Grindcore

Grindcore has always remained on the margins of extreme music, since its output has so often been so uncompromising that it alienates even the most seasoned listeners. In an attempt to break down the prejudices that still grip much of today's music criticism, the following article examines - placing them in chronological order - some of the genre's most important, beautiful, interesting and revolutionary works, moving between orthodoxy, cross-contamination and the occasional heresy. In any case, what follows is not meant to be a proper "history of grindcore" (nor did it ever aspire to be), but rather the writing of someone who considers himself, first and foremost, a fan. A fan who, through the power of words, has tried to capture the epic saga of one of the most radical genres in the whole rock universe, first codified by Napalm Death back in 1987, the year in which the venerable Earache Records released the epoch-making Scum, which you can read about in the "Milestones" section. There, the genre's earliest steps are also outlined, born of a radicalization of punk-hardcore and some of the most extreme variants of thrash-metal.

But before we unravel the long thread of memory, let's recall, together with Giulio the Bastard (historic leader and voice of Cripple Bastards, standard-bearers of Italian grindcore), the atmosphere in which the primordial phase of grindcore first took root.

As fast and extreme as possible

One of the most paradoxical images I have of the early days when I first got into grindcore ties in with an urban legend claiming that some members of a band back then would often hang out under a railway bridge and, the moment a train passed, start pogoing like maniacs, because the deafening clatter of the rails above their heads was the sound that thrilled them most.

From an old Cripple Bastards interview: Identifying with a musical and expressive style that, through a series of coincidences, explodes right in the period when you're getting close not only to the underground scene, but to a plain awareness of your own needs in terms of listening and the imagery that comes with it... That, in a nutshell, was my approach to the genre we're about to discuss. So, landing in a period when both punk and metal were veering toward a stall and a phase of digression, since almost everything had already been chiseled out, tried and reshaped in the preceding years, along comes a generation that, tired of the sloganizing of punk (whose rage and nihilism it will nonetheless retain) and bored by an increasingly technical metal, aims to strip everything back down, just as had happened at the genre's origins, hurling riffs, rhythms, distortion levels and so on into the absurd meat grinder of "as fast and extreme as possible", multiplied to the nth degree. At the root of it all is a narrow circle of tape-trading listeners, on the fringes of the various local scenes, the classic rare birds frustrated by any social relationship or semblance of community. In their solitude, these "pioneers" sifted through demo tapes and scattered fanzine articles for whatever was most extreme and uncompromising in music at the time, not only as fans but also, in some way, to terrify — to earn their isolation through sonic aberration. On ground like this, "whoever is even further out there" is born, and tries not only to reproduce in the rehearsal room the concentrate of that selection, but to give it, nonsense aside, a method of its own, pushing it to further extremes. Since the term Grind didn't exist yet, you could call them "ultra-hardcorers" or exasperated "death-thrashers". They stayed confined to the most remote corners of their circle. Mentally devastated types whose listening range narrowed down to Heresy, Septic Death, Lärm, Siege, Cryptic Slaughter on the HC side, and Wehrmacht, early Sadus, Genocide/Repulsion, some Death and Hellhammer demos, on the Metal backbone of the whole discourse (as one can deduce, later on, by listening to Scum). Whoever ran a 'zine in the field and/or could afford to venture even deeper into the niche, through contacts and refined cassette-trading, managed to extend their knowledge to rare birds like Rapt, Neos, Deep Wound, Hellhouse, NYC Mayhem, Revenge Of The Whores, Crab Society, Cyanamid, ArchEnemy (Usa), Brigada Do Odio and so on. These were the listening habits that laid the first roots of Grindcore, at least up to 1986. Afterwards, building on these foundations and in a cauldron of genius, frustration and the usual urge to break certain molds, other bands managed to give the whole thing a non-style.

My approach to grindcore dates back to before it had even been labeled. I remember the obsessive search for ever more violent, fast and obsessive listening. Then, once we picked up our instruments, the goal was to play at levels of sonic annihilation beyond self-destruction. Almost an aborted projection of those who, five or six years earlier, had enjoyed the explosion of Punk/Hardcore, its rage and its wave of novelty, before collapsing into crossover and its crisis, amid political ramblings and whatnot. Drums pounded to the point of wrist-breaking, guitars with distorted radio-interference tones, screams that shred the vocal cords, demos just a few minutes long packed with hundreds of tracks. And whatever you could do in the rehearsal room or on stage to attack and annihilate yourself as fast as possible...

