Carcass Announce 2016 North American Tour

by Daniel Maarat on April 21, 2016

Carcass doctors

Carcass have been touring almost-nonstop since reuniting and releasing their phoned-into-ProTools excuse to tour, Surgical Steel. Right after supporting Slayer, they have announced yet another set of dates. Despite the mainstream metal openers, this “One Foot in the Grave 2016” might be worth worth checking for grindcore and death metal die hards as Carcass play material from all periods of their career when headlining.

Following a successful assault on our shores alongside label mates SLAYER and TESTAMENT, disinterred British metal icons CARCASS, will return to North America for a headlining tour this summer.! Joining them are southern metal heavy weights CROWBAR, horror thrashers GHOUL, and Los Angeles based metal act NIGHT DEMON.

“One Foot In The Grave 2016”
CARCASS, CROWBAR, GHOUL, NIGHT DEMON
07/16/16 Chicago, IL – Chicago Open Air Festival
07/17/16 Lawrence, KS – Granada Theater
07/19/16 Denver, CO – Bluebird Theatre
07/20/16 Salt Lake City, UT – The Complex
07/22/16 Sacramento, CA – Ace Of Spades
07/23/16 Santa Ana, CA – The Observatory
07/24/16 Los Angeles, CA – The Roxy Theater
07/25/16 Phoenix, AZ – Club Red
07/26/16 El Paso, TX – Tricky Falls
07/27/16 Albuquerque, NM – Sunshine Theater
07/29/16 Memphis, TN – New Daisy Theatre
07/30/16 Louisville, KY – Mercury Ballroom
07/31/16 Columbus, OH – Park Street Saloon
08/01/16 Baltimore, MD – Baltimore Sound Stage
08/02/16 Richmond, VA – Broadberry
08/03/16 Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts
08/04/16 New York, NY – Gramercy Theatre
08/05/16 New Haven, CT – Toad’s Place
08/06/16 Montreal, QC – Heavy MTL Festival (Carcass only)

Keep in mind that Carcass are still entertaining when shitfaced:

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Metal Curmudgeon: When Carcass Lost Direction

by Brett Stevens on April 10, 2016

carcass_-_reek_of_putrefaction

I love used book stores — generally libraries, thrifts and small independents — because the chase is greater than the catch, and finding a rarity or just something fun to read is an inexhaustible thrill. A selection of old books gives a distinct perspective not just of writing but of history.

Each time I look over the dusty spines, castoffs of previous generations or well-loved volumes containing advice relied upon by those who came before, I am reminded how human history is a lattice of ideas. Each great thinker is a nodal point from which others branch, re-combining with other ideas or adding their own. And each writer boils down to one idea, usually, with the greatest having a handful.

The rest is a support system for that. To take a great idea and fling it out into the world requires a book, a third of which is introduction, a third explaining the idea in depth and a final third gesturing at relevance and shouting down the inevitable counter-arguments. Then the author spends the rest of his/her career amplifying on that idea or chasing its elusive ultimate form. Then, RIP and all of that boils down to a sentence of summary that most people know.

Think of Charles Malthus (“utilized resources expand algebraically, but population grows exponentially”) or even Adam Smith (“the self-interest of the many results in a balance”). Metal bands are remembered the same way: Black Sabbath (“used horror movie aesthetics on heavy rock to invent proto-metal”) or Suffocation (“used death metal textural complexity with speed metal choppy strumming styles”).

And Carcass? They will forever be remembered as the guys who made clumsy grindcore based around medical lyrics. This is too bad, as their real strength was to expand the grindcore song structure to include longer riffing that often emulated Second World War era popular music, even if unconsciously.

In fact, most of their success comes from the fact that they did everything unconsciously. On the surface, they were having a laugh with gore lyrics and sloppy grind. The first album, Reek of Putrefaction, is entirely unselfconscious in this way. It does not want to be anyone’s friend, or appeal to an audience. It is just having fun and accidentally unleashes the subconscious mind through a biting parody of society and its fear of disease and death.

It was that awkward and offhand element that caught the imagination of an audience. That, and the ripping tunes: the first Carcass album made grindcore complex enough for songs to be distinctive, but kept its rumbling chaotic surface that hid the structure. This made it heavier than most of what was out there at the time and inspired a thousand imaginations.

