Technically speaking there is nothing objectionable in this Ep, and I loved it when I read that the ten songs on it are on the average less than a minute long. I hated when I saw the punchhole on the back inlay though. Is it so discomforting for a label to think promotion is being paid those 4 meager euros an editor can haggle by selling a second hand Cd? Not that I will ever sell a promo Cd (it’s against my ethics) but like I have said ad nauseam – and I will keep saying it every time I see a punchole or a cutout or any kind of marks on a promo – I pretend to be paid the 80 cents a label pays for a Cd plus postage for using my time to publish it on this e-zine/blogzine/whatever (yeah even with 5 years of delay, eh eh). Hell, I have to recognize that labels do not even send promos anymore. I just delete the promo-download offers when I get that shit in my email inbox. Do they really ask you to download promos? Sure, why don’t you ask me to buy it, lose an hour writing a review and promote it for free?
Like I said before there is nothing wrong in this Ep. There’s even a super slick neogrind-willowtip-di-sto-cazzo layout with all those scratches and Photoshop layers overlapped like pros. The layout is balanced and we got all the necessary infos from recording details to thank lists. This at least looks like a 15 minutes Ep one could actually spend some money on, at least from the visuals.
“Nothing wrong” could be “not enough” when we talk about music, though. Considering the multitude of records circulating these days, even a recording with careful and well studied structures like these might not be enough. When the band plays Rotten Sound it works pretty well, as the sound is thick enough to stand the hyperspeed blasting. There are two things however that just don’t click into my chords. The first and foremost is the terrible vocals that sometimes creep in. Some sort of painful scream that just blabbers “we have arrived to the neogrind bandwagon”. Don’t get me wrong, when the band blasts it cam blast heavy and through, but then they have those fucking shitty beyond belief dissonant slow Neurosis-like bridges that I just can’t stand. Were they fast all the time I would have appreciated the Ep somehow. The problem is really the high pitched screams that are as brutal as cracker crumbs on a bed sheet. Just a few songs for people that like this stuff, as for myself, when I reached the second part of track 5 I felt the urge to get a gun and shoot the Cd player.
Preface: This is a review I begun to write in 2007, so do not bother to write it’s an old album, I know it’s an old album, and yes I am a human shit for not having reviewed it when the band actually needed it, but hey, I was just at war with myself at the time eh eh. Stay tuned because you’ll see a lot of old shit in the near future. It might as well be some bands have disbanded in the meantime. In any case I have two crates full of old promos to review so just shut up and enjoy what I have to say now that nobody needs it, ah!
I’ll start right away by telling what I do not like about this release, and it’s, plainly, the not-so tongue-in-cheek-humor. I barely could bear Spazztic Blurr or AOD, go figure what I can think of a band with humorous lyrics 30 years later. There are no lyrics printed here, but the titles just need no great analysis. Thinking about it one can view the humorous approach a bit like that of cheezy genre movies like Blood Freak (the monster turkey movie) or classic Troma stuff but I’ll be honest, I am not a big fan of that kind of horror, preferring less happy gore demented stuff.
Setting rants aside, I’ll move on to what I actually like of this album, and for a start the layout is quite good. Sure, “run of the mill” vanilla Subordinate “neogrind” style, but you can’t say the packaging isn’t professionally done, with sharp lines and an all original artwork, so thumbs up for the presentation here. But please, lyrics next time.
I don’t understand why they decided not to feature this band on the Metal Archives as not only the crisp sound but the songs themselves seem pretty “metal” to me. Well, a lot metal actually. The backbone is definitely fucked up grindcore of course, and it has some frequent blastbeats as well, but everything just sound as metallic as it can get (hell there is even that Pantera guy who was shot on stage mentioned in the thanklist twice,can you dare to say they’re crusties?). Remove the freaked out vocals from the mix and just listen to the guitarwork and tell me what you think.
From start to end this album is relentless, pretty tight, and has a lot of consistence. With that I mean that there are no boring intermezzos and trippy shit (well, actually there is a humorous song called “Carbonara Groove”, and a modern black metal bridge towards the end, but we can forgive them) but just straight to the core songs which have one or two riffs apiece and this is an approach I generally appreciate. I think if you cut off all pauses between the songs and you can pass this whole album as a single track eh eh. Slow down it a bit and you get a pretty decent Death Metal album as well , I need to try that.
So to wrap up my opinion is a bit mixed, I like the no frills approach and the fucked up vocals (Bastard Saints could have been a strong influence here as the randomly scattered vocal style is quite characteristic on that band and the singer also appears as guest here) but I always preferred a more sick, rougher sound. I have a concept of grindcore which is quite far from this, something darker, borderline frightening, certainly not this metallic. This album is an honest display of fast Grind/Metal with a schizoid vocal dept and a sleazy horror movie backbone. Could be worse after all.
Ahhhh! When Nuclear Abominations first became a webzine in 1999, one of the most boring things to do was scanning covers. It was outrageously boring shit, yet it was cool at the same time since it was difficult to see underground record covers, especially when we talk about very old releases. Am I complaining like an old sailor here? Hell no! All I had to do this time was just Google-ing the name of this compilation and, like magic, here is the cover. Man, these are really great times for lazy fucks like me. I wouldn’t even have to open the Cd, I could just listen to this on YouTube. Couldn’t I?
