grindcore

Suffocating Feats Of Dehumanization is a contender for my favourite release of 2023 so far. This thing is an incredibly well made goregrind release, taking the template laid on the Chainsaws… album and doubling down on it. On the surface of it, Suffocating… comes across like Putrefaction In Progress-era LDOH, but this is actually well crafted (no shade to LDOH’s noise), with chunky riffs beneath the carnage and some of the best drumming and vocals…

For me, Morbid Florist is THE classic Anal Cunt EP. 88 Song EP? Great, but very raw. 5643 Song EP? Too much going on – a novelty. For the truest and best quality collection of old school Anal Cunt blurs and noisecore blasts, look no further than Morbid Florist. I think I would probably be thinking too much into it if I deeply analyzed each and every one of these songs, but here is a…

On Stress, Impulse Noise play intense, frenetic grindcore with a thick and disgusting sound. Like, this shit is really firing on all cylinders. Firstly, the production is fantastic. The drumming is just absolutely insane. The bass, clanking away like some sort of mechanical nightmare, underpins everything and gives the proceedings such a genuine heaviness and weight to it. The guitar seems a bit drowned out at first, but it’s there, hammering away. Vocally, the band…

Cystoblastosis play their down-tuned, dirgy goregrind with intense pinging snares and gargling vomit vocals. It brings the feeling of a subterranean horror bubbling beneath the surface, about to breach the ground level and destroy humanity, or something. Haggus stuff is a peaking a bit, drums are loud as all manner of fuck, but that’s OK. Dirty, nasty, goregrind is the order of the day, of course with the expected Haggus mincecore influences. Disgusting vocals, some…

Solid efforts here from both bands: Denak are more straight up grind, with the brutal, speedy edge you’d want from such a disgusting, underground split. Haemorrhage in this particular session / era have the Carcass worship dialled up to 9000 split skulls per minute. Off the hook sickness, but you’ll know what to expect before you even go in.

After the two noisecore/blurcore smears that were Everyone Should Be Killed and Top 40 Hits (the blurs on this are insane), Anal Cunt shocked the musical world (lol) by coming armed for their third full length album with…. actual songs. Well, the term can be used loosely, but there is more musical structure here than on anything that they had released up until this point. This is also where the song titles and content really…

Highly influential grindcore band, especially to those who went on to pioneer noisecore in the years that followed 1988. Fear Of God (the 7″) is a pretty essential listen to anyone on the path of grindcore history, but for me it’s not something I come back to all that often. The bass and drums are drowned out by the guitar and then absolutely everything is drowned out by the vocals. It’s a mixing choice (or…

I’m not familiar with Mangled Whore Flesh (what a sentence) outside of this split, but the material here is objectively terrible, let down mainly by the bedroom production – but hey, this is the territory we are in folks. As far as Malignant Germ Infestation goes, there’s better material out there by this project, for sure.

I’m pretty sure I saw Nausea touring this thing at the same festival as Terrorizer LA played, in some sort of Oscar Garcia-related frenzy. I could be wrong, because I find all of the iterations of Terrorizer confusing, but why on earth am I talking about Terrorizer in a Nausea review? Well, this is exactly why – the various iterations / lineups of Terrorizer confuse the fuck out of me and I somehow, probably because…

One of those super obscure, sleazy underground splits that you can only find in the depths of grindcore depravity. 2MD play here their earlier brand of messy goregrind/pornogrind with insane monster pitchshifter vocals. The trouble is, do you want to sit through tons of fuckin’ irritating movie samples to get to the juicy nuggets of farting shitgrind? Genuinely feels like the sample to grind ratio here is 10 to 1. Will Rahmer is currently drafting…

Well polished and well recorded (hey, and well performed) metal with heavy elements of groovy death metal and blasting grindcore. These lovely people have the energy and stage presence more akin to the hardcore/punk worlds but play a fantastic melting pot of metal styles, many of which are aptly displayed here on Indoctrination. It’s got that buzzsaw grinding edge but really brings in stuff from all over the place. Bang yer head!

Gruesome Stuff Relish are probably one of the most under-rated “goregrind” bands. Nowadays, Carcass-worshipping muddy death metal / goregrind is all the rage again, but Gruesome Stuff Relish have always been doing it. This 2013 effort is a good a place to start as any for your fix of giallo and exploitation fuelled grinding gore.