(Giulio the Bastard – Cripple Bastards)

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CARCASS – Reek Of Putrefaction (1988; Inghilterra)

Before it was replaced with a less offensive image (according to the English censors), the debut album's cover by Carcass represented a perfect figurative counterpart to the Liverpool quartet's music, with its collage of mutilated corpse parts. This was no random choice, since Jeff Walker (vocals and bass), Bill Steer (vocals and guitar) and Ken Owen (drums) had become fascinated with the medical world after leafing through a pathology manual. So while Napalm Death's grindcore was deeply politicized, with clear anarchist leanings (let's not forget that, through Discharge and Amebix, the Birmingham band was also tied to the anarcho-punk movement), Carcass's own brand, with its diseased medical imagery, would end up steering in a more claustrophobic, splatter-horror direction, giving rise to the term "gore-grind", where the noun "gore" refers to clotted blood. After taking part in the revelatory adventure that was Scum, Steer and Walker focused on writing their debut album, polishing up some tracks that had already appeared on the demo "Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment". Recorded in just four days, Reek Of Putrefaction (catalogue number 6 for Earache) is the foundational brick in the building of the goregrind cathedral, a harsh and cursed record, steeped in a murky, leaden atmosphere, "ruined" (to use Steer's own term) by the terrible production courtesy of that "idiot" [quote] Mike Ivory. Another sound engineer, Paul Talbot, tried to patch things up, but what you hear is still a saturated sound in which high and low frequencies are balanced in a truly disgraceful way. And yet, it's precisely the production (with its anarchic play of pitch shifting) that ended up making these tracks even more blasphemous and terrifying, with basses bursting out unexpectedly from sweltering tangles of harmonic chaos, guitar solos (tuned to B) slicing into the ears like sharpened blades, and vocals so altered (Walker's harsh rasp, Steer's guttural growl and Owen's more distorted shriek) as to become indecipherable.

Framed by the murky, subsonic stench of the instrumental "Genital Grinder" and the swirling, unsettling march of "Malignant Defecation", the set dressed by Carcass across these grooves becomes the epitome of the repulsive in music thanks to filthy compositions such as "Maggot Colony", "Pyosisified (Rotten To The Gore)" (one of the most instrumentally creative moments, between untamed dynamics, sweltering harmonic crashes and an alternation of slower and faster parts), the primitive nightmare of "Carbonized Eye-Sockets" and the horror-laden "Vomited Anal Tract" and "Psychopathologist" (worn down by a lightning-fast electric jolt), the discordant dynamics of "Fermenting Innards" and "Excreted Alive", and the thrash-death legacy of "Suppuration", "Splattered Cavities" and, above all, "Burnt to a Crisp". The lyrics take on the task of putting into words the carnage of sounds and deranged frequencies: The rotting corpse lies on a mortuary slab / Pus starts to burst from each visceral scab / Body temperature drops, bone seizure takes place / As the discharge oozes from the boils on the face (from "Suppuration"); or, with even greater care for assonance: Pyosis mucolysifies malignant mucocoeles / Pustules endocrinating disseminated mortified cells / Flesh punctuated by cancerous pustules / Burning your face with formicating papules (from "Mucopurulence Excretor").

By the end of the year, John Peel had placed Reek Of Putrefaction at the top of his playlist, blessing the beginning of the Carcass legend. A few years later, in an interview given to a German magazine, the three of them recalled the gestation of their first record like this: "The album simply wasn't competitive in terms of sound, but we still got a ton of appreciative letters and, in the end, a great many people ended up buying the record. Beyond everything else, that was proof for us that we were on the right track. So it's not so much the packaging as the quality of a product that makes the difference. But that doesn't mean our second LP was marked by shoddy sound too!". The record was also praised by Earache Records' own boss, Digby "Dig" Pearson, who still considers it the label's finest release to this day, because "it was a genuine look into the future, even more so than Scum. Reek of Putrefaction, in fact, is a truly brutal record, more extreme and with more metallic riffs. A foundational work for the entire gore-grind scene to come".

In any case, to avoid further production headaches, the band decided to place its trust in the experienced hands of Colin Richardson, who had also worked with Napalm Death and Discharge, as they set about recording material for their second album.

