Category Archives: Reviews by letter

BOLESNO GRINJE (Hrv): “Nitko Mas Ne Vidi…” Cd 2006 Deathbag

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Ah! So Blythe was serious when she was talking about her Deathbag records and this Bolesno Grinje release! This means I am the only cunt who’s not able to release a Cd on his own, dammit! Anyway the Claudia fuckin’ Schiffer of Grind Core started out with a grand debut for her label with this Cd, quite different from the previous material. For once, I can tell there’s real progression here, from every angle you eye it. Dropped the fleas, the packaging is real top level, the lyrics are finally understandable (if contorted) and what’s even better, the music has bloomed into a schizoid and thoroughly original pulp of Grind, Death and general extreme music elements. First off the production is sharp and well balanced, the sound has a bit more emphasis on the metal side, with some intreesting turns which even reminded me of some Neurosis stuff and the songs really difficult to pigeonhole. There is just a track which I cannot swallow easily and that’s “Uvdek Problemi” which sounds a bit too emo-progressive post-something at first yet even this one branches out quickly into a plethora of different styles, all at the same time. It is interesting how this band manages to explore and define a sound of their own yet paying homage to a lot of distinct genres. It’s one of those concoctions which just amalgam finely and without sharp contrasts. Surely there is a huge English/Swedish crust vein, expecially in the vocals, but heaviness and complexisty are definitely borrowed from metal. Yet I wonder: to this day, after hearing bands like Nasum and Rotten Sound does it really mean something to talk about labels? Whatever, even if I am still all for teenage gore bands, my critical sense admits there is something big developing here, this band is developing fast, with a lot of logic and inner consitency. Simply put, for being one of the very few bands I can think of from Croatia, this is absoutely the best I know from that country. Were I in you I’d buy it, eh.

SPEARHEAD (Eng): “Decrowning the Irenarch” Lp Cd 2007 Invictus

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Before I start the whining, let me state that this Cd looks real terrific. The design here is tremendous, woefully elegant and definitely classy. The cover art is not only intricately beautiful, but it also reflects a very strong concept that permeates the whole release. War. Struggle as the means of man to overcome mediocrity and avoid corruption and degrade. Historical references appear as pictures of iconic representations in a sleek sepia packaging that is perfect even in the choice of fonts. This is really beautiful to look at. I was even remotely intrigued by the lyrics and foreword on their take on the irenarchs of the past and present.

I always find it a bit difficult to find parallels between boys that play musical instruments on stage and maybe participate in a few weekend full contact sessions with paint guns and real soldiers that see their friends torn to pieces by shrapnels, that visit places where real people die including your strict relatives. But the philosophical message here is strong and that’s not the weak spot on this album: it’s the music that really fails here. This album is one of the best examples of hideously generic thrash/death metal I have heard this year. Sure ly some riffs are nice, and they even attempt a killer echoing “ugh ugh” during the first fast opening riff in the best Celtic Frost tradition, and the solos are actually thought out and cool – but the scattering of good chords and soporific mid tempos is quite hard to understand and to find any coherence in. It’s like that movie “Memento” where all the scenes are cut and pasted backwards. You hear the same mediocre galloping riff 8 times, and then a completely different one drops in, coming from some third grade band from Melbourne. It’s as if someone cut the film in the cassette master and hastily taped it together randomly. This again doesn’t mean they inherently suck, they’re just totally unbearable because thrashing energy never bursts out, always squeezed in a vaguely Australian styled neo “denim plus million patches” Thrash Metal composition that really tastes like Kosher meat without seasoning. The vocals are terribly banal but for once I won’t twist the knife in the wound. This band is definitely not for me, even if the premises were good it lacks completely of catchiness. If only they could take an inch of old Vader or Sadus they could as well be something. As it is I could barely keep my lids open after 10 minutes of mono-frequency vocals and semi identical riffs. Not as bad as the previous one but still light years from being interesting.

