No One Knows What the Dead Think - No One Knows What the Dead Think

BWAAAAAAHHH

I've got a confession: I love grind but pretty much never want to listen to it.  I'm not sure why, I think I'm just rarely in the mood for such laser focused hyperviolence all the time.  I've got some pet bands, y'all know how much I love Rotten Sound and Wormrot for example, but it's just not my usual stomping ground.  And so, because of that, I've never actually listened to Discordance Axis or Grindlink before.  I know they're big deals, but I just stuck with Insect Warfare for a long time and didn't bother to venture beyond that.  So the new self titled release from No One Knows What the Dead Think caught me by total surprise.  I brought this up to some friends and they were all like "Oh yeah I've been waiting for this, it's really cool to see Chang and Marton working together again" and I just had no idea who the fuck these dudes were.

But yeah, assuming you're more in the know than I am, after Discordance Axis broke up in 2001, Rob Marton basically disappeared from music entirely while Jon Chang and terminal fill-in Steve Procopio formed Grindlink, who went to have a lot of success in their own right.  But now, eighteen years later, Marton and Chang have hooked up again and have apparently delivered what is essentially the fourth DA album with No One Knows What the Dead Think.  And frankly?  This fucking smashes.  Like usual, this is only ten tracks and runs less than 19 minutes, so it's just a short blast of intensity but god damn is it intense.  I don't know how they sounded in the past, but right now this is just god damned insane.  Musically it's very spastic, with riffs that jump around the fretboard like a spinning rubik's cube, and drumming that keeps time like a nuclear bomb keeps its shell intact.  Kyosuke Nakano is another name I don't recognize since I never kept up with grind as much as I should've, but if his drumming here is indicative of what he accomplished with Cohol, then that's just another monster I need to check out (though according to MA they played black metal so I can only assume it's of the Deathspell Omega variety).  He's all over the damn kit, rarely playing a steady beat and almost always spazzing out into quadruple time blasts at every opportunity and playing tumbling fills every six nanoseconds.  The musical section of the band sounds like its completely coming apart at the seams and I absolutely adore it.

But really, Jon Chang is the highlight here, because his vocals sound like he's just getting stabbed over and over again.  He has a really dry and extremely high pitched shriek that punches through the mix to strongly that your speakers might as well grow arms and bitchslap you.  The whole thing sounds like total fucking chaos at all times anyway, but his hellish banshee wails just push it over the edge and sends the whole experience careening down a mountainside in a cartoonish fight cloud.  Every time the band seems like they're going to rein it in and deliver less manic segment like the chugging riff at the end of "Dagger Before Me" or the simple eighth notes that open "Rakuyo" he'll be sure to signal his entrance with a piercing shriek and before you know it the music sounds like an avalanche again.  That's pretty much the whole album in a nutshell, whenever one of the three guys slows down the other two start losing their shit even harder.  Check out the sustained chords in "Cinder" where Marton plays some whole notes while the drums start blasting even faster and the vocals start flying off the rails.  It's complete sustained mania that stays wild even when it chills out. 

Bottom line, this is one of the biggest surprises of the promo experiment for me, because this is a total fucking knockout.  It's sort of the same reason I like Gotsu Totsu Kotsu so much, even though they're obviously different different bands.  This is pure maximalism, even from a three piece that doesn't feature a bassist.  Every single second is loaded with more activity than any second can logically provide and so the songs all just kinda mindfuck the space-time contiuum and transfer that physics-defying beating to your eardrums.  I can dig a subtle and emotional album, but that's not what I want from grind.  No One Knows What the Dead Think is exactly what I want from grind, and that's pure chaotic noise and excessive bloody violence.  I don't care if it's barely 15 minutes long, this is a genuine candidate for album of the year.


RATING: 95%