Top Five Favorite Grind/Power Violence Albums Of 2017

5. Fluoride - Fluoride

Fluoride meddle in the same muddy and savagely dissonant waters as Cloud Rat do - both their sound and style are unarguably similar. A bleeding, bottomless guitar tone leads an aural assault that feels desperate and hopeless, splintering fissures into the foundation of it's audio-being that beam with melodies and a futile shimmering of light behind sludgy breaks in short bursts of speed.  Breathless, anaerobic, and distorted vocals feel as though they've been sprayed over the totality of the record like a corrosive toxin. Fluoride seers through the skin like enduring a ceremonial chemical burn and is over before the cauterization of nerve endings offers you a bitter relief.  Better yet, maybe just reference the album art as a dead-on balls accurate portrayal of the listening experience.   https://fluoridenj.bandcamp.com/

4. Antigama - Depressant

Antigama are calling this record a 'mini-album', but fuck all that; there are too many Grind albums that over-stay their welcome in the same amount of time that this album absolutely doesn't. The opposite of the effort that comes before it on this list, Depressant is remarkably clean in it's production value and that takes away from nothing, as on all Antigama releases, it's a necessity to the creative and technical cacaphony the band has always towed the line with without falling into pretentious self-awareness - and does anybody do drum-fills better than this guy? Though vocalist, Lucasz Myszkowski's vocals seem ever-so-slightly pushed a bit too far up front in the mix here, the rabid dog channeling of Barney Greenway on Depressant offers a bit of savagery to the clinical sonic teeth machine going bonanza behind it. Strategically punching in more groove oriented tracks here as well as some noise experimentation not only adds longevity and dynamics to the album, but feels like a conscious evolutionary step into something even more progressive than the fearless, genre-defying material that's come before it. Maybe the whole reason this 'mini-album' exists in the first place is to offer fans a smaller leap to whatever is to come next.   https://selfmadegod.bandcamp.com/album/depressant

3. Chepang - Dadhelo: A Tale Of Wildfire

Brandishing two drummers (and not in a Slipknot guy hitting a garbage can with a bat kind of way, but two full-on drum kits) playing simultaneously, Nepalese Grindcore swarm Chepang come barreling forth on their second full length, Dadhelo - A Tale of Wildfire, discharging a torrent of frenzied surges of blurring aggression that overwhelm and exorcise. The impression of 10,000 fists battering only ceases for an occasional - what I can only assume is - Nepalese serenade that can either slow the momentum of the album down or allow your senses to heal long enough for the beating to feel brand new again when the noise cascade persists moments later, that's all on perspective. Though I wasn't able to hear the aid of both drummers on the recording as obviously as one might think (I didn't know about it until I'd already known the album proper), I do believe that that specific endowment adds a subtle but not so subtle asphyxiation to the already speeding vacuum, allowing the ever-so-non-chromatic binaural bleeding of two beats happening at almost the same time to suck whatever semblance of microscopic quiet may be struggling to the forefront between notes. This record reminded me alot of last year's personal favorite Grindcore album Unit 1 by Gendo Ikari, in both it's writing style and over-all sonic delivery; in a musical genre with as much turnover as female pornstars, that gives me hope. https://chepang.bandcamp.com/album/dadhelo-a-tale-of-wildfire

2. Corrupt Moral Altar - Eunoia

At just over 42 minutes Corrupt Moral Altar's Eunoia is a marathon, but one of those really rewarding marathons where the scenery seems to cut the distance in half. And like any endurance trial, crossing the metaphorical finish line is well worth the resolve. Eunoia is a rather enjoyable gauntlet of human emotion, incorporating sludge laden breakdowns, crusty d-beat, clean vocals, violins and climactic crescendos to a straight forward grind attack. For me, it's got all of the catharsis of a great Converge record, with a shit-ton more blasting. The fulcrum of the album lies in the three song stretch of 'The All Consuming Self', 'The Rat King', and 'Body Horror' - a charismatic stepping away of everything that came before it to really give the record double the sense of purpose and an indefatigable quality rare to a collection as intense as this. 'Five Years' serves as the cherry on top offering one of the most satisfying finale's to a Grind record of this length since Dr.Doom's 'Apollo's Death' on the Everyone Is Guilty album. Good stuff here.  https://corruptmoralaltar.bandcamp.com/album/eunoia