After that point, however, the Carcass story tapers off. Every album since then has been the band trying to re-interpret its original unintentional success, but to expand it by making the music more like Led Zeppelin and Metallica so that it can be “serious.” And therein is the problem: this band suffers a deep neurosis and when it tries to be serious, it fails. When just drunk and goofing around, these guys are able to reach into the unsocialized parts of their minds and come up with something good.

Symphonies of Sickness came out shortly after Reek of Putrefaction, but already shows us a more self-conscious band. The title is cute, the songs more obviously melodic and prone to borrow hard rock riffs, and the production still vicious but in a controlled way. Everything about the second Carcass album is a managed environment designed to manipulate appearance just like the neat rows of houses in the suburbs, political speeches and advertisements for security companies. The band reversed its raw approach and joined what they mocked.

After that, it has been all downhill. The Tools of the Trade EP showed us the new Carcass: melodic songs, death metal riffs and none of the grindcore urgency or organic appeal. It was all very much a product of the conscious mind trying to be serious so that other people would like it. Necroticism — Descanting the Insalubrious shat the bed with more of the same. For the time, it fit in competitively with death metal, and I listened to it then, but found over the years that I reached for it less and less.

I feared becoming like an old punker I met back in the early 1990s. “Carcass, great band, but they lost it after the first album,” he said. I knew these guys, I felt. They were like the old bearded dudes in robes who stood on streetcorners in the 1960s with signs saying THE END IS NEAR. They were walking stereotypes: the bitter old “truist” who only likes the demos and maybe the first album for any band, and will tell you to stop listening to that commercial shit you’re pimping and look up some rare, expensive and ineptly-packaged 7″ or cassette instead.

But the old guy — at probably 35, already a curmudgeon-in-training — had a point: most bands have only one idea. In metal and punk, bands are artists first and musicians second; they become musicians to express some idea or feeling. They intuit that musicians become experts in making music that people like and as a result, the external form dictates the content and it becomes about like everything else: technically correct, artistically empty like all the other products, fast food and celebrity autobiographies.

Carcass went on to get a PhD in bed-shitting with Heartwork, which was a decent speed metal album with some nice technical touches, but lacked any purpose so became overly “emo.” After that, the grindcore audience fled and the hard rock audience — this was pre-nu-metal days — was scared off by the vocals, so the Carcass brand went into free fall. The band launched a bitter final salvo with Swan Song in which they realized that their responsible, middle class daylight personalities always wanted to just be Led Zeppelin because that is how you work hard and succeed in rock ‘n’ roll as a career!

I fall between your average suburban music fan and the old crusty punk. Perhaps the Peel Sessions, “Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment” demo and a few scattered 7″ and live shows are the “real” Carcass, but the first album is real enough for me. After that, the band gets self-conscious and soon there is a stinky speedbump under the sheets. But Reek of Putrefaction is great and every person who enjoys quality outsider music should hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3l-5X4jLM

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Intolitarian – Suicidal Allegiance (2016)

by Brett Stevens on April 6, 2016

intolitarian_-_suicidal_allegiance

Back in 1995 someone cut metal’s balls off. Underground metal (death metal and black metal) had gone to the furthest extremes: denying rock music, smashing down mass religion, and finally, endorsing a Nietzschean natural selection against the will of the herd. There was nowhere left to conquer, except perhaps politically.

As the odious and 99% horribly boring and pointless NSBM movement showed us, however, Nazism was not just captured by a group of unibrow SJW types, but it was boring and not very extreme. Nazism was an attempt to stop the collapse of our civilization, its breakdown by good intentions, and as a result was like a nagging Nanny albeit one that committed horrible genocide, even if relatively mild compared to the USSR and Genghis Khan (elite company).

