism is a sibling to Napalm Death's previous album, and possibly the stronger and more mature of the two despite being, or maybe even because it is, younger. To illustrate this point, we need to turn to the final track of the album, "A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen." The track moves as if stakes had been run through both its feet, lumbering painfully forward, becoming anguishedly mored to the ground with each step. Shane's bass rumbling like a distant storm, and Barny's vocals sounding more like a gregorian chant than his typical shout. It is one of the more unorthodox tracks of the album, but its exceptions prove a few rules: 1) Throes of Joy is nothing if not exceptional, and 2) Ever rule is meant to be tested, including those you make for yourself. 

Throughout Throes of Joy, we find Napalm Death stepping over the lines of convention, much as they have done throughout their careers, but this time, achieving odd and unexpected results with alarming frequency. The atmosphere and industrialism of Apex Predator is carried over and manifest on tracks like "Invigorating Clutch" with its mechanistic gauge and post-punk splay of grooves, and the Killing Joke-esque cackle and hypnotic, fire-walking skin-peel of "Amoral." Both tracks build on and improve upon the template of the previous album's designs. There is a perverse sense of empathy conveyed on "Joie De Ne Pas Vivre," which relishes in an acidic slurry of death-rock guitars, superheated in a cauldron of animous by Danny's heathen flame fanning percussion. You can still recover glimmers of Naplam Death's past punk-pariah ruminations on tracks like the ferocious "Backlash Just Because," but you'll be getting your hardcore with a heeping helping groove metal, and this is doubly true of the cut-throat, cry and gnash of "That Curse of Being in Thrall." If you thought that the experimental nature of the album was confined to only a few tracks though, you are of course our of your depths, as the title track with the cleaving shape of its metallic hardcore charge, Converge cultivating crush and the tread-wheel like pinch-and-strip of its grooves reveals, even thirty-odd years into their career, Napalm Death are not only the masters of their craft, but one of grindcore's most enduring and extreme pioneers.

Thematically, Throes of Joy explores the Anglo-World as attempting to revel in the pleasures of its privilege and "end-of-history" status despite the demonstrable failures of its political and economic projects. The prices for these failures are felt acutely elsewhere around the world, creating mounting refugee crises due to environmental collapse and social-political instability, the barest understanding of which rarely breaches the conscious awareness of the citizens of US and UK, and when it does, this rupture often takes the form of a graphic image of a migrant washing ashore on a beach after their boat capsized, or a father still clutching his infant daughter as they both lay face down on the banks of a river somewhere on the Texas border. The gravity and reality of these images glide off the flat-smooth surface of the public's psyche while they scroll CNN on your phones, waiting for your brunch order to arrive at an outdoor cafe that used to be an autobody repaired shop before returning to their condo that used to be the hermitage of an Eastern Orthodox Church. 

"Iniquity" is the phrase that jumps out at me the most when examining the lyrics on Throes of Joy. I am thinking specifically of how it appears on the final track, "A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen." There is a sense that the pain that the rest of the world is experiencing is manifestly unfair. That conditions as they exist are unsustainable. That we are only able to ignore these realities through constant delusion aided by a terminate drip of dopamine fed directly into our brains through social media, streaming services, and video games, and that everything bad about the world is attributable to lack of proper virtue exhibited by our fellow citizens. There is a sense that even knowing the truth and how we avoided dealing with it isn't enough to actually effect meaningful change. That because changing the world would require difficult work, and because any change in our political projects is rife with uncertainty and discomfort, it is better to allow them to persist rather than explore alternatives. If you feel like there are not more alternatives, and the future is spent, this is why. As a society, we are in a staring contest with the sun, and we're expecting the great ball of fire to blink first.

Get a copy of Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism from Century Media

Interview: Fuck the Facts

Photo courtesy of the artist

Because I'm leading some kind of a charmed life, I had the opportunity to speak with Topon of Fuck the Facts about his new album Pleine Noirceur, life in quarantine, and why making fucked up sounding records is all part of the plan. You can check out a full transcript of our conversation over on New Noise today! 

Interview with Topon of Fuck the Facts. 

Get a copy of Pleine Noirceur here. 

Album Review: Undertakers - Dictatorial Democracy

I was saving this one in case Trump won the Presidential election last week but I like this album a lot so I'm going to go ahead and post it now. To be clear though the guy who won that election is no friend to working people and the vast majority of Americans who could use a hand up right now. He will be equally as bad in many ways as his predecessor. Anarchists will have more than enough reason to take the streets in resistance to a corporatist goon like Sleepy Joe in the coming months, however, putting aside real politics for a moment, it was very satisfying to see the Annoying Orange land on his ass this past weekend. Hit the bricks Donny! Go get lost down a well!