EXHIBIT-A (Aus): “Home Dentistry” split Cd with ROADSIDE BURIAL (Aus) 2008 Grindhead

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No. I am not really going to take it. A few dozen tracks written between 2000 and 2001 and exhumed just for sharing plastic with Roadside Burial. I admit this band is slightly more savage and deranged, and all in all it’s nto so bad, but i don’t feel very merciful these days. This band is fast, chaotic, has some shredding Japanese like screams and a monster gruff sound, which is fine, but it really leaves much after you listen to it. Even if more varied, the constant vibration of the high screams soon make this listening a test of patience. It might be okay for a listen, but not so much as to spend your money on I am afraid. I really start to miss old dirty grindcore of the eighties/early nineties and the bulldozing energy of Last Days of Humanity – these bands really have no much soul. Still better than post-Nasum washing machine gind but even this Australian prototypical drunk grind is getting a bit overheated.

I like the weirdo approach and the unpredictable song writing, and I loved the crdue way the tracks are hacked so you can hear the moment one ends and another start. But it’s a bit little for a band to stand out of the drowd today. From Grindhead I loved Eyetofuk much, much better.

ROADSIDE BURIAL (Aus): “Such Is Life” split Cd with EXHIBIT-A (Aus) 2008 Grindhead

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Roadside Burial is ex-Volatile, a rather unknown band, at least here in Europe, who supposedly played grindcore. Personally I have never heard Volatile, even if the name is so fucking cool…(1, 2, 3)… NOT! A two men band with a terrible sounding drum machine isn’t exactly what usually stirs interest in me but considering how many times I have been wrong by judging Cds by the cover lately, I swear I am putting myself in trancelike state while listening to this record so I can be as objective as possible.

Let me see… the vocals are cool, of the two-layered kind you know. The riffs are little more than crust core a la Discharge lus some metal added. These drums are unbearable so let’s skip them for once. Well to say this stuff is unremarkable would be a desperately honest judgment. If this band was from Czech republic and had Bizarre Leprous routine 2 second shit cover I would have already thrown it in the “average death metal” heap. Being a Australian band with a 15 year background, I want to convince there is more here than a bunch of riffs written after a dope party over a totally anonymous drum machine program. No – really – this is not bad stuff, but so incredibly average I would barely recommend it unless you have 5 euros in your pocket after a bad show in a local squat and need to go home with something new. There are still good bands around that have to be exploited (since we talk Australian ground, get the latest Cemetery Urn album – pure gold), I see no need to go with this, not to mention the artwork on cover is really routine too. Good guitar sound, cool vocals, if nothing else.

PROFANATICA (USA/Ny): “Profanatitas De Domonatia” Lp Cd 2008 Hell’s Headbangers

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I decided to exhume an old review from the previous website (remember you can access all the old reviews by clicking the “old reviews” link in the sidebar) just for the occasion. Like I used to say, Profanatica was one of my favorite Black Metal bands, to receive their new album is a fucking event. The question is: will this reunion work? Or we’ve just been lucky with Archgoat?

In short, I will tell you that this is really one of the top 5 Black Metal albums of the year. Ask someone with a brain what Black Metal is and you’ll get similar answers. It has to be misanthropic, alienating, mesmerizing, insane, demonical, inhuman. All these elements are still present and strong in Profanatica‘s sound, goddamnit! And in a perfect balance as well. This is one of the bands that paved the genre and they still do it brilliantly. You don’t get the evocative ballads of Burzum or the merry sing along riffs of Watain here: just unrefined, raw Black Metal force, a sticky black fluid that absorbs life and happiness flows out of the stereo once you put “Profanatitas…” on the turntable. This is also one of the best releases from Hell’s Headbangers so far too, it was a cool relief to hear that some bands actually withstand the test of time so well.

Just like it should be for real Black Metal, there are no fancy evolutions here: everything is stripped to the absolute minimal – drums are just a constant droning sound in the background, an almost tribal hypnotic beating. The riffs have the crushing, slow force that pressed nails in jesus’s hands and feet. The vocals a lacerating lament, gargling with hateful spite for living things. I cannot think of a better expression of good old fashioned BlackMetal. You can almost figure yourself in the middle of a bestial orgy, surrounded by the smell of sulfur and brimstone, black robed priests with leper gnawing human bones and virgins fucking with goats and dogs. This is definitely a must-fucking-have album.

The artwork is cool but the booklet is a little bare, just folded cardboard. Thinking about it a second time, it fits the release – but I’ll personally go for the vinyl. Get the 12″ version if you find it, its force is doubled on old school vinyl with all the pops and crackling. Again, absolutely a must have.