Metal needed to push further. When war metal combined the dark primitivism of Beherit and Blasphemy with the unrelenting forward drive of high intensity rhythmic death metal bands like Angelcorpse and Hate Eternal, it reduced the “busy” tendencies of those bands but created a type of monotonic texture music that was both comforting and violent. Intolitarian pushes things a step further by using the war metal model to incorporate a more technical version of early Napalm Death style grindcore, and harsh industrial noise.

intolitarian_-_logo

Starting songs with samples and feedback, Intolitarian then launches into a song pattern like that of war metal but with more idiosyncratic internal structures, eschewing the darker riffs in favor of pure deconstructive chaos riffs in the Napalm Death From Enslavement to Obliteration style. From harsh industrial noise it takes a ton of guitar feedback, fuzz and abrupt samples, but even more importantly, the tendency to hang on a squeal or shriek and then let the chaos surge in again, like waves on a beach put on fast forward before a storm.

Much has been said about the political dimensions of Intolitarian, and nearly all of it is painful nonsense. If this band wanted to be Nazis, they would have just joined up with the usual crew of basement-dwellers who have made “white nationalism” a walking joke like their liberal counterparts for the last fifty years. Intolitarian want to be worse than Nazis. There is no safety in politics with this band. Only a raw need to destroy the walking dead that is our society, and replace with with a feral and atavistic struggle for survival.

Suicidal Allegiance was recorded in 2012 and finally saw release last month through a yet-unnamed van-down-by-the-river underground label. If anything, it is too short; these songs feel like a window into a different world, and one that is more structured than industrial noise and more focused than grindcore with the easy engagement of war metal. Let us hope this provocative and stimulating band continues to refine its attack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETShglbLEos

https://youtu.be/9PFZ7J8jQtE

https://youtu.be/LgG2N1hSW9w

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Reissue Radar: Blood – O Agios Pethane (1993)

by Gabe Kagan on February 26, 2016

blood_1993_small

Following up on Vic Records’ reissue of Christbait a couple months ago, Dunkelheit Produktionen from Germany is preparing a reissue of that album’s followup. O Agios Pethane also got a good review from the Dark Legions Archives at some point in the past and is presumably a worthy continuation of the band’s career in a similar style. The album is currently available for preorder from Dunkelheit’s online store and will be officially available on March 20th, 2016. Like its predecesssor, it should serve as a historic example of well written grindcore/death metal, although any band seeking to draw inspiration from it may need to also pull from other sources in order to produce something valuable.

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Magrudergrind – II (2016)

by Gabe Kagan on February 22, 2016

magrudergrind2_1500

So famous that you might’ve just heard of them right now for the first time. Magrudergrind is back after a hiatus with an album that makes a potent case for keeping simplicity tightly under wraps so that we don’t risk every band with half a half-hearted interest in songwriting nabbing it from the medicine cabinet and hoarding it all for themselves.

I don’t exactly listen to much straight up ‘grindcore’, which adds to the holes in my listening experience, but II sounds pretty much like what I’d expect any half-proficient band in the genre to put out. It’s understandably a little slicker than most of the formative efforts in the genre (Napalm Death, Carcass, Repulsion, etc.), although from what I’ve heard this album trades in some of the bits of schlock comedy that “distinguished” previous Magrudergrind content from its contemporaries for more standard, basic, banal grindcore. On some scales, this is really a perfect 5/10 album; it’s exactly what I expected aesthetically, it does nothing particularly interesting, and it doesn’t even have the temerity to offend me even slightly lest I end up shaming Magrudergrind on the internet; does this sound like anybody we know? II is basically the equivalent of a blank cassette waiting to be recorded to for the first time, but like most albums of little musical merit, we can at least learn a few lessons from the circumstances surrounding it.

As I hinted at in the intro, Magrudergrind’s latest is a very simplistic album that isn’t far removed from the starkest, most deconstructive efforts in its genre. The problem working in such a limited palette is that most of the time, it’s only a sign of low effort; it takes surprising amounts of skill, ambition, or at least luck, to cut down your music and still retain some shred of coherence and communicative value. Grindcore, as a genre, is especially vulnerable to the dark side of these tendencies; once you reach maximum violence and intensity there isn’t much left to do in the confines of the genre. The various famous bands of the genre all found their coping mechanisms; I’m personally most familiar with Carcass’s rapid pivot towards pop music. Magrudergrind’s, on the other hand, was apparently to go on hiatus for a few years and then return when everyone had forgotten not only them, but also the very knowledge that they had forgotten about Magrudergrind.