Considering I am not some high profile psychologist nor a hermit swelling in its own thoughts, I am not going to ponder the reason why I still do buy records sometimes. I haven’t really thought much about it but like I always did for music-related stuff, I just go with the feelings I have at the moment. That’s why I never learned to play an instrument I guess. Whatever the case I was intrigued to hear this retrospective. Obviously, I had listened to the main recording that make up this collection before, namely the 1991 demo tape later repressed on 7″ on Seraphic Decay (mine is on trippy pink paper cover, combined to the abstract design it was quite a nice psychotropic experience), but I never had the chance to hear Absurd live before. Obviously we’re not talking about the German NSM band (I omit the B on purpose here), but one of the small underground Swedish bands that played in Sweden in the earlier days of this form of music. They were from a small town just north of Stockholm (Täby, same town as Treblinka) for what I see, and well, you cannot really go too wrong with a 1991 band recording a demo at the Sunlight Studios at the time can you?
Before going on the the release itself, I’ll gladly spend a good word or two on the label: Black Vomit (from Greece) is the same label that released that Necro Schizma compilation we saw some 10 years now (IIRC it was From Beyond that released it) on wax, and – thank you Satan my lord – it has been released on super standard black vinyl with an super standard, bare packaging – enough with huge boxed sets spilling patches and pins from every corner. While I am a Necro Schizma fan and I did get the record as soon as I saw it, I have n0t bought their Genocidio vinyl yet but I plan to do it sometime in the not too far future. I have that old Ep of them and a more recent Cd from the early nineties (“Hoctaedrom”, how did it end on the local pop music store is a mystery) and I liked that stuff pretty much: good brutal sound without too much gloss. Together with this Cd I also got the Necroccultus / Sub Niggurath split, which is also killer. Good work man. Support this label.
Now on this proper Aburd release. One big “thank you” for not using the bakery shop logo they got on the Seraphic Decay Ep, I am pretty happy with this one. Thank you also for keeping it lineart black and white, please somebody tell every label doing reissues today that this is the ONLY way to go. I learned from the interview repressed in the booklet taken from the Return of Swedish Dodsmetall that the band used to change logo continuously (more or less like Nun Slaughter?) so the one we saw on cover is probably just one of them According to the ex-Espulsion guy Christopher Wowden, the band (but I can read “him” between the lines) was not fond of classic Death Metal logos so my guess is the logo chosen and the cover we see here is probably not what the band would have used at the time. Have a read at the interview if you don’t have Nicola’s book because it’s quite interesting. In conclusion, Absurd wanted to be progressive but the Cd came out way more similar to a old school Death Metal release than 80% of the retrospective I see these days. All in all, I am happy with this choice.
So what do these Absurd sound like? Well I am talking about the 3-trax demo here, because the live show, while interesting (there’s also a Pungent Stench cover), doesn’t exactly convey all the down-tuned, spectral sound of the band. I could dare to say sometimes the band has that slightly Crematory-ish semi-melodic vibe in the background, but all in all it’s Swedish Death metal. Highly structured, with a lot of tempo changes and blast beats, but Swedish Death to the core, hell yes. The vocals are not just the hyper-deep kind, and even have some metallic effect on the third track “See Through Me”. This last song definitely needs some extra attention because it has a lot of structure. I really like when bands attempted to experiment a bit while keeping it brutal (think Demilich or Crematory). It goes all through the spectrum of mid tempos and blasts but the choice of riffs and malevolent tremolos is something that could only come from 1990 Sweden. I have plugged off from the world for a few years but I am curious to see if any more recent band can capture this feel.
Good shit, get the Cd even for the three studio tracks if you don’t have the Seraphic Decay Ep. One single complain I could say is there is really little info except for a pretty regular collage and the aforementioned interview. I guess I would have liked a repress of the demo thank-list or some other extra information on the recordings, but after all you can excerpt the necessary info from the interview, so no big deal.
Where do I start? I don’t remember anything about reviewing records ah ah! After a cold beer tonight I just picked out the old box of Cds and tapes yet to review and wiped some dust off a multitude of cool things. Unable to decide where to start I just picked up this one randomly. The letter is date october 14, 2008. Wow Ricky, I must extend my first apologies for reviewing this album almost 4 years later. Eh.
I think I always started by giving some clues on the packaging. Nothing to say here, reeally, it’s just a CD-r with some tracks in it. Still better than downloading mp3s from the Internet of course. The font used may not be the best in the world but sticking to black and white and old horror lartwork reminiscent of old Tales from the Crypt is a sure shot. I have seen professional packages done worse than this (see Extreem records reissues).