Punishing old school death metal for the masses! I was lured in by the candid sleeve art and the related name (lol), and I stayed for the brutal assault. For an early 90s death metal demo tape, this is incredibly well put together, and the production is very clear too. What I love most about Bloodclot’s* songs is the frequent descent into all-out blasting chaos. It reminds me of Harmony Corruption / Utopia Banished era…

You can always count on Mumakil for delivering the breakneck high speed, high gloss polished grindcore. There are many that would say “polished” and “grindcore” shouldn’t exist in the same sentence, and you may possibly even be right, but a market for this kind of stuff does exist (cheers Nasum!). Thankfully however, Mumakil are fantastic and whilst it is initially rather difficult to ascertain the differences between a lot of the songs in this session,…

Savage grindcore but with a bevy of interesting vocals, some even in the death metal or hardcore styles, and a lovely jubbly chuggy grindy chewy nasty fucking HM2 guitar sound to boot. Honestly for months I thought these guys were named after the Dead Infection album Brain Corrosion, but I’m an idiot. As the record develops it spreads its wings a little, more variety creeps into the songwriting, we get wider expanses where riffs can…

Well fuck, isn’t this a collaboration of the grindcore elite? Your men Dorian Rainwater and Bryan Fajardo (both of 9000 different amazing bands), along with Rahi (Insect Warfare) on vokills, smash out a stunning set of spasmodic, intensely complex technical grindcore. With production by Scott Hull, art by Arif Rot and a complimentary noise piece by everyone’s favourite stoner madman Jay Randall, the fact that I have snoozed on this album for 12 years is…

Ah fuck I just absolutely love Nick Barker. I won’t say that he is hideously under-rated, because the people who like him love his work but generally, in the wider metal world, he is definitely snoozed on. This man can drum! Anyways, what do you get if you mix Nick with the string section of Napalm Death (RIP Jesse) and put Peter Tagtgren on vocals (he did some Bloodbath stuff but otherwise I am unawares…

Violent Reprisal is the first CD I got from Lock Up, and is a compilation of their first two albums. Personally, I prefer the albums in their original incarnations, as well as with the original art, but if you are looking for a marathon of Lock Up stuff in once place, you can’t really go wrong with this CD.

Brutal as all hell (those vocals just cutting through the mix are some of the sickest, most twisted pitch shifter groans ever!), but good gravy the quality on this is shambolic. I mean, what did I expect? Haha – but some of the studio LDOH stuff can be enough of a challenge in its own right, I don’t need to struggle through live versions too. Would be 1000% better if I was actually there, but…

Holy fuck shit Batman, this is a noisy one! By the 2000s, LDOH were a full-on gorenoise outfit, creating some of the most outlandishly disgusting audible sounds known to mankind. Their material on this split is in the same (severed) vein as their Putrefaction In Progress album or In Advanced Haemorrhaging Conditions EP. The general quality seems a bit lower here, with the bass farting out of the speakers and the treble albsolutely melting my…

Ugh! Someone is blowing chunks of gore through my speakers! Crusm come at you with a different kind of gore. It’s always cool to see variations on the theme of goregrind and Stench Of Decompose delivers in that regard.

This was sold to me by Bandcamp as grindcore, and – impressively – the album which brought Hydra Head back from the dead. Endon’s music here is far from grindcore, in my opinion. Yes, there are intense passages of absolute carnage, which I suppose could come close to something like Cloud Rat, but Through The Mirror dreams far, far bigger than such a restricting genre tag. Endon is more or less post- everything and everywhere….

I enjoyed this mid 90s effort from ENT but couldn’t shake that disappointed feeling that every song sounds the same, which makes the album kinda nondescript in some ways. But then, it took me a minute to realise, half of these fucking songs appeared on Holocaust In Your Head. No wonder I thought them familiar! They have been updated and given a polished metallic sound here, for some reason.

Blood remain one of the most criminally underrated bands in the grindcore world. You really have to peel back the surface layers to find appreciation for them. It’s weird, because they have been around since the genre’s heyday, and as another writer so well put, they are like an amalgamation of both early Carcass and early Napalm Death. O Agios Pethane proves however that Blood are so much more than the sum of their parts….