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The little doom factory – Interview with FUCK YOGA Records

by Staff on November 28, 2015


Interview by Gent Mehmeti

A small distro portraying Skopje’s (Macedonia) gloominess and fucked up street reality through records and gigs since the early 2000s, FUCK YOGA has since grown into a label that makes obscure hardcore and metal gems somehow available to the few heterodox freaks roaming this city. Its presence has grown during the years. Today, it is home to some of the more obscure acts that seem to have acquired a cult following in the margins of hardcore and slow-paced metal. California’s Noothgrush and even Boston doomsters Grief have gone through FUCK YOGA.

We’ll dive inside and try to dissect everything up in an interview with Ivan Kocev, the man behind this freakish abomination.

1. Ivan, you seem to be heavily attached to gruesome acts of human abhorrence. Well, at least one’s first impression is similar, whilst viewing Fuck Yoga through the lenses of conventional societal pattern.

I accept it as part of nature’s condition, hidden behind the veil of social conventions. It is important to familiarize oneself with all aspects of existence in order to gain more knowledge and bring more truthful judgments further in life.

2. What’s up with you and yoga anyway? Why all the hate dude?

When we were plastering posters for shows, they were often being covered by a yoga class. What also contributed to choosing the name was the “instant enlightenment” vibe that radiated from these people… I also read that the purpose of yoga was “becoming one with the great power that you were never actually apart from” or something like that, which I found bullshit at that time. So over 10 years later, the name remained- it’s not something I actively live by.

3. You pretty much nailed it with a few issues lately. Apartment 213, Noothgrush, Grief…some pretty cult stuff right there. How did you manage lurking them into your lair? Isn’t there a shitload of labels, some highly reputable I might add, in these guys’ states?

I’m a big fan of the mid-90’s mutant hardcore. It might as well have been the final progressive effort of sonic alchemy in it’s respective genre- acknowledging the past, yet branching out into unorthodox forms. Of course-with varying degrees of success, but the general feeling of actual creation and boldness was highly inspiring to my younger self. The bands you mentioned would have no trouble finding a “bigger” label then FUCK YOGA to release their records, but standard scaling doesn’t necessarily apply in this world anyway. They might be considered “cult” nowadays, albeit most of their records were issued on labels strongly rooted in the underground. I cultivate the DIY spirit while providing a very decent representation of their body of work. I salute staying underground by choice, not by necessity.

4. I guess you’re exposed to much of the sensibility of this genre. You collaborate, tour and run a label. You’ve grown to understand the scene from within. Do you think it is an all inclusive club that has built itself upon an egalitarian belief of indisputable equality? Or has this been the distorted image that we have been served by potential pests? My question seeks to disclose if ubermen who breed elite ideas are still present within these circles.

It is up to the individual to choose on which of the many conflicting attributes it pays attention to. You don’t have to look hard to come upon hypocrisy and shallowness in the underground- why would it would be devoid of? I encourage self-sufficiency, yet it’s funny how the bigger picture you see, roles start morphing. It is important to learn from experience and stay alert.

5. What are some of the shittiest bands out there that have been bringing a lot heat lately? I’m all obsessed with negative lists and would really want to hear your opinion.

I am not following “the heat” really. As time becomes more precious for me, I have to spread it out as productive as possible.

6. How do we kill this whole revival trend that has been busting our balls? Resurrection is cool sometimes, but if every idiot is given the opportunity to bring stuff back to life, pretty soon we might even see Christian metal bands or some fucked up shit like that rocking the scene.

Simply judge for yourself instead being told what’s good for you. Easier said than done, I know… If your acceptance filter can handle a copy of a copy of a copy- who cares? I try not to focus on what I dislike, rather use my effort in directions that excite me. The underground will always survive through mutation- some will lose sight, interest or power- but it implodes forever.

7. Are you a fan of population reduction? I am. Who do you think is doing the job well in aiding the process?

It’s difficult to imagine oneself as a 1/7 billionth part of a system. I try not to get too global, it feels depowering. I believe in eye-to-eye centrifugal action, as a real change needs a strong core. Much more efficient then just poking all over the place.