1. Full Of Hell - Trumpeting Ecstasy

Trumpeting Ecstasy makes me wish Full Of Hell would stop screwing around with exceptionally good collaborative noise efforts with The Body and just double the fuck down on their full on Grindcore releases. This album burns with so much anathema it feels as though it could be the very incantation of a curse. There is a fullness and depth to their sound here, the wholeness of everything happening comes across so much less compressed than what their contemporaries seem to be doing - some of that may have something to do with that little bit of reverb I hear behind the incredibly clean and in-your-face final mix.  Adding in some killer songwriting chops, the ride through hell with the windows down that is the title track 'Trumpeting Ecstasy', and the adrenaline pumping, tribal, war-like percussion to close the album out, and the final by product is a sonic brand that leaves me almost blue-balled and salivating for more when the whole thing is over. A fantastic result of a fantastic record no matter what the genre. https://fullofhell.bandcamp.com/album/trumpeting-ecstasy

Album Review: Death Toll 80K - 'Step Down'

Troll 2 is one of those movies that often gets put on a pedestal when discussing the worst movies ever made, and while no doubt it can justifiably be considered a shit-can fire of a cinematic experience, I'd argue it as far from the bottom of the barrel. Here's why: you see, the cards were stacked against it from the beginning. No budget, a lack of talented actors/actresses, language barriers throughout the entirety of the script, time constraints, the foundation of the original content, etc. It's a typical low budget horror film only atypical in the cult following it's garnered for being so awkward to watch in it's pitiable presentation.

It's the major-motion picture misfires that have potentially everything going for them that I'd platter forth as far more reprehensible than the aforementioned underdog productions like Troll 2. Remember Spawn? Aliens vs. Predator? Each with source material in graphic novel form that was far more dark, violent and interesting than the watered-down, marketed bullshit that was released in cinema to the masses. Death Toll 80k's Step Down is akin to those movies with every opportunity going for them to be amazing. And while the album is not at all watered down per se, it does have the talent, the skill, the writing, and the production to be amazing, and instead delivers - what is to me - a Grind-accessible mediocrity that does more harm to the genre than good.

It's all - all of it - on the vocals. Now, granted I have niche' taste within the niche' of the genre. I find I typically lean towards an incorporation of intermittent highs and lows in a song to help offer both a variance in delivery as well as some depth in emotive impact, which Step Down has in spades, but the inane and banal one syllable at a time conveyance over what is some really good Grindcore and Power Violence music just feels wickedly lazy and slightly imbecilic. Added to which - and I really tried here - the syllables don't match up with the lyrics they're passing forth. As if they totally and completely phoned the vocals in over the top of what was already done as a complete after-thought, without any preconceived notion of lyrics or a message.  Then afterwards, it feels as if they penned some lyrics which, while I admit are rather decent, don't seem to fit at all with anything in the incomprehensible monosyllabic grunts and screams that are finalized in the mix.

There is a lot of Grindcore out there like this I get it, and I also GET it. For a lot of folks this is exactly their bag, but with all the recognition I see Death Toll 80K getting in the underground scene through the likes of under-the-radar websites way more legit than here, and various comments sections dealing with posts within the genre I personally expected a whole lot more. I hear the writing chops and production values of bands like Wormrot, and maybe even more-so Insect Warfare with the high-highs and low-lows with no in between on the vocal front, but with almost the same kind of sonic presentation look at how much more Insect Warfare or a band like Coffin Birth stand out in terms of dynamics and variation.  I'd be embarrassed to put this forward to someone on the fence about the genre as something to represent an already very discredited kind of music that I think is unique and deserving of more respect. I really don't mean to be so harsh, but I think it's because I can feel the goddamn potential there beaming like a hot flare locked away in a cellar. There's already an incalculable myriad of less-than mediocre, lazy garbage out there in Grindcore, these dudes have every bit of talent, creativeness and accessibility to raise the bar more than a few notches. Right now this just isn't my cup of tea I guess. Listen here and then berate me about how I listen to false Grindcore. No matter how I feel, I hope you dig it - and good on them for even doing it in the first place.