I would be lying if I said that I got into this on the first listen. In fact, it has taken me several years to even consider writing about it. In that time I have done countless relistens, and not once has this record landed with me. I’m not even really sure what it is about it that doesn’t gel with me, but there you have it. A pointless review but one I’ve been wrestling…

Short, sharp and messy! Think something like Pharmacist crossed with Impetigo. If that doesn’t get you excited for this band then I don’t know what will! There’s only three tracks here, so its difficult to go into any sort of depraved depths, but the demo is a brilliant example of what the band is about, and I’m really looking forward to their album dropping for more old school gory grind sickness.  Standout track: “Posthumously Penetrated”

Defaction is a short-lived side project of Mick and Mitch Harris (no relation), both of course of Napalm Death fame. I believe the purpose was to be a bit grindier than the rigid death metal that Napalm was peddling at the time, but honestly, this is still fairly far into the death metal camp. It’s got a cracking sound to it and of course we are listening to two of the greats here. It’s a…

Nasty, disgusting blasting goregrind. It gets to a point where describing such a thing leads you round and around the same paths, in a literary sense, of course. Aurally however, the sickening musical delights of Bodily Stew will no doubt please any goregrind fan with an appetite for the macabre festering away in their hearts.

Abysmal, fetid goregrind with the shifted vokills and dustbin snare drum. Obligatory, my dear. Despite this, a fairly clear production helps hold your attention through the blasting, mushy carnage, as does the inclusion of more mincecore elements, which brings variation and respite, not to mention a bit of groove. Tidy.

Well-rounded production and a decent heavy sound, but a fairly typical groovy goregrind vibe. That sentence makes this sound like Rompeprop or something, but what I mean to say is, Egggore play the chunky, death-metal influenced form of drum machine grindcore (either that or the drums are triggered to smithereens) that was very popular at one point. It kinda sounds like Hymen Holocaust if they used a drum machine and were a bit more rigid….

A similar method of approach could be given to that of Razor Sharp Daggers or Theatrical Symbolisation etc etc – if you are interested in Black Clouds Determinate as a studio album recording then the first 16 tracks are the only ones you should concern yourself with. The rest of this bloated run-time is filled with live material, which whilst not the worst thing in the world, does drag this thing out unnecessarily.  The early…

Some of the earlier Autophagia stuff can leave you wanting, what with a production that is so clogged with dust it’s impossible to really make anything out. On Postmortem Human Offal however, there is no such problem. The gruesome grindcore is bared for all to see in all of it’s sickening detail: guitar blurs and sharp riffs, shambling corpse drums, and my Brother in Christ, these are some of the most insane pitch shifter gurgles…

Manhunt play blistering fast grindcore that will rip your face off. Perhaps it is the perfect soundtrack to playing the super controversial and violent video game of the same name, if I could be so bold. Internal Rot are shaping up to be one of the greatest grindcore bands of the recent decade(s), and this split is no different in demonstrating their intense aural outpourings.

What always surprised me about this record, I think because of the name of the band more than anything, was that it wasn’t some hideous porn and / or goregrind, and was more in the straight-up grindcore camp (with a whole bunch of death metal influences, of course). Some pig squeals sneak in here or there, but these are used for comic effect more than anything. The production is clear and powerful, if a little…

Heavy, well-produced and chunky grindcore. They only ever did one album to my knowledge, but it’s a good one and it’s well worth checking out. There’s definitely a hardcore punk undercurrent, which along with the clear production carries this album along nicely (and at a ferocious pace too).

Whereas the group’s debut was all “go”, Buried Secrets – which was a quick follow-up in the next year – hits the ground running but takes a moment to breathe every now and then, slowing sometimes to a Filth-era Swans style crawl, which allows for some real nastiness to show through. Buried Secrets is still very challenging, and still very much consists of incomprehensible jazz-meets-grind blurs, but the varied pace brings more interesting arrangements.