8. What’s on your schedule with Fuck Yoga?

Any day now (late November `15) I’m releasing a new batch of records; GRIEF s/t 12” and “dismal” LP/CD, MOSS “sinister history vol.1” (the first in the series of several records spanning the early, obscure years of the band), DESPISE YOU “west side horizons” LP, and BILLY BAO “communisation” LP. Next would be a NEW WORLD 3”/4” record, SETE STAR SEPT “vinyl collection” CD and HERPES “medellin” 7” repress. 2016 will see records by BASTARD NOISE, DAZD, GOLI DECA…

9. Do you think we’re battling an inside war against our own when facing the fury of SJWs who are censoring us with their PC crap? Fucking hipster pieces of trash!

I will have to disappoint you again with my detachment from cliques. I do not practice any organized political belief- It takes a lot of skill and practice to become independent. I can’t completely deny my social presence, and I am continually learning how to minimize compromise in favor of saving energy for the long run.

10. Briefly explain everything I missed out due to this interview being conducted by me in my utmost hung-over state. I didn’t ask you anything about Fuck Yoga’s roots, plans, presence etc. Neither did I ask you about the 3-4 bands you’re currently in (there’s at least one of them that I dig). Hell, you run a bizarre label somewhere in Southeastern Europe, where such things are true rarities and I didn’t ask you anything the domestic situation – that’s pretty lame of me; I bet it’s fun to hear some bone chilling stories of Balkan underground. Plus you’re organizing this festival in December and I totally skipped that. Preach the gospel!

Here’s what bands I’m currently involved in: GOLI DECA – the music is slow, but not “doom”- it’s devoid of the traditional rock/metal attributes- along the lines of what SWANS were doing on the first few records. VKOZUREN is musically comparable to early BURZUM- primitive and escapist.

The longest running, yet still unnamed band is somewhat a continuation of my previous band, POTOP- only more feral and surreal. I have used musical influences from WINTER, DISEMBOWELMENT, (early) MORBID ANGEL, EARTH 2, (early) DEAD CAN DANCE. Another unnamed, featuring Oleg Chunihin also of the band above and GOLI DECA, is trance-like bass-driven micro-compositions- think HELLHAMMER, BARATHRUM… There are a couple of rehearsal clips online, studio recordings and eventual releases are planned for 2016. MILITANT ZAZA is the name of the mini-fest we’re organizing for the first time this year, with exclusive performances by VERMAPYRE (nightmarish horror soundtracks), REGLER (the new project of BRAINBOMBS/ BILLY BAO personnel), PROPOVED (amazing ancient heavy doom from Serbia) and GOLI DECA. The idea was to organize an event covering different points of the extreme music specter, focusing on the fringes. Thank you for your interest and effort, it’s much appreciated.

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Earache pushes Carcass LP box set

by Gabe Kagan on November 10, 2015

Carcass - Casket Case (2015)
On Friday, November 13th, you will be able to purchase Carcass’s latest compilation (Casket Case) for up to one minute. Earache Records claims that their previous ultra-limited box sets have sold out incredibly fast and it seems unlikely that this will be an exception. Casket Case features all five of the studio LPs Carcass released for Earache, meaning that you get the later underwhelming “melodic death metal” material as well as earlier, formative grindcore and death metal if you manage to get your hands on this. As a consolation price for those who fail to get their hands on this apparent bounty, Earache is also discounting the separate albums on CD for some time, as well as two compilations from when the band was dissolved during the late ’90s and early 2000s.

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Swarming streams “Hideous” from Cacophony of Ripping Flesh: Recordings 2010-2012

by Brett Stevens on October 31, 2015

swarming_-_cacophony_of_ripping_flesh_recordings_2010-2012

Swarming brings together experienced old school death metal personnel from Finland and Sweden to slash out a putrid, raw, grinding and crusty form of death metal that borrows as much from Autopsy and Carcass as it does Demigod and Dismember. For Halloween, Dead Beat Media has released Cacophony of Ripping Flesh: Recordings 2010-2012 which collects the complete works of the band during the first two years of its existence.

Check out the exclusive stream of “The Hideous Incantation” right here:

Storming death metal riffs gain support from an underpinning of melody balanced by the sickening, dragging and decomposing riffs that like the unsteady hand of a drunken surgeon dragging scalpels through flesh, induce a mood of hopeless darkness and perverse enjoyment of the world’s suicide. Demonstrating competence in both the technicalities of death metal and the intricacies of rock guitar, Swarming show death metal at its most engaging and yet repulsive.

