Joe Pesci – At Our Expense! (2009)

January 13, 2014

Joe Pesci play really blurry sounding fastcore, somewhere along the grind highway between sounding like Anal Cunt and (really) early Magrudergrind. At Our Expense! sounds like more of a demo than anything, but it is a great, yet sadly quite short, trip through a grinding world of total speed. Bones Brigade released this CD back in 2009 after some self-released splits/demos and a 12″ four-way which the band appeared on around 2007. After the release of this album, 4 years ago now, Joe Pesci seems to have disappeared into thin air. It might have something to do with The Afternoon Gentlemen being rather busy, but, hey, what do I know?

The first thing I notice about the sound here is that the drums are oddly panned to one side, with a slight echo of the track on the other side a split-second later. I’m not sure if the guitars and drums were recorded separately in a rehearsal environment and what I’m hearing is the drums bleeding through on the guitar track, but it takes a while to get my head around this confusing anomaly. Oddities aside, this CD is a fucking animal! The guitars are an endless blur, rarely stopping to break into the odd riff, and with the drums the standard speed is “blast, motherfuckers!”, sometimes slowing down to a crust-punk kinda speed and sometimes even speeding up into gravity blasts. What is this, a death metal record? Ha!