Where the previous album featured a tracklist of over twenty songs, Symphonies Of Sickness (1989) trims things down to ten, split between a "Requiems of Revulsion Side" and a "Concertos of Carnage Side". It's clear, right from these details, that the band – well advised in this by Richardson himself (a true workaholic, capable of forcing the band to put in 15-hour days!) – fully intended not only to iron out the flaws of their debut, but also to give their compositions a stronger structure (here, on average, longer than before), searching for a balance between brute force and sonic delivery. In short, against the chaotic (yet still experimental!) sound of the debut, Carcass respond with an extremely tight body of work, made up of songs in which their goregrind roots (more evident here in the faster passages) blend beautifully with death-metal influences (heard above all in the more measured moments and elaborate instrumental progressions), giving rise to one of the foundational works of the deathgrind saga. Meanwhile, all three musicians show a marked improvement in technique, starting with Owen, whose drumming now props up the songs with more dynamic architecture and better-calibrated blast-beats. Steer's guitar (always tuned down and packing a hugely powerful sound, helped along by Walker's bass) delivers a whole series of relatively more elaborate riffs (think, for instance, of the one in "Excoriating Abdominal Emanation"), often plunging into the murky, turbid territory of certain Florida death-metal (Obituary, Death, Morbid Angel), even producing a few genuinely good solos along the way (the vaguely Egyptian-toned one that splits the stormy "Exhume To Consume" in two; the "spacey" one that creeps into the mid-tempo section underpinning the tectonic tremors of "Excoriating Abdominal Emanation"; and, again, the sibylline one in "Cadaveric Incubator of Endoparasites"). A few keyboard touches also contribute to the album's putrid feel, starting with the one heard in the very first seconds of opener "Reek Of Putrefaction". Among the other tracks worth noting are "Ruptured In Purulence" (which evolves from a Slayer-esque cadenced intro into a raucous gore bloodbath), the melodic streak of "Empathological Necroticism", and the great zombie-marching finale of "Crepitating Bowel Erosion".

Following the album's release, Carcass headed to the United States for a run of shows alongside Death. It marked the band's definitive consecration, and in 1991 they would release "Necroticism – Descanting the Insalubrious", another memorable work that refined the formula of Symphonies Of Sickness, tilting more decisively toward the death-metal side, as underlined by the legendary "Corporal Jigsore Quandary", the brightest star of this new course.

FEAR OF GOD – Fear Of God (1988; Svizzera)

"Hardcore, grindcore, death metal, noise, whatever bullshit – anything at all. At first, we weren't really on the same wavelength as each other, but eventually we found common ground. We wanted to be 'brutal', we wanted to turn Fear Of God into the most extreme band in the world, or rather, the most brutal. Every member of the band was under constant pressure, because each of us had to contribute at maximum intensity. The drums had to play as fast as possible, the guitars had to grind out riffs trying to build a wall of noise, and the bass and vocals, finally, had to fall in line with the overall structure, made up of terrifying distortions. So I did my best to turn my voice into an inhuman sound."

With these words, singer Erich Keller once recalled the very earliest phase of the Fear Of God saga, a band from Zurich, Switzerland, that produced some of the earliest and most radical expressions of grind-noisecore. In the first half of the Eighties, Keller was a fairly solitary character. He wanted to play in a band to vent his rage, but found it hard to find anyone who shared his same passions. So he invented a fictitious band, ATTA, and started spreading that name around, claiming it was a Turkish outfit and the most extreme band ever. Meanwhile, he was experimenting with washing machines (!), blenders (!), and fairly basic vocal effects, recording a few demos and keeping in touch, through tape-trading, with some of the most radical acts of the era. Meeting guitarist Reto 'Tschösi' Kühne (who had played bass in Messiah, one of the most important local thrash-death outfits) gave things a decisive push. A first project, called BOL (Bunch of Lies), was aborted, and out of its ashes Fear Of God was born, settling into a quartet completed by drummer Franz 'Osi' Oswald and bassist Dave Phillips. It was the spring of 1987. Scum would come out shortly after, and barely a year later Fear Of God – having also played a few shows with Napalm Death – decided to radicalize that approach without compromise, recording extremely noisy, spastic tracks made of rhythmic sobs, atonal collapses, deformed vocals, and assorted aberrations. "My intention," Keller would say, "was to carry over into our music that sense of total hopelessness that, for instance, Amebix had captured so well on albums like 'No Sanctuary' and 'Arise'. I wanted, in short, Fear Of God's music to be constantly shaken by gusts of hatred and despair." Words that prepare us for the most representative work of their art, namely the self-titled Ep, also known as the "21 tracks Ep". A record cut on an eight-track, under precarious conditions, overseen by a sound engineer still cutting his teeth. The final mix didn't convince Keller (who was aiming for an even more brutal and powerful sound), unlike the other three members of the band, who declared themselves thrilled with it. Be that as it may, the twenty-one tracks that make it up render this work one of the most extreme sonic experiences of the era. Keller's inhuman screams (which, hard as it may be to believe, use no vocal effects whatsoever) tower over a buzzing stream of noisegrind, amid demonic retching (the seven seconds of "Rubbish Planet"), funeral marches wrecked by schizophrenic fits ("Under The Chainsaw"), sickly grooves gutted by savage vocal duels ("Proud On Your Pride"), slowed-down chants ("Which Way?"), outbursts of boundless hatred ("A Life In Rigorism", "Circle A", "Raise The Siege"), extremely raw blast-beats ("The Two Sides Of The Coin", "Locked Away"), pseudo-songs annihilated by terrifying epileptic fits ("I've Seen"), and sonic maelstroms that foreshadow Sore Throat's Disgrace to the Corpse Of Sid.