Biography

Swarming (formed in February 2010) is a Finnish-Swedish collaboration with Lasse from Hooded Menace, Phlegethon, and Ruinebell, and Rogga from Paganizer, Ribspreader, and Humanity Delete. The guys share the same passion for raw and filthy music and that is what they are here to deliver with Swarming. Downtuned and putrid, grinding, crusty death metal!

Swarming Cacophony of Ripping Flesh – Recordings 2010-2012 compiles tracks recorded during the band’s existence so far including the two tracks from Swarming/Zombie Ritual split (Doomentia 2010). Cover artwork comes from David of Extremely Rotten Records. The album was mixed by the band and mastered by Mikko Saastamoinen (whose other works include Hooded Menace, Ruinebell and Vacant Coffin).

Thanks to Jill at Dead Beat Media, we are able to offer you this exclusive album track stream on Halloween 2015. As you are gorging on candy and cider, take a moment to vomit purulent blood with Swarming!

    Tracklist

  1. The Hideous Incantation
  2. Reeking of the Bowels
  3. It Came From the Graveyard
  4. Hacksaw Holiday
  5. Feasting on Drowned Flesh
  6. Amputation Frenzy
  7. Convulsing Into Eternal Doom
  8. Premature Embalming

You can find the CD and cassette at the Dead Beat Media store at deadbeatshop.bigcartel.com and keep track of the band through Facebook pages for Dead Beat Media and Swarming.

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Blood – Christbait re-release coming on September 28th

by Gabe Kagan on September 17, 2015

Blood - Christbait (1992)

Vic Records is rereleasing Blood’s 1992 album Christbait on September 28th. This German death metal/grindcore act received some praise in the old archives for successfully adding some conventional musicality to a standard formula. In that regard this is similar to how Carcass and Napalm Death expanded their sounds on Symphonies of Sickness and Harmony Corruption; Christbait is similarly more intelligible and elaborate than Blood’s previous work (although still fairly simplistic) while retaining much of its intensity. Newer bands would do well to learn from these examples if they want to create works of similar quality.

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What thrived and what died from the 1990s (Part I)

by Brett Stevens on September 3, 2015

record_store_man

While the new last.fm redesign seems to me another exercise in pointless self-justification by middle management, the ability to see statistics on my listening has entirely changed how I view the music held closest to my heart. Seeing the numbers has shown me how it is one thing to list a band as a favorite or recommendation, and one far different animal to listen to it on a monthly basis. One is assessment alone, as if listening were your sole task, and the other utility, showing that this piece of music has a place in your life of many tasks and goals.

This assessment filters among the upper level of the highest echelon of metal. The assessment itself filters out the nonsense, all of which suffers from a single sin — disorganization — which takes many different forms but reveals a lack of will, purpose and principle in constructing art and always red-flags a directionless listen. But among those bands who have escaped the madness, there is no equality in listening. Some have risen and some have fallen over 20 years of pounding out metal from my speakers as I work or relax at home. In most cases, the reaction was first shock and then realization that the seeds of this knowledge were there all along. Let us look at a few pairs where listening habits elevated one album over a similar one…

Blasphemy Fallen Angel of Doom vs. Blood Impulse to Destroy

blasphemy_-_fallen_angel_of_doom_-_reissue

Over the years metal has frequently benefited from punk influences because metal, as befits its partially progressive rock heritage, has a tendency to create layers of abstraction and complex musical discourse where punk cuts to the chase. This is both a strength and weakness for each genre; metal is abstract, which makes imitators very obvious but can get lost in muddle-headed musical wanderings, and punk is concrete, which makes it effective but imitation easy. Blasphemy introduced a punk-based genre, grindcore, into black metal. It adopted the aesthetic approach of Sarcofago but underneath applied the percussive lower-five-frets texture musik of grindcore. The result is very effective, and easy to listen to, but also — if you have many other options — kind of boring. In fact, many of these riff patterns are the same ones, albeit simplified, that speed metal bands tried and failed to use to revitalize that genre. As raw motivational material, the music is fantastic, but over time, it fades a bit as one realizes that its strength as low-complexity high impact music also means that its content is one-dimensional. Over the past 20 years, I have thrown this record on five times and apparently terminated it early each time.