I know Zorn did Naked City but this kind of “high art” vibe experimental jazz seems a million miles away from the basement gigs and punk ethos of grindcore. Nevertheless, Napalm Death whirlwind Mick Harris is on this thing. An odd choice in 1991 it may have seemed perhaps, but Mick has done some very experimental stuff with his career, from Scorn to Lull to the bazillion other projects. The man is so much more…

Proper meaty, long-player split from two amazing grindcore legends. Agathocles don’t require any introduction, but their session here is solid and well-played. The high-end frequencies are a bit harsh but AGx aren’t known for production quality and this is far from the worst of their stuff. Suppository are brilliant. I fear I’ll sound a bit dense describing them this way but I love how the music is a mix of straight-up ravenous grindcore in the…

Embalming Theatre are so, so good. I’m the murky worlds of both grindcore and death metal they still stand unique, churning out their own brand of sickness. The two tracks here are par for the course, but hugely enjoyable. The vocals on track two are noticeably different than usual, though.  Jigsore are a messy blur, but that’s why we are here, right? I listened to this only yesterday but already can’t remember what the third…

I was pretty excited when I heard Bobby Maggard (aka the gore master) had another new project, this time a more “musical” death metal style form of sickness called Clumps Of Flesh. For all the endless forms of gorenoise Bobby has made, I do miss his more listenable exploits from the past such as Corpseinthecrawlspace and Dehydrated Tissues. (On that note I am forever and to infinite shame still sleeping on Gangrene Discharge as of…

Awesome three way split with some amazing goregrind bands. Pulmonary Fibrosis kick things off with the most well produced session on this entire thing. Intense, blasting gore is the name of the game, with bludgeoning down-tuned riffs and sick gore vocals. There’s a live session too that extends the band’s runtime, but it’s fairly redundant. Haggus are up second, with that razor-sharp guitar tone and unique spin on the gore shifter vokills. In a (radioactive)…

Nonsensical, pointless, ridiculous noisecore – just as the genre should be. Footjob kick this 19 minute demo off with nearly 5 minutes of the same redundant porn sample, before hitting some early days 2 Minuta Dreka style noisecore bursts (basically like 7MON with gore vocals). Listening to this demo felt like the longest 19 minutes of my life. You could have halved the run time, left the porno sample in, and it would still feel…

This little remix EP proved a rather difficult task to hunt down online, so I bought a physical copy. Yes, this idiot is buying CDs in 2022! Roll up roll up! Anyways, this is a completists item most definitely, featuring six remixes – and the original – of the title track. And that’s it. The art is cool as fuck, and the remixes from Kid 606, I Am Spoonbender and Bastard Noise are worthy of…

Feastem continue to be a massively under-rated grindcore band outside of Europe, which is shocking to me considering just how fucking fast these guys are. Like, this is some serious Insect Warfare level territory here, so I don’t understand why the USA grinders aren’t lapping this up. Maybe they are, and I’m just not privy to the conversations. Anyway, this falls into the well-produced end of grindcore populated by bands such as the previously mentioned,…

Crazy blasting gore – no groove, no compromise, just goregrind headcrash carnage. Insane vocal effort and FX, dustbin drums and a mechanical, deafening bass attack. Catastrophic stuff!

The first thing to notice about this second Rx remix offering from ANB is how insanely ferocious it is out of the gate. There was some harsh sounds on the first volume, but also a ton of moody offerings. Here, the entire ship is steered by none other than Delta 9, and only using (I believe) material from Altered States. So, taking both those things on board, it is hardly surprising that this thing rips…

Silly yet fun little EP from death meets grind British metallers Foetal Juice. If you like puns in your metal, you’ll love this slice of insanity. Really good production too.

Haggus, despite being a fairly new band in the lifespan of “mincecore” have gotta be the ones who are holding that gold standard up high (along with Archagathus and Hyperemesis (RIP)). This split with Fentanyl Surprise is no different: intense, super bassy and chunky production underpins the sickening toilet bowl vokills and insane dustbin drums. It’s just so gooey and disgusting! I love it.  Fentanyl Surprise have a bit more of an old-school grindcore sound…

Malad are great. I had a cassette of theirs once, but I’ve lost it or traded it away. Useless!  Anyway, I love the rumbling noisecore carnage here. Not much that can be said, but if you love warm, distorted, horrible old school noisecore on cassette then look no further.  Inopexia have (dare I say) a slightly cleaner sound, and more of a goregrind vibe, but it’s still car crash noise craziness.

15 traXXX in four minutes? Sounds about right to me, guvnor. Expect the wateriest, most ridiculous shifter vocals, and y’know what, some actually really well programmed drums. And that’s it. No guitars or bass or anything like that. Just drum programmed blasts and toilet vocals. This is gore (porn?) noise as God intende

Interesting take on some of the self-titled stuff, with a completely different running order and some omissions / changes. The funniest thing about this for me is that the original working title for “Ignorance” is “Black Metal”.  This little disc is definitely one for the die-hards to hunt down though, and everyone else should go straight to the excellent self-titled release from 2000.

