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%

Musket Hawk - Upside of Sick

Gatling Pigeon

Even after several spins I'm not even entirely sure what this is or why I like it so much.  I feel a bit over my head talking about Revolver Duck considering this lays the sludge influence down super thick and my only real point of reference for that is Melvins since I never really bothered exploring the genre much further than that beyond a few scattered classic tracks here and there.  With that little knowledge of one of the bigger influences on Upside of Sick, I really shouldn't even be talking about something I clearly don't understand, and that's been my philosophy for a long time.

However, my philosophy is also "I know good/bad music when I hear it", and Tommy Goose very confidently falls on the "good" side of that equation.  In fact I'd go so far as to say that they've been one of the few truly excellent bands to pop up in my inbox all year.  The sludge metal here may be a major influence and that puts it pretty firmly outside of my wheelhouse, but the band really let the punk side of the sludge mixture shine, and the occasional blasts of grinding intensity make Upside of Sick something I can comprehend just enough to headbang myself into a coma.

This is a very short release, clocking in at just under 25 minutes, but it crams a whole shitload of riffs and hooks into that short time.  The opener, "Roidhead Swindler", pretty much showcases everything the band has to offer.  It crashes through the gate with some brutally doompaced sludge riffs, absolutely drowning in overwhelming distortion, before giving way to some raucous, filthy Discharge-styled hardcore, and from there in peppers in quasi-random blasts and squealing dissonance, all underneath heavily distorted screams and bellowing growls.  It sounds like I'm describing pretty much any extreme metal band, but trust me when I say that the punk attitude of the whole thing keeps it consistently vicious, regardless of whether they're going for the throat with hyperspeed noise attacks or hurling boulders at you with a more deliberate pace.  There's an inherent danger to Upside of Sick that acts as the intangible that keeps this from falling out of regular rotation while I slog through the other dozen mediocre albums I don't care to write about. 

I can't say too much about this considering it's succinctness, but Gun Bird came with a point to make and they're more than happy to make it and carry on quickly, leaving you a twisted, smouldering crater in their wake.  They're explosive and mean and that's all I really ask for out of a band this stupidly simple.  There aren't any flashy tricks because there doesn't need to be.  They show up, destroy, and leave. 


RATING: 84%

Rotten Sound - Exit

All hail the head vein!

I know very little about grindcore.  I can't listen to any one band and tell you why they are good for their style.  I have no idea what grind fans love about grind and what makes Grind Album X grind grindier than Grind Album Y.  I only grind a grindful of grind bands and I'm not even sure if they're the grindiest.  Grindcore rarely even grinds what I'd refer to as "grinding" in the first place, since it grinds at far too high of a grind to truly grind the feel of grinding some grind.

The point is that "grind" is a really stupid word, and now you all agree with me.

But no, the real point is that, while I'm not as intricately familiar with grindcore as I am with death, thrash, or power metal, I do know good music when I hear it, and Finland's Rotten Sound is damn good.  Their fourth album here, 2005's Exit, ranks as the strongest to me, and it may well be because of the splendid marriage of both sheer, nut-shattering intensity and bleak, apocalyptic nihilism.  Exit, to me, is the kind of album that angry fifteen year old outcasts would write if they actually had any idea how to properly convey their ideas.  Every track is just chock full of fast, to-the-throat evaluations of our places in society as merely cogs in the machine, the inevitable downfall of us all due to the overwhelming greed of those in power, and the depression of soldiering forward as a faceless drone weighed against the futility of trying to break free from the mold.  There's no way out, life is terrible, you know it and I know it, let's get together to demolish a house with our fists and then eat a gun.

The band gets these themes across with the utmost fervor, blasting away with a wall of sound moving at light speed, completely overwhelming you as if you're standing under a waterfall; except instead of water, it's bile.  The opening title track takes about forty seconds or so before it really starts, but when the distorted ambiance gives way, we're treated to twenty seconds of the most blisteringly fierce music imaginable.  And it never lets up from there.  Apart from the fake-out ending of "The Weak", Exit never takes its foot off the gas, and the album would only suffer if it were to take any other path.  Every last track is just stuffed to the gills with blasty poundy rippy shreddy deathgastic fuckfarting.  That doesn't make sense, but at the same time it totally does.  There are riffs here and there, and in fact this is quite riffy for grindcore (based on my admittedly loose grasp on the genre), but it takes a back seat to the overwhelming intensity.  There's pretty much no room to rest here, and it's just a constant barrage of blasts and shouts, but really what else could this possibly consist of?  There are some cool flourishes like the drainpipe gurgle at the end of "Maggots" or the bass break in "Mass Suicide" or the mosh riff in "Western Cancer", but they're relatively few when weighted against the brick wall of clipped relentlessness.

I know that all comes off as kinda vague, but there's only so much you can say about Exit.  It's bleak and nihilistic and just takes a really balls out aggressive approach to the themes presented.  The world sucks, and sometimes you're not just sad about it, you're fucking pissed about it, and that's what Rotten Sound allows you to do.  Exit is the soundtrack for lashing out against the frustrations of everyday life and just taking absolutely no prisoners in your rampage.  There's nothing held back, and as a result it's actually kind of one-dimensional, but this approach is so good that I find myself not caring.  It's fast, unrelenting obliteration, and is a perfect album for venting your stress (aka: "punching shit to pieces while screaming your head off").


RATING - 91%

Unburied - Slut Decapitator

One of my favorite album titles, at the very least

The only phrase I can use to describe this would be "lukewarm vehemence". There isn't anything really bad about this Virginian Death/Grind outfit, but there isn't a damn thing worth getting excited over either. It's something that is fantastically mediocre, extraordinarily middle of the road, and just very, very, inconsequential. None of the riffs stick with you, none of the songs command your attention, and no single instrument strikes you as spectacular or awful. Y'know? It's Death/Grind, and that's about it. The only thing I can think of that is even somewhat unique or memorable about the album is the fact that they don't really mix the two genres as much as they make them "coexist". What I mean by that is simply that the songs aren't a mixture of the two, but the album contains some Death Metal songs and some Grind songs. The grindy songs are still closer to metal than, say, Last Days of Humanity or some other ridiculous goregrind band, but most of the songs just sound like a really bland, slightly faster than average, Death Metal.

I have to give the band some credit for making the bass prominent in the mixing. Most bands really seem to neglect the low end, and the act of simply making it easily audible will immediately make bass players enjoy the album just a slight bit more. I'll say that the second half houses the more memorable and worthwhile tracks, and "Gore-Soaked Revenge" is probably the best purely because it is based off a good, memorable riff, but it's still a faceless blur overall. There isn't much point listening to something that you won't remember or want to hear again, so I'd say this album shouldn't be bothered with unless you're a huge fan of the genre and need absolutely every release in order to feel complete with your life or something.

RATING - 54%


Originally written for www.metalcrypt.com