blood_-_impulse_to_destroy

I chose Impulse to Destroy because Germany’s Blood also occupies the narrow space of grindcore bands who think like black metal or death metal bands. Grindcore generally self-reduces to extreme minimums and must, like junk food, reintroduce sugar and salt at the surface to spice up the otherwise one-dimensional utilitarian approach. Death metal on the other hand is not utilitarian, while it is consequentialist (“only death is real” being the ultimate statement of that belief) and yet also has a highly aesthetically-motivated but not aesthetically-expressed transcendental outlook. At its best, grindcore overcomes its utilitarian tendencies for a ludic or playful view of the collapsing world, and from that some of the best material emerges. Blood for example creates a dark and morbid absurdism which brings to light all that our society suppresses with itself, and like Blasphemy, creates it through patterning cut from the chromatic strips of the lower registers of guitar. In this case, however, the textures take on a life of their own, like a three-dimensional house made from flat punch-out cards. Different riffs interact with one another and dramatic pauses and collisions give rise to interesting song structures. Like Disharmonic Orchestra Expositions Prophylaxe, Impulse to Destroy provides a wealth of riff archetypes applied with enough personality and purpose to create unique compositions which may be enjoyed for decades or longer despite their simplicity.

Napalm Death Scum vs. Carbonized For the Security

napalm_death_-_scum

This is one of those albums that most people get for the sake of novelty. “But check these guys out, they’ve got one second songs and stuff, it’s just about noise…” — rock music does not get more ironic than that. And ultimately, that was the power of grindcore. Like punk a decade before, it removed all the pretense of rock and boiled it down to simple songs. It then sometimes added in new flourishes of song structure which made those songs more interesting than radio pop, which had been studied by MBAs and PhDs and reduced to a simple formula distinguished only (barely) by rhythm, production, instrumentation and vocals. But once the money men and white lab coats were able to look at rock as a product like any other, they saw that to please enough people in the audience to make it a hit, they did not have to innovate at all. They only needed a new skin for the same basic patterns and they could produce it over and over again with high margins (well, until digital piracy hit). Like the punk rock and then hardcore punk, grindcore stripped away illusion and replaced it with innovation. The problem here is that these songs are very similar themselves because they rely on dramatic confrontation within each song, which like all things “turned up to 11” becomes expected and thus a sort of background noise. Every time I have listened to this album it has made itself into sonic wallpaper before the halfway point.

carbonized_-_for_the_security_-_reissue

Some of the albums which were considered “also-rans” back in the 1990s had more to them than people initially considered. This one has been a favorite for me, along with the second album from Carbonized but not the third, for two decades. I listen to it regularly, finish the whole thing, and sometimes start it over. Record labels tried to shoehorn Carbonized into the “death metal” model despite some clear warning signs, and consequently bungled — the root of all evils is incompetence at some level, starting with the ability to be honest — the career of this promising band, but for those of us who lumped this in with aggressive grindcore like Terrorizer and Repulsion, the similarities outweighed the differences. For the Security expresses paranoia, existential insecurity, melancholic doubt of the future and a desire to explore all that life offers in depth, all within and as part of the same outlook. This is the music of a brighter-than-average teenager who perceives the world honestly and rejects the foolishness but wants to look deeper into the interesting stuff that, because it does not affirm the dominant lie, is rejected by the herd. Chunky riffs alternate with broader rhythms derived from punk and yet are dominated by a desire to make song structure vary with content inherited through metal from progressive rock. Each song forms a sonic sigil to the topic at hand and the response of the artist, making each bursting with personality and reality portrayed in finely-observed ways at the same time. This is a masterful album which will never bore.

Roundup

As you can see, Dear Reader, these albums are both quite similar on the surface — and quite different underneath. That bands can do so much with a handful of power chords, and have such different outcomes, is endlessly fascinating. Yet not every metal-influenced album is, even among A-listers like these. It may be time for all of us to go back through our listening, search ourselves honestly, and see what has actually stood the test of time.

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