One of the best bits of grind / powerviolence records I’ve heard in quite some time. I find this channels Gets Worse kinda energy, with incredibly crisp and clear production but without sounding overworked. It really allows the carnage to breathe, and you can feel every blast, every blurry riff and every shredding vocal with equal intensity. Super recommended.

Super turgid, lo-fi grindcore from the faraway land of Japan. Great shit, with a pinging snare, rancid bass and the front woman is on absolute fire with her range of disgusting offerings. One for the crustier side of grind.

Hiss is to grindcore what Cattle Decapitation’s Harvest Floor is to death metal. I appreciate what the guys are doing here, pushing the boundaries of grind in the way that many greats have before them (Nasum, Pig Destroyer, Antigama, Assuck, Discordance Axis and so on). There’s a lot of dissonant guitar playing here, which is lovely. The drums are absolutely bonkers yet very precise, I forgot how good this guy was, and it’s been a…

When you look past Meat Shit’s ultra misogynistic and homophobic subject matter (if you can actually look past it, as some of it has aged like milk), there’s actually a really dank grindcore / death metal band underneath. Definitely these guys have influenced everyone from Gut to Lividity and plenty in between. This is a compilation of old demos and tons of splits, which I’ll cover separately in order to catch the other bands contributions….

Ah, wow. Now this is just a glorious fucking mess. I mean, the cover art kinda tells you that before you even press play. Morgue Tar mix the bottom of the sewer style goregrind with d-beat , which is just glorious. I’m not talking about a bit of mince here that’s leant a little heavily into it’s punkier roots, I’m talking 100% d-beat crossed with gore. They should have called this Dismorgue.

Massgrav are fast as fuck. I first came across them on a split 5” with Yacopsae but then I forgot about them until I saw them live and was blown away by the speed of things. This War… is the first full length I’ve checked out and damn it’s amazing. Super fast hardcore punk on steroids. Fastcore is a genre I have neglected for some reason, in my life. It’s brilliant.

Festerdecay’s demo was amazing old school gore, so I was pretty stoked to get around to listening to this split, which has more of that gooey sickness. Blasting away with a better production job, it’s still easy to get lost in the primordial soup that is Festerdecay’s riffing. What a glorious, dusty mess! Really great stuff. Crash Syndrom I’ve come across before (one of their EPs, I think), and are noticeably sharper and more dynamic…

In 2007 locust released what would be their final studio album to date. It’s actually incredible how much time has passed since this final studio album and it still even now feels kinda weird to be talking about the band in the past tense. Even from the first few notes, you can tell that New Erections is a different beast to what has come before. The record is full of the bleeping blooping batshit crazy…

I’ve never been too hot on Guineapig, as at first listen it seemed like a much more polished and easily digestible version of what CBT has been doing for years. But this was narrow minded and stupid. Bacteria is a very chunky album, slow and chuggy, but with a few blasting passages too. What makes this thing pop for me though is the insane pitchshifter vokills, which are some of the best I’ve heard in…

Arguably the definitive Impetigo record? It’s hard to say. I’ve struggled to get into Impetigo in the past but with Horror Of The Zombies, that all changed. This has to be one of my favourite sounds in all of metal, punk and grind. It’s just so dirty, grimy and dusty. I just want a million cassettes of this thing, so you can bury them with me once I die. Impetigo perhaps need no introduction, but…

The Yacopsae stuff opening up this is clearly pushed to the front due to the underground weight that this act brings. However, it sounds like complete shit, if I can be so bold as to declare that in such an environment. LOL. But yeah, the Gdorks stuff that follows (RIP Katz) I’m pretty sure is the stuff from our failed split, which was also released on its own through Grindcore Karaoke. Here it is again,…

VRV are one of those projects that is fairly awful on record but absolutely amazing live. Unless you have a particular penchant for drum machine fuelled noisecore with no direction or purpose, then please do not let me stop you. This 2008 CDr (I believe, from the man himself when I bought the VRV split with Agathocles) contains 2 sessions of improv madness, followed by an unlistenable live final session.

