The Booster: Grind #1
Grind I like that's out now
It's time to grind. You might even say it's grind time.
Antigama - Whiteout (Selfmadegod Records)
Whiteout, Antigama's eighth full-length, is the Polish quartet's most immediate music. The long-running grinder decks itself out in the near-death metal bloodthirstiness of early Brutal Truth with the multi-genre beatdown of the ageless Napalm Death in its post-Words from the Exit Wound incarnation. Even the slower songs, such as the thrashier and groovier "Holy Hand," are designed to have a wide blast radius. Like a cold wind on a cold day, it's in your face all of the time.
But this is Antigama, after all, a band that started out 22 years ago making quirky, jazzy grind that was closer to fellow Polish oddities like my beloved Nyia and Neuma. The weirdness still remains. When you train your attention on Whiteout, listening between the blizzard of notes, like cutting your headlights while driving in a snowstorm, you start to hear all the idiosyncratic sonic details that recall the Antigama of Discomfort and Zeroland. "Debt Pool" closes with a monkish vocal drone. Then, after a thrash-Meshuggah1 bridge in "Holy Hand," there's a section of swirling discordance, plus monk vox, that's way more Dodecahedron than anticipated. And, really, that's the story of Whiteout. It subverts expectations, not on the first listen but the tenth.
My favorite track is the shortest on the album. "Align" bolts a tricky little squiggle of a riff onto a supercharged chugger. (Also, there's that monkish drone texture again! Is that Whiteout's uniting feature? Its dark matter?) Guitarist Sebastian Rokicki pulls out the stops. Rokicki's six-string ferocity is matched by his longtime partner in crime, vocalist Łukasz Myszkowski, who has mastered that Barney Greenway roar. The rhythm section of drummer Paweł Jaroszewicz and bassist Sebastian Kucharski put the song over the top with a pickle-jar-lid tight performance. And, when Antigama needs to groove, it grooves hard.
So, "Align" is all of Antigama's current strengths in miniature. It closes that section of the album on a high note. "Muteness" through "2222" take the band in a punkier direction, another subtle subversion of expectations. (The saxophone on "2222" recalls Siege, too. I could do a whole other blurb on this run of tracks. It's a sly bonus EP.)
Speaking of expectations, in 2012, Drugs of Faith's Richard Johnson asked Rokicki this question for Johnson's long-running Disposable Underground zine:
Do you rip off Voivod and Napalm Death as much as I do? Please choose one:
A. Yes, about the same.
B. Yes, if not more so, but I do a better job of hiding it.
C. No, I play avantgrind—I've gone beyond Voivod and Napalm Death.
Rokicki answered, "I think it will be A and [a] little bit of B. Ha!" Like "Align," that response sums up Antigama in its third decade. It's a band comfortable iterating on the past. However, it filters the past through its unusual predilections. You might not hear it on the first spin. But, like that monkish drone, it's there. Once calibrate your ears to the surface stuff, the predilections stick out. They enrich the experience, turning this barnburner into a fascinatingly deep album. If anything, I'd argue that Antigama is, in fact, not hiding it. It's right there, in your face, all of the time.
Days of Desolation - Circles (Halenoise Records, Loner Cult Records, Romantic Songs Records, Up The Punx)
Inside baseball: The Days of Desolation blurb that cracked the column was meant for this newsletter. I had to pilfer and rework it to hit my deadline. So, I don't have much more to say about Circles at the moment beyond reaffirming that it rips. Guitarists Jasper Swerts and Bart Jansen play like they're swishing around a riff sword, slicing through these songs with grind/crust runs and juds. Drummer Owen Swerts is a rhythm engine that keeps these songs racing along. Owen's vocals are also great. His yells are augmented with a punkiness that's thankfully free of the powerviolence protester-with-a-megaphone voice. So good bones, gooder songs. If you only have a smoke break to appraise them, "Hypersleep" has everything you need. But know that Circles has nary a dud. It’s going to be in the rotation for a long time.
Also, PSA: Monnier, Jasper's kick-ass collaboration with Makiko of Flagitious Idiosyncrasy In The Dilapidation is available for free at the Loner Cult Bandcamp.