The following 12" "As Statues Fell" focused instead on the band's live dimension, giving us blistering lo-fi snapshots in a document of lesser quality, but still capable of offering yet another close-up look at the most anarchic underground of Europe at the time. In 1988, after playing their last show as the support act for Henry Rollins (!), Fear Of God broke up. Further live recordings (even rougher and more intimidating: "that's how I wish our first Ep had sounded!", Keller would say some years later) were nonetheless dug up in 1992 by Atrocious Records (naturally!) under the title "Pneumatic Slaughter". Indeed, just in these past few years, all of the band's material, enriched with unreleased tracks and extras, has been coming back into circulation thanks to F.O.A.D. Records, run by Giulio of Cripple Bastards. I'd therefore recommend that anyone interested keep an eye on the label's official website, which, among other things, also has some news in store concerning the Terrorizer universe.

NAPALM DEATH – From Enslavement To Obliteration (1988; Inghilterra)

While it's impossible to strip Scum of its status as the ultimate cornerstone of grindcore, it's just as hard to deny the importance, within the Birmingham band's discography, of their second album, which sees the formula laid out on their era-defining debut solidify decisively. From From Enslavement To Obliteration (an album that debuted at number 1 on the UK independent charts, dethroning Sonic Youth!) onward, grindcore's identity became defined once and for all, helped along by a cleaner, more balanced production and an obviously more pronounced tightness, given that, unlike those on Scum, these twenty-two tracks were recorded in a single session and, above all, by a stable line-up which, at the time, consisted of: Lee Dorrian (vocals), Mick Harris (drums), Bill Steer (guitar) and Shane Embury (bass). Under these conditions, the band managed to write and record songs that were, on average, more polished, in turn showing clear compositional growth. Opened by "Evolved As One", a long intro of solemn spoken-word, crust-punk-derived electric webbing and dub-style detonations/implosions (a construction reminiscent of contemporaneous work by Godflesh and Scorn), the album completes the definition of the Napalm Death legend with white-hot tracks. Dorrian's growl resembles that of a zombie under electroshock or, if you prefer, a serial killer tormented by guilt. Steer's guitar (tuned to C#), meanwhile, spins out deafening webs of sound that saturate the tracks from start to finish, though occasionally unleashing solos that resemble otherworldly hallucinations (listen, for instance, to the one that soars in the middle of "Uncertainty Blurs the Vision"). Harris on drums, meanwhile, is as certifiably unhinged as ever, delivering blast-beats that resemble genuine bombing raids, the driving core of a band that, as he himself would recall years later, at that moment thought of nothing but going faster and faster... As for the songs, while the bulk of the record is still devoted to inhuman epileptic fits, some moments already point toward death-metal territory: I'm thinking of "Unchallenged Hate", "Mentally Murdered" and the blazing "Display to Me", but even the title track itself goes well beyond the genre's usual fences, with a "panoramic" construction that shows more than a passing intention to shake up the usual breakneck raids. After all, even grindcore fans themselves ran the risk of ending up like the rock-music consumers targeted on "Cock-Rock Alienation": blindly following not bands or the evolution of a genre, but outright fads, obviously anchored to clichés. Following this logic, then, it becomes easier to understand the death-metal turn set up by the "Mentally Murdered" Ep and completed by their third full-length, "Harmony Corruption".