This “album”, at just over quarter of an hour long, marks – for me – the point where The Locust “became” The Locust we all know and love. Granted, the line-up which made some of the greatest records of all time didn’t solidify until 2001, but this self-titled record is an absolute explosion of grinding synthesizer madness. It is hard to explain really, but there’s just something about the frantic energy of The Locust that…

This is the first of two self-titled releases the band did. The first is called, technically I guess, just Locust rather than The Locust. As a historical listener, the most striking thing for me about this 7″ is how the band’s sound develops from the more rudimentary powerviolence approach of the 1996 splits into what we could consider the more recognisable Locust sound. Hydra-headed jackal-like vocal attacks punctuate intense stabs of grinding noise. Most importantly,…

A 7” I’ve had for about 15 years and have listened to multiple times with a purpose to review it, yet I can never remember what the thing sounds like. It’s not bad, but the fact it’s so forgettable hardly looks good, does it?

This was originally recorded and released digitally in 2018 but the tape eventually came from Haunted Hotel Records in 2020. Sulsa are at the absolute peak of what decent goregrind should sound like. There’s a little mince stomp (only just), but otherwise this is punishing gore with a fat, disgusting bass leading the way. The vocals are putrid as all hell, and I cannot recommend this band heavily enough. Cystoblastosis have some good old school…

This is one of those things where the title should give you an adequate clue as to what to expect. Purile, nonsensical drum-machine grindcore is, of course, the order of the day, so I hope you’re down with that or I’m afraid you’re fucked out of luck. Where do I start with this? The subject matter is prime 2000s MySpace-era “grind is offensive” fare, but the songs are actually pretty savage, with intense bashings from…

I’ve probably heard this AxCx session a thousand times as I had a download pack of all the old AxCx shit (I think from Agz’ (is that name right?) Crustorrents blog). Its abrasive, nasty and an absolute mess. Everything you want then, from a noisecore band – one of the genre’s founders, no less. It really says something about 7MON, when back to back to classic AxCx, you can truly appreciate just how noisy and…

Haggus are still the undisputed kings of vegan mince carnage. I feel like I say this about a lot of goregrind-based bands, but they truly do have one of the best shifted vokill attaxxx in the whole game. Just spin this up and find out. Of all places, the voxxx really shine on the Mob 47 cover (lol) that closes this thing out. Hardcore punk in a goregrind style? Yes please, drive. Glob offer a…

I love earlier Exhumed, and their stuff on this split 7″ is no different. Bark n growl, Carcass-baiting, thrashing death metal is the order of the day. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. The jewel on this 7″ however is my discovery of Pantalones Abajo Marinero. Shit, these guys are fucking awesome. Really fast, savage grindcore. Which is, of course, forever in my wheelhouse. Stunning.

I opened this review to start writing before the 5″ started, and it will no doubt end before I am finished. You gotta love 5″ records. They are ultimately pointless, but are so perfect – never has a format been more fitting to an individual genre, in this case grindcore. I’m not sure if this was recorded before or after the stuff on the MITB split, but this, whilst a lo-fi affair, is much more…

(Excuse the crappy thumbnail on this one. This release seems to have fallen through the cracks of time into perma-obscurity. I can’t find my copy of this CDr anywhere, so the shitty thumb it is (oo er), apologies folks) I got sent this CDr by the dudes in the band, because we worked together briefly when I ran a label. They appeared on a compilation 7″ I did (where does a multiple split end and…

The final release from the seemingly defunct Intrepid Corpse. More intense mincecore stomping goodness, in the vein of Haggus, Hyperemesis or earlier Agathocles. I remember the first release from this project and how it had that mince element underpinning it, but here, this is all-out stomp. Love it! The perfect soundtrack to blasting heads off on Doom. 2022 edit: This, along with Intrepid Corpse in general, appears to have disappeared off the internet without trace.

I got this tape from Roel back when it came out, and I have absolutely fucking no idea what I’ve done with it over the years. Thankfully, some kind soul has uploaded this to YouTube so I can remind myself of how it sounds. I can’t decide if the best thing about Anal Penetration (what a sentence) is the drum programming or the guitar work. Both are intensely good. Like, seriously, seriously good. For such…

I loved Sikfuk when I was a teenager. It’s death metal, but silly as fuck and also technical as shit! What a duality! Much in the same vein here does the carnage continue, but with a whole slew of additional sounds added to the one man’s already chock-full barnyard of vocal styles. There are now punk rock / powerviolence shouts and grunts to go alongside the usual gurgles and gargles. There is also a catchiness…

Dahmer are a fuckin’ great grindcore act. I snoozed on this band for years think I only really checked them out for the first time in 2016. Anyways, the two tracks here are slightly longer than the usual grindcore fare, but suffer not in terms of pacing or ferocity. Throat shredding vocals, razor sharp yet dense riffs and bonkers drums – it’s all here.