Letting the disc spin, I have to say Battered Intestine is not the most outstanding goregrind band you can hear either. It’s always a fine line you’re walking when you try to play mid tempo gore stuff: plainly said CBT are good at it, this “band” isn’t. The record neither noisy nor sludgy nor heavy enough to stand out of the murky waste of gore sludge the scene proposes, it’s just a run of the mill bedroom recording with that metallic drum sound and buzzing guitarwork we heard many times, and honestly the guitar riffs themselves, taken singularly, are atrocious. Better than latest Samael for sure, but not a must buy.
Just in case you want to give it a chance, the full demo can be downloaded from their MySpace page.
This is Beyond Terror Beyond Grace‘s debut, a young band from Australia’s Blue Mountains, and it consist of four short tracks of a non-defined mix of extreme music styles. The opening riff is a total killer hyperfast blast of violence strongly influenced by Rotten Sound, Jigsore Terror, To Separate The Flesh From The Bones and the likes and made me hope for the best… if things were following that line all the time we could have had something real interesting if not overly complex or catchy. However there is a big flaw that I spotted almost immediately,and it’s that these songs are made up of riffs so eterogeneous that it feels like hearing Praxis or Mr Bungle (well not exactly to be honest but you get the point). While that opening blast was full of energy, the mid tempo Death Metal slam that follows close is among the most boring I have ever heard, kind of Internal Bleeding stripped down to play even more basic sloppy death. The vocals are a schizoid chamaleon which vary completely timbre from grunt to screams according to the underlying riff, and something weird happened when those got higher: a cold, pine smelling breeze entered my room and I could hear the penguins approaching from beyond the mist… Ah! No really they sound more new black metal than Grind, but that’s just a matter of perspective, I guess I could get used to them if we get over the bigger flaws. To tell the truth, I hate the Death Metal slam mid tempos in here, but the faster riffs range really from average to excellent. They should really drop the useless parts where the vocals become guttural and keep the faster parts only, or just try to improve songwriting of the slower bridges, becouse those are real lame. As it is, this is neither fish nor meat as they say here. The Cd has a very short duration, just like 9 minutes or so, but I guess it explores clearly what the intent of this band is. The guys look very young so we can expect some serious improvement I think. I hope the singer is just growing his hair, and not keeping that cut on purpose, though (ah ah, j/k). Nothing much to add to this, working a good layout when flames are involved is real though and well, it doesnt work in here either, but this is an Ep so things might have been made with some hurry. The cover depicts a man or a scarecrow shrouded in flames, and little else. At least the quality of the pics is sharp.
From my point of view, after years and years passed listening to Metal and Core, the sum of all the live recordings that deserve to be bought easily stays in the finger of a hand. And I am pretty much afraid this live 2004 isn’t in that list. Honestly, I like Bathtub Shitter, I really do… I have bought all their 7″ and listened to all of them a few times, but my narrow Doberman cranial box struggles to understand why I should listen to these songs with a broken sound and crowd shouts in the middle. I am probably the last person in the world to ask about live recordings, and well, I assume for a live it is good quality after all, but I just find live recordings completely useless.
The Cd looks pro, it has a color booklet, lyrics, photos collage and all the routine stuff in its place, but I really find it difficult to recommend something like this. You know Bathtub Shitter, right? Noisy at times, musically proficient at others, with that little touch of Japanese madness. If you’re a record collector and find challenged by this band’s huge list of releases here it is, get in touch with Power It Up.
Okay, this time I prefer not to read anything about this new release before actually hearing it from start to finish. I remember this is the band who also released a split with Abscess some years ago and according to Power It Up‘s info sheet it’s a collection of Bloodred Bacteria singles. I am not hugely versed on this kind of new grind core, but it seems to be a genre immensely popular in Germany, eastern European countries and in the far north. I personally never got big into it, and according to the sales of my shop back in the days, it doesn’t seem to stick very much in Italy. Maybe I didn’t push it enough… whatever.
The label is doing a good job with reissues in general, starting from a nice packaging with full lyrics and a couple of meaningless drawings, to a careful re mixing of these old songs for an even, better balanced sound. I lost myself halfway in the lyrics, some sort of generic rant that goes from moaning about how liberalism is bad and generic fun stuff. This definitely not the kind of lyrics that stick in the head like Fugazi‘s or Minor Threat if I must be honest. Also I would consider them a little more if they came from a Chilean band, instead of Germany.
From the musical standpoint, the Cd starts out a bit slow. Mostly that boring brand of run of the mill grind you can find on that big box of 7″ with nonsense covers you always find in average punk gigs. You know, the one sold by that guy with the army cap with Warsore patches, yellowish vegan skin and that brand new Driller Killer shirt. However even with the worst cynicism I admit there is good shit in the remaining half of this collection, though. The band seems to have gained some awareness somewhere in 2003-2004 starting out with the Swarrm split (that one is a great band by the way). The vocals are kinda strange, they are not particularly extreme, but their use of multi-layered recordings make them quite personal. The guitarwork has become more contorted without falling in that mathcore shit, but also not purely derivative of Discharge either. I must say there is some personality in this work. What seems to lack however is a good punch. The chemistry seems to have stalled to good levels, but none of these songs gave me even a fair shake. Mostly fast chugs and repetitive shouting. Could be a good choice for those into generic grind, I personally found it quite avoidable.