Fake Meat - 腐肉 (self-released)
腐肉 is the debut full-length of Fake Meat, a project from the brain of Derek from Brain Corrosion. Derek is joined in this grisly endeavor by Hagamoto, the prolific goo slinger responsible for riffs in Aspirate Coma, Extremely Brutal, and Failed Treatment, among tens of others. And, for the most part, this wet, gooey team-up is pretty much what you'd expect from these two. Songwise, Fake Meat is like Impetigo transmogrified into a blob that ate Entombed's "Premature Autopsy." Of course, more than a couple of bands are blobbing around in that space. So what separates Fake Meat is the musicianship, particularly how hard everyone goes on their respective instruments. Derek seems to tap every inch of his kit every second of every song. Hagamoto shreds trems and strums measure-length chords with the exuberant intensity of someone getting to play with their bud for the first time in ages. In other hands, I think Fake Meat would be whatever, but Derek and Hagamoto have that spark, enlivening gory, deathly grind and turning it into one fun hang. 腐肉 does the impossible and goes beyond, like all fake meat should.
Human Cull - To Weep for Unconquered Worlds (Circus Of The Macabre Records, 7 Degrees Records, 783punx, Loner Cult Records, Psychocontrol Records)
The big surprise when writing this blurb was finding out that Human Cull has been around for over 10 years. I knew this on some level. I remember when the Bristol grind band released its 2014 full-length debut, Stillborn Nation, on the mighty Wooaaargh. But time moves differently for grind bands that keep playing fast. They always feel new. They always feel relevant.
Musically, To Weep for Unconquered Worlds is where Antigama used to be, blending Napalm Death and Voivod and Extreme Noise Terror and pipping that slurry into a Jouhou-era Discordance Axis exoskeleton. Another way of thinking of Human Cull is that it's the opposite of Antigama now. The surface is all unconventional rhythms and sharp, dissonant riffs. Underneath all that are songs that focus on maximum aggression instead of confounding listeners. Evisorax, another UK grinder that has been around the block, is also working in this space. I think the lesson both impart, beyond proving that the UK's grind scene continues to kick ass, is that playing fast, furious, and brutal will always be contemporary. To that end, Human Cull taps into something else that's eternally pertinent: the feeling of immense frustration with the world around you.
"Our songs are generally themed around the suppression of human rights, miscarriages of justice, the slow erosion of liberty, the toxic permeation of our lives by far right ideas, war crimes, genocide, ecocide, historical examples of all of the above, and the odd song about feeling like shit," singer/guitarist Edd Robinson said to Blog of Putrefaction in 2014. "An expression of frustration with the human condition and the problems it engenders."
This is, naturally, some supremely nerdy stuff on my part, but after reading that reply, I keep imagining To Weep for Unconquered Worlds being recorded by a Sector 7 band preparing to push back on the corporate keepers of an iniquitous world. (In my defense, Ramuh, the international grind trio of Mauro Cordoba (Maurta), Dylan Walker (Full of Hell), and Balázs Pándi, is explicitly Final Fantasy themed, and it sounds similar to Human Cull.) It's not a lamentation but a furious condemnation of deteriorating conditions.
Anyway, whatever, don't listen to me. The songs rip. "Axe of Flint" opens with Robinson and bassist Luke Archer's titanic chugs. During the blasts, when drummer Sam Trenchard takes the lead, the Human Cull gets weird around the edges. Then, when the chugs return, an added noise element rises like the dull throb of anger that fills the space behind your eyes. Rules. Each one of these tracks has a moment like that. "Time of Ending" has a spectral near-melody. "Habaeus Corpus" has charging blasts when it sounds like Trenchard’s kit is about to implode. "Sworn to Chaos" has Kurt Ballou-y lightning-flash runs. These moments make the album. But they're supported by the fast, furious, and brutal that makes To Weep for Unconquered Worlds sound bracing, new, and relevant.
Narakah - Nemesis Cloak (self-released)
Narakah is a four-piece out of Pittsburgh that's also out of time. Maybe "unstuck" in Slaughterhouse-Five's usage is a better term. Sure, Nemesis Cloak, an 18-track death/grind album, sounds very now. It has a big production, the musicianship is technical and meticulous, and on and on. You can hear those markers of modernity throughout. But Nemesis Cloak is also reminiscent of a particular period in grindy metalcore history. It's as if the Ferret and Black Market Activities rosters, armed with sawblades, got in a dust up outside of a Hellfest while Contamination-era Relapse cheered them on.
So part of me thinks you have to be a fan of squelchy metal and core from 2000 - 2007 to fall in love with Narakah. Like, if you have Turmoil, Uphill Battle, and Bucket Full of Teeth CD-Rs entombed in an ancient CD book, stop what you're doing and buy this album. This will help you commune with the old you. It will be both of your things.
But ehhh, the other part of me realizes that good songs are good songs. Granted, your listening history might get you on board quicker, but Nemesis Cloak will win your devotion eventually. For instance, the kinetic energy Narakah creates by bouncing around styles is a great sell, even if the influences don't sound familiar.
