I tried and I tried and I tried but I just never saw the potential greatness for Wormrot that a lot of other genre aficionado's were spouting when the band released there mid-level label debut 'Abuse'. I take that back - I felt the potential, but I didn't feel that album, or the one that followed it. For me it meandered a bit too much in the traditionalism of late-80's grindcore and lacked a certain unpredictability and off-the-wall intensity to it, and from what I have found in parallel worlds on the internet I'm the only one that felt that way (though admit to thoroughly enjoying the track 'Fuck...I'm Drunk). I think a lot of that had to do with the potential that I felt there. This band was sonically threatening, it was a perfectly designed killing machine, with all it's parts in the right place and a clip full of deadly ammunition locked and loaded, it was just aimed in the wrong direction and being used as a coat rack on a parade float locked away in a garage someone had forgotten about. In all honesty I probably wouldn't have given this new material a listen had it been a full album, but I thought I'd give the corpse one last forced breath....I'm sure glad I did.
Opener 'Loathsome Delusions' violently evolves from a single line of feedback into a bottom heavy hardcore stand-on-two-legs Weekend Nacho-esque chest thumper and then quickly into a frenzied tear-yourself-apart grindcore berserker attack before it all locks into itself and gallops off and through the drywall. It's like watching Cronenberg's 'The Fly' at warp speed. And before you collect your brain cells back together from the jarring they've just surprisingly endured and have a chance to soliloquy "what the fuck?!" 'False Assumptions' comes careening off the tracks, pummels you into the floor and rolls you into ground beef with industrial sized freight train cars in the form of blast beats. 'Outburst Of Annoyance' stands out in the middle of this EP with it's striding rhythms that finally break free from the rest of the album's sonic agoraphobia and violently dances in a perception of vast openness, feeling the rays of natural overcast light and breathing real air all too briefly before being snapped back into the gears of the complex teeth machine that is devouring everything in it's path. 'Breed To Breed' 's stop and go grind finds it's groove a third of the way through it's track and morphs into a trademark Nasum kill-bonanza, and 'Perpetual Extinction' is a schizophrenic aural assault that compresses several sub-styles of the genre into a final Death Blossum attack before the barrage of crazy-fists in the beginning of the album closer 'Many Funerals' churns into an almost valiant stride of desperation that fades out at the end. The production is top-notch, dare I say that it's perfect for the sound it's suiting. Low fist-to-brick bass drums and tight snares pepper distorted guttural bass lines and multiple vocal styles that morph more times than John Carpenter's The Thing on PCP (is there an underlying Sci-fi thing happening here?). It's essentially the same sound Wormrot have always had but finally put against a worthy opponent. Force this down my gullet with no label and I'd have never guessed it was them, but I'm sooooo glad to hear them do it, and soooo glad to experience potential met. Adding to the awesomeness is the short EP format which allows this batch o' tracks to do exactly what it - and it's entire genre - is meant to do and that's cattle-prod itself into your skull and scramble your brains, leaving you face down on the slaughterhouse floor catatonic and saturated with your own piss before you ever even knew where you were. To me, personally - I'll go out on a limb and say that these five tracks in this short format is damn near my idea of Grindcore perfection. I don't know, it just hit me that way - blame a recent lack of impressive new sounds in my catalogue or a vulnerability to the audio chaos from a long winter of listening to drone music - I'm just glad it's sites have been readjusted and it's out of the garage. I'm drained yet longing for more pummeling. A +++.
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