This is a lengthy split from 20 years ago (damn, son) (23 years for the original cassette before this CD version). If you know what Ahumado Granujo are about then this will not disappoint. There are less techno passages and more groovy finger-pointy goregrind, but hey, I’m not complaining about that. Production is good as always, and a few Gut covers towards the end (and a cover of Impetigo’s “Boneyard” but much faster!) are the…

Vulnus play intense, well-produced death metal. Despite this, there is a quality remaining of the feel of an underground demo, but the band’s overall tightness and professional sound does wonders for their crisp, precise carnage. As I listened to the split for ISOYF, discovering Vulnus was a pleasant surprise. ISOYF have thusfar failed to ever disappoint me. One could say that the band are not very adventurous with their sound, whilst another could then counteract…

I’d like to think, that back in 1993, it was almost unimaginable that a band like Anal Cunt would do a full-length album. I mean, they crammed 5000+ “songs” onto a 7″ in one way or another, so who could comprehend a full-length? Similarly, with such an abrasive and intense sound, the formats of short, sharp shocks to the head worked perfectly. Who in their right mind would want to endure that in a full…

This is what I’m talking about. Forced Expression do not fuck around. This 7″ of blistering hardcore intensity takes us firmly into classic powerviolence territory. Bouncy riffs meet pummelling drums and intense vocals, just what the doctor ordered in regards to total sonic annihilation. Tidy!

Noise noise noise noise! All Dutch and Belgian bands here (or just Belgian maybe – I could be wrong). Permanent Death have always eluded me. I’ve always wanted to check them out because they have had both Tony from AGx (RIP) and Isaac from Fromtheashes and Leng T’che (and a bloody good bloke) on drums. Nonsensical noisecore is the order of the day here, as is much the case for LSD Mossel and De Madeliefjes….

Totes brutes death metal is the order of the day, with a chunky digital production holding everything in a surprising state of clarity. The drums pierce the mix brilliantly, whilst the riffs are fully distuishable underneath the vocals, despite their technical complexity. All in all, sounds good, and doesn’t fuck around on the savagery scale.

I just love how confusing the Man Is The Bastard (Noise) AKA Charred Remains discography is. So… is this Man Is The Bastard? Or is it Bastard Noise? Discogs has Man Is The Bastard Noise looping back to Man Is The Bastard, but this record is clearly a noise release. Perhaps I’m just thinking too much into it. LOL. Either way, it is the crushing power electronics headfuck you can expect from these guys, with…

The Stiffs Are Looking Lively (what a name!) is a colossal compilation record of all (I believe ‘all’ at least) the Savage Man Savage Beast demo stuff and unreleased tracks. The runtime is massive, but if you’re down for 60+ tracks of one man drum machine grindcore (leaning towards the gore), then by all means pull up a chair, you’re gonna be here a while. Despite being culled from I think 5 or 6 different…

What an absolute beauty of an EP. I first marked this down for LIW’ing in 2020, so it was a pleasure to come back and check it out for this review. I absolutely love the mix of jazz, noise and I suppose, even grindcore. There are muted electronic passages that invoke the realms of vaporwave and 80s nostalgia, before the madness comes back and smacks you upside the head. A topsy turvy listen, for sure.