The style shuffle works because the multi-headed vocal attack matches each jump in genre with the right voice. The super-low lows at the end of the Red Chord-y "Crosstream Sumeria." The venomous hardcore bark on the chugging "Headless Nazarene." The coruscating snarl on the ultra-blasting "The Rogue's Wallet." Killer. It immediately acclimates you to the impending juddery, no matter the generation of that jud.
I would've loved catching Narakah on an Ed Gein bill back in the day or receiving Nemesis Cloak as an unexpected throw-in after ordering the Merzbow/Shora collaboration. I would love to catch them on a Yautja bill now. It's a band that's unstuck in time. More importantly, though, it's grinding out some good songs today.
Neuro-Visceral Exhumation - Gruesome Body Count (Bizarre Leprous Productions)
"I Love Nothing, Nobody, Nowhere (Death to All)." That's your introduction to Gruesome Body Count, Neuro-Visceral Exhumantion's fourth full-length. The Brazilian grinders have been doing this in various forms, with a few sabbaticals here and there, since it was named Corrosive Nausea in 1995. "Death to all" has been the general MO, that ethos perhaps peaking during NVE's first run on The Human Society Wants More Gore, a nasty blaster that sounds like Repulsion morphed into Lärm. Gruesome Body Count, the second LP this slimmed-down duo has released since reforming, takes that blueprint and powers up the gnarliness. Tinnitus drums, distorted growls, dentist drill guitars. The band sounds more like goregrind D-clone than anything that would go viral for an Obscene Extreme set. I don't want to say that Gruesome Body Count sounds more real, but you can tell these songs were captured straight to tape at night when the players were at their most frenzied. Since there are fewer layers of artifice, NVE feels more dangerous. It falls right into that Prowler in the Yard zone of an album vastly improved by its low fidelity. And, when NVE backs away briefly from the ping-accented blur to groove, it's a well-earned treat. As I wrote about Spastic Tumor, this doesn't represent my worldview one bit — I probably spent more time thinking about what seeds the neighborhood birds might like to eat than anything else non-work-related this week. But I'll be damned if this noise doesn't sound great. I wish Relapse would reboot the Grind Assault series. I know what's kicking off the Brazilian edition.
Triac - Pure Joy - Numb Grief-stricken Animals (RSRecords)
Sometimes I wonder if Triac's newest album, Pure Joy - Numb Grief-stricken Animals, is a sneaky sales pitch. Hey, are you ready to record? Need a producer and masterer? Come on down to Kevin Bernsten's Developing Nations Studios. As soon as the knobs are twiddled, we'll ship your tunes to James Plotkin to smooth the peaks and valleys. Need a testimonial? Welp, Bernsten's own Triac just tore your ears off.
Look, this album sounds incredible. Bernsten's vocals and guitars are sharp as heck, piercing the mix. Tim Mullaney's bass has a thick tone that's the noise rock ideal. Jake Cregger's drums are super powerful, each stroke a TNT detonation. It's one of the best-sounding grind albums I've heard this year.
But killer production can only take a grinder so far. Triac's performances are equal to Bernsten's sound-capturing prowess. These three crush their duties, which is saying something because Triac multitasks. Pure Joy is grind, but it's also fastcore, powerviolence, and noise rock. The songwriting blends these stylistic shifts so well that you often don't realize how varied these songs are. You get the excitement of an all-over-the-place mixtape, but the tracks are plotted tighter than an Argento movie.
What's especially neat is that, sometimes, each player is working on something different. Cregger may blast powerfully while Mullaney busily works around the boundaries, providing rhythmic punctuation and catchy riff twists. Bernsten will thrash, chug, or groove atop this bed, his guitar evoking Infest, Arab on Radar, Terrorizer, or more, and sometimes all within the same progression.
A song like "Sardonic" gives you the lay of Triac's land, a savagely sprightly grinder. However, my favorite song is "Grief-stricken." It starts as a noise rock lurch that could've been extracted from the brain of Cherubs at that band's noisiest. And then, surprise, welcome to blast town, population the puddle of goop that now occupies where you once stood. These brisk rev-ups that deserve sonic booms slay me. If your band is this tight, just stomp the gas. Who cares? It's going to sound awesome, no matter the production. But when a grind record sounds this good on top of that? Pure Joy - Numb Grief-stricken Animals. Developing Nations's operators are standing by.