A turn that would, in any case, usher in the least interesting phase of their career.

O.L.D. – Old Lady Drivers (1988; USA)

As someone rightly put it, O.L.D.'s first historic Lp brings to mind a cross between Napalm Death and Spazztic Blur. Now, presumably you're all familiar with the former, but I'm certain very few of you could say anything about the Portland band. Well, around the mid-Eighties, Spazztic Blur played a thrash-metal so cheeky and irreverent that it essentially turned into an outright parody of the genre popularized by Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth and company. If you've got the time and the inclination, track down "Before and After [Befo Da Awbum]" and things will become clear. That same parodic streak from the Portland outfit runs right through this debut by Old Lady Drivers as well – the moniker chosen back in that distant 1988 by the very young James Plotkin (guitar, bass) and Alan Dubin (vocals) to give shape to their musical passions, aided by drummer Ralph Pimentel.

The duo had already caught Earache Records' attention a few years earlier, back when they still went by the name Regurgitation and demos such as "Organic Backwash" (1986) and "Bathrooms Rule" (1987) were circulating through the underground, messengers of a bleak yet extremely raucous deathgrind steeped in ferocious irony. Digby "Dig" Pearson's interest (sparked, it seems, by a tape lent to him by Mick Harris) resulted in the release of the aforementioned self-titled debut, one of the most important works of the very earliest phase of American grindcore. The frenetic excitement (sharpened by Pimentel's lightning-fast blast-beats) running through tracks like "Total Hag" or "Corpse Full of Gunk" brings Nuclear Death to mind, but we're a long way from the depraved, nihilistic scenarios of the band behind Bride Of Insect. What reigns here instead is the sneer of a clown in the throes of delirium tremens (can you keep from laughing at the high-pitched voice on "Supermarket Monstrosity"?). The lyrics themselves, after all, have something to suggest: Just because we're old and grey / Doesn't mean we'll go away and, again, still from "Total Hag": I like to scare the prune-tit scag / Drop a match in her shopping bag / Kick her in her Rickets, push her in the road / Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! I laugh at the total hag... In an increasingly mad and surreal scenario, we hear Dubin turn into a truly wicked, cynical witch across the hyperkinetic progressions of "Tracheotomy Peashooter" and "I Laugh as I Chew...", the disorienting psychedelic digressions, complete with a magnificent melodic flight, of "Wisdom Lost" (Where are my dentures.../ I can't find my dentures.../ Where are my dentures.../ I really need my dentures..., just to give you a further idea of how absurd these grooves get), the "Frère Jacques"-style refrain of "Die In Your Beauty Sleep", the operatic parody of "Screaming Geezer", and the instrumental oddities of "Colostomy Grab-bag", caught between raw heaviness, acoustic swoon and ecstatic abandon. Among the slower moments, worth noting is the cover – comically sped up in its finale – of "Cocaine".

Starting with the following "Lo Flux Tube" (1991), the band would devote themselves with ever greater care to a more experimental sound (on the title track, John Zorn, who had fallen in love with their debut, gladly lends the piercing high notes of his saxophone), juggling industrial, avant-metal, progressive, electronics and a healthy dose of madness.

SORE THROAT – Disgrace to the Corpse of Sid (1988; Inghilterra)

Among the earliest standard-bearers of so-called "noisecore" or "noisegrind", alongside Seven Minutes Of Nausea, Anal Cunt and Grimcorpses, are Sore Throat, a project born thanks to the efforts of singer Richard "Militia" Walker and drummer Nick Royles, later joined by bassist Jon "Doom" Pickering and guitarist Brian "Bri" Talbot. Immersed up to their necks in the nascent grindcore movement, Sore Throat amplified its polemical, combative side, digging up the anarchist extremism of fellow countrymen Discharge and Disorder, but also echoing, alongside the primordial black-metal of Hellhammer and the most violent forms of American hardcore, a whole series of underground releases that had helped mix the spirit of punk with the raw brutality of noise in an ever more brutal fashion: from fellow Britons Plasmid's "Lust for Power" to the Americans Occult's "Bloodthirsty", by way of the Swiss Køtsen's "Attack of the Savage Horde" (not by chance, a Hellhammer side-project), the Japanese Z's "Violence Action" and the Belgian Hellsaw's "Exorcism Shall Fail". The band's goal, as that madman Walker would repeatedly recall, was clear from the very start: be pissed off at everyone, drink until you pass out, and produce the rawest noise possible. Naturally, as a footnote to the first commandment, one might add: make as many enemies as possible. Obviously, all of this required a precise musical strategy: 1) zero rehearsals; 2) record, as quickly as possible, only short, extremely short bursts of sonic vomit, purely to épater le bourgeois. And furthermore, screw the entire record industry and screw all the punks who had, in the meantime, sold their arses for a place in the sun!