Undertakers are an anarcho-grindcore band out of Italy. If you hold a position about the structure and purpose of a hierarchy, they'll more than likely have polemic to slap you with tucked away in their back pocket. They released a new compilation LP Dictatorial Democracy last month and I did a little write up for it for New Noise. You can check out the links below:

Write up of Dictatorial Democracy here. 

Album Review: Brain Corrosion / Ripped to Shreds - Exhumed From Eastern Tombs Split

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. 

Get a copy of Exhumed From Eastern Tombs Split from Horror Pain Gore Death Productions here. 

Album Review: Clown Core - van

 

Because I have impeccable taste, I did a write up of Clown Core's new LP van. I tried to give my thoughts on it as concisely as possible, but Clown Core really are not a band that you can talk about in conventional music journo terms. I recommend just skipping what I wrote and listening to the band yourself. Make up your own mind or whatever. 

Here is my write up of van over on New Noise. 

Get a copy of van here on Bandcamp.

Interview: Grog

 

Image by band

Had the chance to catch up with Pedra of the Portuguese grindcore band Grog about their new live album and split with Agathocles, Smashed Hammer Feast, recoded at last year's Hammer Smash Fest. The two bands really helped to cement the grindcore sound of continental Europe in the '80s and '90s, and despite having released dozens and dozens of splits individually, the two bands have surprisingly never released a record together. That's all changed now! Smashed Hammer Feast is out via Helldrod on September 30 but you can stream the whole album now over at New Noise today! 

Read my interview with Pedra and stream all of Smashed Hammer Feast at New Noise here. 

Album Review: Pig Destroyer - The Octagonal Stairway EP

 

I've never one to skip over the smaller releases. Head over to New Noise to check out my write up of the bewildering B-Side collection from Virginia grinders Pig Destroyer, an EP titled The Octagonal Stairway. Make sure you take your meds before giving this one a spin. 

Read the review of The Octagonal Stairway at New Noise here.

Grab a copy of The Octagonal Stairway from Relapse Records here. 

Album Review: Karst - Genesis of Nervous Decay EP

Slithering up from the bone rich earth comes LA's Karst, a venomous new organism, learned in the ways of old school death and skilled in the use of modern sonic devices of devastation and torture. Gnostic grinders like Discordance Axis have sharpened their claws, while the surface-weary Assück has painted them with arcane symbols in a ritual to forestall the corruption of the upper world. With crust covered gums and fur matted with scented mud and wax, they are the feral harbinger of a new age, liberated from the hollowing sickness of the modern world, bursting forth from fetid flesh like an itinerant worm newly free of its decaying host. 

The opening and title-track of Karst's EP Genesis of Nervous Decay, pries open the seal on the ancient pithos jar, unleashing a flood of billowing blast-beats and sling-shot riffs all firing in orbit around collapsing grooves like asteroids caught in the grips of a black hole. The crushing compress and gorilla-girth charge of "Panic Resin" will shove you into a secluded wading pool of despair, where you will be forced to bear witness as time accelerates in your reflection and you waste away to dust before your very own eyes. "The Cusp of Process" matches the feeling of fleeing through a thorny brush to escape some watching, passive horror, that could bridge the distance you've placed between you and it in a single, dispassionate bound. The deep, pungent, miasmic exhaust of "Anxiety Birthed" has the same mantle-ward pull of a Hooded Menace track but delivered with the restless, carnivorous prowl of Assück. And lastly, "Egress and Onward" winds down the affair with sparse, measuredly post-rock strings, hinting at a reprieve from the madness of the proceedings tracks… or is it a prelude to a new nightmare? 

I was so excited about this short but bitterly sweet album that I reached out to Karst via email with a few questions hoping for some context and insight into their latest creation. And boy did they deliver! You can check out their responses below (edited slightly for clarity): 

Who are some of your influences with in the world of grindcore? I'm hearing a lot of different stuff on your record and I want to hear it from the ghoul's mouth where it's all coming from. 

Grindcore has definitely played a huge role in the development of our sound. Karst was established from the remnants of our old grindcore band Fuck White God, but we really wanted to approach Karst with more death metal and crust influences. 

We can confidently say that there are a few specific huge grind influences, mainly Napalm Death, Assück, and Discordance Axis. Napalm Death really proved to us that you do not need to confine yourself to one genre and implementing different aspects of extreme metal is a complimentary possibility. Albums like Harmony Corruption, Fear, Emptiness, Despair, and Diatribes (90s weird logo era Napalm Death) were some of the albums that we are confident have some influence on us, but we have not confined ourselves to any one kind of sound. 

Assück is simply the best of the best when it comes to death grind, and all the founding members of Karst are huge fans, because we started as a band full of punks that listened to a lot grind and crust. Anticapital and Misery Index really retain that punk ethos and approach, which we wanted to emulate, but also have some killer death metal grooves and crushing blasts and d-beats. They made a historical and memorable mark on the grind, crust, and death scenes with 15 minute EP’s, which we thought was so admirable and have inspired our own sound. 

