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