PROFANATICA (USA/Ny): “…Tormenting Holy Flesh…” split Cd with MASACRE (Col) 1992 Osmose

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Profanatica was one of my favourite Black Metal bands when it was becoming a solid enstabilished genre per se, with its aesthetics and stuff, and the fact they came from a district of New York just made the thing for me all the better. I feel really annoyed by Scandinavian Black Metal, however you call it. This band originally formed out of a very early version of Incantation when both Ledney and McEntee left Revenant (if you want to hear the other bands which came before this: Contrivisti and Toten, check out the excellent – as usual – retrospective on Nuclear War Now!) or as Ledney put it, when John left the band and took the name with himself. Whatever the case, it seems their friendship must have been deteriorating afterwards becouse McEntee is on the first line in the thankslist of this “…Tormenting Holy Flesh…” split album. Profanatica is quite atypical for the modern interpretation of the Black Metal band, for several reasons. The riffs of their songs were not just constrant buzzing tremolos a la Immortal & Co. but you can call them riffs old school Death/Black with Doom laden bridges and powerful twists, there is even one small touch of the early Incantation here, when I really like the guitars, the impossibly bad recording and shrieking vocals just don’t annoy me so much, on the contrary, I am pleased by the total garage sound, it really reeks evil like the worse south American recording and the malignity just results heightened. Ledney here handles both drums and vocals (like Nocturnus or Autopsy) and I believe he does a good job at both things. His screams are a blasphemous agony, not your ridicolous typical popeye Scandinavian-style shout, I really picked this out becouse some resemblances to Messiah which I reviewed yesterday might not be totally out of place, when we talk about the slower grinding sections. Track 1 is the only new song here, as both “Final Hour of Christ” and “Weeping in Heaven” previously appeared in other works, and the 8 minute “I Arose” is just a fucking evocative instrumental masterpiece. No really this stuff is so neat I am not afraid to say I like it more than 99% of today’s Black Metal (there are exceptions, but you get my point), this is what I mean for Black Metal, not paper penguins. I don’t care much for the panda corpsepaint but seens it’s a must have for any so called satanic band (bah). Profanatica was really, really direct and sick in their blasphemy. I have seen a video of these guys playing naked and smeared with blood on stage, masturbating on the bible, smashing a virgin mary statue stained with blood on stage, spitting urine at the crowd, they were really, really nasty and disgusting, trying to break all of jesus christ’s rules not just by writing lyrics in their flats but also by acting disgusting and against the laws of nature (a bit like G.G. Allin). I haven’t heard anything since their reunion (except for the collection picLp but that’s all old stuff) so I can’t tell if things changed for the best or stayed so primeval, you should check Hell’s Headbangers website often to stay informed. I have compared both vinyl and Cd versions of this split and I haven’t found any differences. There was a flyer insert withing the Lp cover however where Osmose was sponsoring the “The Raping of Virgin Mary” unreleased album, ah. I don’t know if there was a mistake on the flyer but what was to become the cover of this split was instead placed as the cover for that never released album. Blasphemous and totally crude the way this is meant to be, once again! Fuck polished sound!

SERAPHIM SLAUGHTER (USA-Nj): “Scum Terror” Lp Cd 2007 AIDS Needle

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I had to think about it several times, and I finally came to the conclusion that I don’t like this debut album by Seraphim Slaughter. Sure, it is rough and crusty. Sure it has equal shares of Abscess-like Punk and Black Metal. But it’s just the black metal part that doesn’t manage to convince me at all. It’s an hybrid nested somewhere between The Germs and any Norwegian Black Metal band from the 90’s (pick one, anyone – they’re too hard to identify ah ah!).

If there was more South American vulgarity maybe… maybe… but like this it’s a bit weak other than filthy. The general idea is nice: a band from the grime of New Jersey experimenting lessons in alchemy with vials of the most ugly kinds of music. The cover art is also superb, totally “old school ’80’s thrash metal demo” style, mixing suicide, dead babies, a girl stabbed to death and AIDS encrusted syringes – it looks so vintage it’s a real pity I cannot make myself enjoy it. But really it’s not a matter of filth, it’s the guitarwork that it’s definitely too easy in a bad way, much like a college band if you know what I mean, I must have listened to all the riffs contained here when I was still a teenager. Just like happened with Watain, the dress is not at the same level as the content. Some thrash, some punk, some easy listening black metal… there is really HUGE space for improvement. As it is, I won’t personally buy it for 20 cents.