Hater is now 11 years old. Damn, son. Anyways, this little fucker is probably my favourite TFD stuff, outside of the sessions that appeared on the Slimewave splits (I absolutely love the drum sound on those sessions). Here Rich Hoak and chums perfect their spastic, jazzy grind down to the very last blast or chug. The songs are just brilliant. From “Weaponization Of The Mega-Self”, “Everything You Need But Nothing You Want”, “It’s Only Attitude”…

Thecorpseinthecrawlspace is one of the more “musical” things that Bobby Maggard and chums were involved in. In fact, I can’t remember if this was actually a solo project or if it had other members (some of the main-line bands on Stoma Stew had some other people involved, I’m sure). Anyways, blasting goregrind is the order of the day, only here we are happily engulfed in riffs and some excellent drum programming, rather than the endless…

This was a project that I put together in late 2013. I’d decided that I wanted to do some gorenoise, but with the genre feeling rather saturated, I initially figured I’d fire up some “pornoise” shtick but eventually settled on using a bong for long, watery vocal effects. In fact, this was a ton easier than using actual pitch-shifted vocals. The bong is run through the same kind of effects that you would use on…

Intestinal Disgorge’s first album is as fuckin’ batshit crazy as you’d expect to be. By this point, the band have a long and surprisingly varied career (who saw that coming?), so its nice to go back and check out the very sordid beginnings. In fact, Intestinal Disgorge got seedier and more brutal as they progressed into the 2000s (Depravity is probably one of the sickest and most unrelenting things ever recorded, at 60 tracks long)….

Very angery. Straight up heavy as shit, balls out powerviolence. I love the aesthetic, I love the production, and I love the rabid vocals and unstoppable instrumentation. As with most compositions in this style, it doesn’t last forever, but it doesn’t need to. Highly recommended.

A live split EP which actually sounds pretty clear. The AGx stuff crawls a bit, rather than being from their selection of mincing microblasts. Quality is usually any issue that I have with splits from these Belgian legends, repeated songs aside. And that’s all OK here. The Nyctophobic side isn’t bad either. Is this an essential underground gem? Perhaps not, but it’s not bad either.

Atrocities has to be one of, if not the best, First Days recordings. Their slushy drum machine gore is perfected here, with interesting themes and perfect shifted vocals. The vocals in of themselves are something that need to be heard to be believed. Fast, brutal, savage. That’s all I need to say here, I think.

The Blood stuff here is great. Its raw, its nasty, and it really shows the styles that the band flirted with, bridging elements of death and grind with even black or war metal stylings. Love it. Unfortunately for me, I’ve heard the Impetigo side a thousand times because I got the Giallo / Antefatto complication CD through a trade when I was a teenager and these songs are already on there. Plus, the version of…

I snoozed on this when it came out, and I snoozed once more when the 3XM side was re-released on 12″ vinyl. In fact, why did the vinyl re-release only include the 3XM stuff? Seems a bit shitty. Anyway, I digress. This is a pretty solid effort from 3XM, which farts hyperspeed drum machine grindcore over you in their “original” full length style – i.e. the production is decent, the vocals are weird and the…

I have a spotty relationship with Wheelchair x4. Granted, its mostly my fault, having organised a failed compilation featuring 69 bands around the time everyone was leaving MySpace en-masse and it took a year or so to get everyone’s money back. Anyway, that’s water under the bridge. I got this in 2013 along with the Elastic Death split and I really enjoyed it, despite the animosity the guys seem to have against me. Maybe its…

Ah! Classic old school Agathocles EP right here. Guitars down-tuned to non-existence, shifted vokills and drums that are all over the place – what more could you possibly want? I love this primordial soup stuff, way back before mincecore was defined by stomps, d-beats and those riffs. Not that I hate any of that stuff, no no, but I do have a soft spot for the more grinding death metal sound to Agathocles had at…

Wow. There’s something humbling about listening back to old noisecore stuff. There always seems to be an element of fun involved with just getting into a room, or switching on your board setup, and giving everyone’s ears hell. When I listen to raw rehearsal recordings, which is the case here with the Final Exit stuff, I feel like I’m given an unique window, a fly-on-the-wall look into a rehearsal room full of friends messing about…

You gotta love 7MON. In fact, one time, their addition to the OEF 2015 line up swayed me to buy a ticket and make a solo trip from the UK to the Czech Republic. Whilst I was watching this band play their ridiculous noisecore on stage, I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d travelled 100s of miles to watch a band dick about for an hour haha Noisecore, I know, isn’t everyone’s bag. Personally, I love…

Gore Beyond Necropsy have this wacky edge to their tunes. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it doesn’t make it silly like, idk Sloth and stuff like that. If anything it just adds to the angular weirdness that is GBN’s early grind output. On the other side, “legendary” pornogrind outfit Gut pummel us with some dirging filth. I have a soft spot for Gut even though pornogrind is somewhat ridiculous. The sleaziness…