Trucido - A Collection Of Self-Destruction (RFL Records)
Dallas's Trucido is the new band from drummer Bryan Fajardo, formerly of Kill the Client and Phobia, currently of Noisear, PLF, Gridlink, and Cognizant. Fellow Cognizant shredder Irving Lopez is along for the ride. Everyone else is new to me: Alejandro Ramirez on vox, Eduardo Hoyos on bass. That's the necessary backstory because, in true PLF fashion, you probably didn't know this band existed until someone told you about it. Minus Gridlink, all of these bands prefer word-of-mouth PR. Seems to work out fine for them. It drives me insane as a column maker. But, now that you're aware of Trucido's existence, it won't surprise you to learn that the band rips. A Collection Of Self-Destruction does what it says on the tin, compiling the quartet's work thus far. The big draw is Fajardo's playing, that instantly recognizable barbarity that's forceful, precise, and fluid in equal measure. But everyone gets down. Lopez spins out some neat, razor-blade-tornado riffs, Hoyos adds a nifty rhythmic layer, and Ramirez is a vocal Swiss Army knife, displaying a versatility that ranges from deep death metal lows to punky yells. Musically, Trucido matches Ramirez's approach by adding a powerviolence levity throughout that provides buoyancy. Think if a Blastasfuk grind band like Roskopp got in with the Slap-a-Ham set.
Vermin Womb - Retaliation (Closed Casket Activities)
What happens when an album moves beyond entertainment and becomes something like therapy? Do the usual music writer tropes make sense when explaining that power? Like, can I still cage one of these songs in a riff zoo and point at it while leading a tour, declaring in a professorial tone, "Wow, now look at this groove!" I don't know. Bit of a dilemma. It's tough because I don't want to soil these blurbs with the stain of me. Like, I'm just some idiot who has failed their way into writing gigs. Who cares. I don't matter. Then again, sometimes albums become so much a part of yourself the only way to explain them is to tear yourself open.
Vermin Womb's newest album, Retaliation, is very important to me. I can't get around that. Ignoring that ignores something fundamental about how I approach it. So, if you want to read a take on this record that's freer of me, there's one in the column. If you're still with me, here's my updated appraisal.
The simplest way I can explain Retaliation is that I've found so much solace in this 12-song set. The Denver trio's brand of loud disorder has a purifying effect on my psyche. Vermin Womb helps me reorder the chaos of my own thoughts by allowing me to inhabit it for the duration of its running time. During its near-19 minutes, it's just me and the din. It constructs a walled garden of grinding, blackened mayhem cloaked in death that I can disappear within.
I don't want to relegate Retaliation to the domain of "feels" or "vibes" or whatever. The performances are great. Drummer JP Damon is a blast beast, playing with furious abandon but also building these intricate rhythmic beds. Bassist Artus is like a rushing river, that ever-present roar of a strong current that moves around you with great force when you dive into it. ELM's guitars and vocals are like a door getting pried off an airplane at 30,000 feet. The songs are even better. I can't tell you how many times I've listened to "Rot in Hell" and marveled at that first shift from fast blasts to faster blasts. For something so feral, so rabid, it's seamless. It's the practiced violence of a professional boxer.
But, yeah, it's hard for me to think about these songs as "songs." I have a different relationship with them now. Existence has been...challenging. Retaliation provides a unique respite, a surrogate that shouts the shouts I want to shout. It's the kind of album you wear as armor. I feel safe within it. I feel like myself.
wombscape - Forced Labour Songs (Landscape Records)
To avoid getting dunked on by style sticklers, truth be told, Japan's wombscape isn't grind. But the trio's kind of core chaos gels well with this list. "Each member has their own music roots," drummer Hiro said to Артур, "but Converge is a common band between us all-time, including past members." You can hear that influence across Forced Labour Songs, especially on the When Forever Comes Crashing-like "KUROGANE," a 90-second turbo chugger that sounds like a warehouse collapsing. To be clear: not grind. But the sound of twisting metal is grindy, right?
Of course, a Converge comp may give you pause in the year 2022. What makes wombscape more effective than Converge clones, or even nowadays Converge, is that it uses that seminal band as a leaping-off point, not a schematic. From a song-structure standpoint, Forced Labour Songs is diverse. Album centerpiece "Leaden Cradle" has a mathy herk-and-jerkiness, the spark-flying mechanical groove of misaligned gears, that you'd expect more from a noisy near-grinder like December. "Collapsed Hollow" is a slow sludgster that evokes the tech doom of Ion Dissonance's "A Prelude of Things Worse to Come." By freeing itself up to follow the path that serves these songs instead of an influence, wombscape sounds liberated to slice and dice the sounds it wants while generally adhering to the core facets of Converge that make that band's better material great.
That said, multiple spins of Forced Labour Songs make these comparisons fade away, especially as you attune to the theme. "This is an album where human beings started to lose their emotions and work like slaves or even machines," Hiro said. "The title Forced Labour Songs implies that normally 'labour song' is something you sing to boost your morale. But by being forced to do that, they even cannot realise it is bad or they even feel they are happy with that desperate situation. We express it with a rage or hatred at the beginning of the album but eventually we feel hopeless about the situation of that world."