Lastly, Discordance Axis was a band we aspired to technically, but mostly aesthetically. They played a face-melting technical approach to grind, with vicious precision and speed, and we really looked up them aesthetically. They strayed away from typical extreme metal imagery and subject material (like drippy logos, gore focused imagery and lyrics), even though these are things we are really drawn. From their strangely fitting cover to The Inalienable Dreamless to their slightly obscure and poetic lyrics, they’ve played a huge part in our formative year and approach to death metal. 

Why is so much of the theming of the album focused on Mermithids? Which as far as I can tell are a kind of parasite that primarily infects insects and other invertebrates. 

The Mermithidae are a parasitic nematode that simply feed on the insides of other animals until they are no longer of use to them, and eventually burst from their host and go on to reproduce and restart their life cycle. We thought it would make for a fitting metaphor and representation of anxiety and depression. The EP itself is pretty much a concept album and piece of lore in a universe we want to establish for our lyrical content. 

We use the mermithid in our EP as a characterization of struggles with mental health and mental illness like anxiety and depression. The mermithid acts like a figurative vessel to conveying a person’s struggle with mental illness because those kind of struggles can be very difficult to explain and understand. So we just wrote our version of a horror story, characterizing anxiety and depression as an outside force and villain (the mermithid), that simply eats you from the inside and doesn’t stop until you’re either dead or feel like you’ve gone mad, which is the sad reality of mental illness in some cases. 

I guess in conclusion, the biology and life cycle of the mermithidae in real life seemed fitting to represent anxiety and depression, and to help expose how terrifying mental illness can really be. Also just like the mermithid does in real life, mental illness can target anyone, whether it be hereditary, from traumatic experiences, or struggling with life in general, everyone has a pretty high chance of dealing with some kind of mental health struggle or becoming victim to mental illness, which is also pretty fucking scary. 

Can you shed some light on the title, Genesis of Nervous Decay? It feels very specific to what you are doing and not just a "cool" metal title. 

The title can be interpreted as literally as possible: the EP tells the story of the beginning of someone’s mental demise. Just read the lyrics and you can see it follows a story from a beginning to an interpretive ending, of a random person victimized by mental illness. Life and nature can be very real and severe, and people suffer every day. 

We are against the glamorization of mental illness that can be prevalent in metal and pop culture, but metal also succeeds at being brutally honest and relentless about these realities. Reality is truly fucked, and there are so many issues and subjects to write about, and we chose to write about something we are familiar with and can possibly help raise awareness for, which for us is “cool” and “metal” in itself! 

We just wanted a title that was true to what we were trying to express plain and simple, and it just sounded right when we thought of it! Titles can be tricky but we are happy with The Genesis of Nervous Decay. You don’t want to bother yourself too much over choosing a title. Just go with what feels appropriate! 

Grab a copy of Genesis of Nervous Decay from Karst's Bandcamp here. 

Album Review: Internal Rot - Grieving Birth

Australian vomit wallowing wretches Internal Rot have emerged once again from the swill of embryonic bile they’ve claimed squatter’s rights over to regurgitate a second full-length LP into the basements of the outback. Grieving Birth is very much in the style of their earlier material, meaning it is red-eyed, tempo-agnostic, grindcore that will strip epidermis off any exterminator foolhardy enough to spray for the Insect Warfare-infestation that they neighbors have been complaining about. The vocals flow over the mic like blood and offal disgorged from a slaughtering plant into a rotting slurry pond, the guitars bite like a hack saw compressing and cleaving its way through mossy worm-eaten wood, and the blast-beat percussion hits like a heart attack. There is very little hardcore punk aesthetic to grab on to for those accustomed to the more Napalm Death side of grind. Instead, Internal Rot plays around in the sloppier, noise fueled side of Regurgitate, but without the restraints of death metal chord-progressions, or Excruciating Terror, minus the crossover whir, while managing to be more dynamic than many of their peers in this exacting space within the heavy music spectrum. The crushing slide guitars on “Unnegotiable Impact” will absolutely sweep you off your feet like you were standing before a damn as it bursts, while the pinching and rending quality of the chord progressions on “Eaten By Crabs” will leave you with the sense that you’ve been transformed into a buffet for tiny, knife handed crustacean. “Failed Organum” is a concrete to head, skull fracturing, tumble out a twelve-story window, while “Gorge On Abuse” will tenderize your supple human meat with piston grooves in a suffocating cyclone of odium. As their label says on the groups Bandcamp page, “Do you grind? Because this fucking grinds(!)” (emphasis mine).

Grab a copy of Grieving Birth from Iron Lung Records, here.