When the theme clicks, you better understand how the album is ordered. The first five tracks shoot sparks with a grinding intensity, that jolt of new-job vigor. "Leaden Cradle" is when worker burnout hits, encapsulating the numbing drudgery of endless toil. "Collapsed Hollow" is the back-breaking acceptance, the depressing realization that this is all there is. You can almost hear the spirit leave the body on the song's final This Heat strum. Does it build to something? It does not. The track cuts out. No glorified end. No resolution. Hopelessness.
Quick Hits
As this list is packed with stuff I've previously covered, I wanted to drop in some recommendations of newer records I'll write about in greater detail next edition.
Antro - Defastiodistorção (Heavenly Vault)
You might remember Germany's Antro from its demo debut released last year on Lower Class Kids. It's grind, punk, and thrash. Righteous Pigs meets Repulsion meets Hellhammer meets Driller Killer, all of that swimming around the brain of a garage-bound band who just heard Sarcófago. Or something like that. Anyway, Defastiodistorção collects that demo and the new four-song release from this year. The new tracks go. Morgana has gotten even better at those vocal-hit yelps and yips. The riffs, full-on thrash punk knife fights, are hard as hell. Can't wait to hear what's next.
Deliriant Nerve - Domed (Malokul)
Washington, DC, grinders Deliriant Nerve debuted last year. The trio has wasted no time. Domed is its second release in 2022, following the aptly titled Uncontrollable Ascension. Grind on the more core side is what's in store. Makes sense given its relations. Let me pick two: Needle and the banging Brain Tourniquet, a band I'll feature in the core Booster at...some point.3 Speaking of not sparing seconds, I write with the slickness of a podcaster transitioning to an ad for boner pills, Domed bulldozes through four songs in four minutes. Blasts, serrated riffs that draw blood quicker than an absentee ballot envelope across your tongue, and growls delivered with ask-a-punk urgency.
Nyctophagia - Conscience of the Fire (self-released)
The new Nyctophagia EP, Conscience of the Fire, is my favorite from the El Paso project so far. D-beat plus gore. Dylan Phagia (all instruments and drum machine twiddling) utilizes the inherent forward momentum of both styles to maximize Nyctophagia's mobility. Joe Warkentin's vocals are deep and gritty, which is not always the case in the moister variants of goo. Finally, if you're not on board with Spastic Tumor's horror movie nihilism, Nyctophagia tackles real-world corporate ills and the scummy byproducts of capitalism.4
Shitgrinder - Shitgrinder (RSRecords, Headsplit Records)
Holy good goddamn. I'm sure if we crunched the per capita numbers, Australia would have just as many grind bands as any other locale. Nevertheless, I can think of few other places that contain so many killer grinders that I cite as often. Roskopp, Lurid Panacea, The Kill, Internal Rot, Rawhead, etc. Add Brisbane's Shitgrinder to the list. If you need to orient yourself to its sound, you can do worse than looking at the shirts this trio has chosen to don in its Facebook band pic: Crossed Out, Cannibal Corpse, Slipknot. Crossed Out provides the frame of quick bursts interspersed with big-ass grooves. Cannibal Corpse is responsible for the ruthless heaviness. Slipknot injects catchiness and perfectly placed bat-hitting-a-keg, let's-fucking-go moments. Deathly grind with powerviolence and mince parts is also applicable, but you'll know what's up as soon as that first riff starts. Love this album so much. New bands searching for a sound: Australia is your influence.
Got a question? Email us! plagueragespod at gmail
Check out Wolf's other garbage: https://linktr.ee/wrambatz
Our logo and branding are by Mike Teal. Find Mike at www.storylightmarketing.com and www.miketealdesign.com
Like what we’re doing? Drop us a donation on Ko-fi
Thrash-uggah? Considering how poorly rated the Justice-inspired period of Meshuggah's career is on RateYourMusic, I think we have to spin this era off into its own thing. We have to save it from djent dorks. No, I won't stop complaining about this. Contradictions Collapse is good.
Substack insists on autoplaying any Bandcamp embed that doesn't use the Latin alphabet. I've created a ticket. If you want to do me a solid, please do the same.
This year has taught me to not set deadlines.
EOY is going to be a strange time because Spastic Tumor is going to be high in my list. It's like trying to explain to a date that you're not that person while your dating profile states you're exactly that person. I swear! I like petting dogs and joyfully chittering at squirrels! I won't bury an ax in your chest!