Album Review: Holy Grinder - Divine Extinction

Sometimes all I need is an injection of a savage fucking racket into my ears to help calm your nerves, and if you’re reading this, I bet you feel some kind of way similar. Toronto’s noise-grind heathens Holy Grinder and their new record Divine Extinction is the booster of blast-beats I need today as I contemplate the state of the world. Divine Extinction once again sees the band partnering with Topn Das of Fuck the Facts to unfurl twelve sacrilegious shocks of purling, fizzling grindcore heat, in a meditation on the defeat of fascism and state authority. The band continues to hone their songwriting chops, as evidenced by the slapping double-time pulse of “Heretic” and the steamroller, malice-go-round “Disgusting Trash People.” The two tracks fold into each other to create a feeling of inversion. like the sidewalk under your feet has simply jumped out from underneath you, and you are now plummeting upwards into a raging cyclone of demonic energy. “Vile Hymn” and “Unholy Grinder” take a more death metal approach to their structure with decaying, corpulent grooves and tempo changes that allow you to feel the force and impact of each incoming change up as it broadsides your head. There is even a little bit of Full of Hell’s obsidian wormhole hiss on tracks like “Vile Hymn” and “Mental Terrorist.” Holy Grinder’s Divine Extinction is a slippery work of vital violence that seeks to plug nails through the frock of legitimacy, which authoritarian elements dress their maleficence and sadism in. Ripping these garments down from around their shoulders, it seeks to expose the vampiric flesh beneath, causing the benighted wretch to wither in a cleansing shower of daylight— a necessary purge of anti-human commitments from the halls of power accomplished with a flush of ear-puckering noise.

Grab a copy of Divine Extinction from Jean Scene Creamers, here.

Album Review: Ripped to Shreds - 亂

California's death and grind gladiator Andrew Lee sounds more cohesive and masterful than ever before on his latest LP with Ripped to Shreds, somewhat ironically, titled 亂 (Luan)- a character which translates to “chaos” in English. The title is not necessarily self-referential (although applicable) and appears to stem from an outward examination of the world and human history. The character 亂 can also mean warfare and destruction, and you may remember it from the poster art of Akira Kurosawa’s exploration of human hubris, Ran. Given that context, the themes of the album come into sharper focus. The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries for much of the world has been a ceaseless wheel of horrors and destabilizing events. The past four years (especially the past six months!) have required many of us in the United States to take stock of the role that our country has played in seeding this disorder. A reflection that becomes all the more necessary as the bounty many Americans once deemed their birthright (the product of colonialism, capitalist imperialism, and good old fashioned racism) has been revealed by COVID-19 to be little more than a mound of rotten fruit. But bandleader and musical marshal Lee is not content to let 亂 wallow in the shallows of guilt that have presently overtaken the American political consciousness. No, he has much older scores to that he ios looking to settle. 

The cover art depicts the Lugou Bridge Incident, a battle between the invading army of Imperial Japan and China’s National Revolutionary Army in July 1937. It involved the Japanese army’s attempt to locate a missing soldier in a Chinese town and quickly escalate into a brutal showdown between opposing forces, which some historians credit as the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War (and World War II proper). The entire Incident is depicted in the first single from the album, “Opening Salvo” a maddening crush of crater making grooves and pulverizing percussion that will leave you scrambling for cover as the deadly heat of the Phil Tougas's guitar work rains down around your ears. Through the twisted marauderism of tracks like “Righteous Fist to the Teeth of the Wicked,” Lee delves into the inciting sentiments of the Boxer Rebellion, while the wild cry and merciless hack-saw push of the doomy “Throes of a Dying Age” tells of the war’s grisly, bitter conclusion. 

Not all of the tracks off 亂 are mired in the grim history of colonial warfare, though. The album sees Lee taking the time to explore Chinese mythology as well. Although these detours inexorably lead the listener down a bloody path that parallels the real-life horrors depicted elsewhere. The Entombed-Thrower sputter and rip of “Eight Immortals Feast” shutters with blathering cries that have all but lost their human qualities as the lyrics depict a butcher shop that reduces luckless souls to moist delicacies for the culinary satisfaction of immortal beings. Later, the listener is greeted by an equally grisly depiction of King Zhou Xin and Queen Daji of the Shang Dynasty’s debauched parties on a lake of wine on the track “Ripped to Shreds,” a stranglehold of unyielding pressure and galloping, skull-cleaving grooves, abated only by the writhing shriek of a frenetic guitar solo’s outburst.

If you’re looking for a refreshing, modern take on Swe-grind that will occupy your ears as well as your mind, leading you down Wiki-rabbit holes of myth and true-life tales of mayhem (and really, why wouldn’t you), then Ripped to Shreds's 亂 is here for you when you're ready to set your senses and psyche ablaze! 

Grab a copy of 亂 from Pulverized Records, here.