"We were dead set against all those ridiculous, self-obsessed idiots on the English scene, who hid behind their 'anarchism' just to find an excuse to get laid." Given all these premises, there was only one possible title for their first demo: "Aural Butchery". Because, however you look at it, it's a sonic slaughterhouse. And if the first riff, the one on "Screams Of Pain", echoes Napalm Death's "Instinct Of Survival" note for note, the chaos is already announced by a whole series of scattered noises, deafening squeals, metallic wreckage, aborted riffs and assorted spit. Pure, unadulterated lo-fi delirium. On "Death to Capitalist Hardcore", the hatred toward the music of rebellion, which ends up letting itself be seduced by the SYSTEM's money, is more alive than ever (the cover itself, incidentally, depicts a little man impaled while holding up the symbol of D.R.I., the American hardcore outfit that, at the time – we're in 1988 – was starting to reap some financial rewards). In any case, at this stage Sore Throat are still musically recognizable, and across 43 tracks, for a scant nineteen minutes of music, they oscillate between extremely raw crust-punk and blasts of grind bile in perfect "You Suffer" (Napalm Death) style. On their first Lp, "Unhindered By Talent", the songs are more dynamic, mediating between the ever-present Scum (above all in its reverence for the blast-beat), crust-punk leftovers and lethal anthems in the Discharge orbit. There's no shortage of pure divertissement either, like the guitar-and-voice power-pop of "Go Away" and the reworking of Bernard Wrigley's folk nursery rhyme, "The Mole Catcher".

But if there's one album to be handed down to the history of the most extreme, uncompromising music of all time, it's certainly Disgrace to the Corpse of Sid (1988), a noisegrind triumph that crams a full 101 tracks (if "tracks" is even still the word) across two sides. With this deranged, parodistic, hilarious yet fearsome work, Sore Throat took grindcore, barely a year after its official birth, to its most extreme consequences, boiling it down, across the 90 (!) tracks on side A, into shards of blast-beat, subhuman death rattles, acid retching, disastrous flare-ups, and vocal brutalism (just a few examples? "Crazy Blood Whirlwind", "Mosh Is Thrash", "Spleurk!", the "android" aberrations of "Do You Remember?" and "Fuck State Before End", the metallic squeals of "No More Hurt Of Life"), the whole thing disfigured by a range of effects (echoes, feedback, reverb, and so on).

It's obtuseness elevated to a life philosophy, the only anchor of salvation against the progressive destruction of the human, in the name of the Holy Profit. It's pure psychedelic chaos, but played by drunk kids in the grip of a misanthropic fit. Suddenly, the very sonic "revolution" inaugurated by Napalm Death already looked old, outflanked by what is, to all effects (in line with the sacred Discharge commandment: "noise not music"), an avant-garde gesture. We'll have to wait for Last Days Of Humanity's terminal Putrefaction In Progress to hear a sound this traumatic and definitive. But we'll get to that later.

If, then, side A represented grindcore's ground zero, side B featured longer, more structured tracks, though for the band it was really just the other face (the relatively cleaner one, that is) of the same coin, as suggested, right from the title, by the epic sludge-doom of "Different Sides... Of Same Coin". Alongside the idiot-chant piss-take of "The Ballad Of Mad Mickey" parade glorious post-punk hallucinations in the orbit of Flipper ("Famine", "Desire (Peniside)", "Pride"), the Amebix-style crust nihilism of "The Enemy Within", the neck-snapping punk-metal of "Chapels Of Ghouls" and slowed-down doses of Henry Rollins ("Prisoner"). These weren't throwaway ideas at all, since, just a few months later, the band (which for the occasion changed its name to Saw Throat) deepened them on a concept album, programmatically titled "Inde$troy", entirely dedicated to ecological catastrophe, announcing its message with these words printed on the back cover: The meek shall inherit the earth, the meek shall inherit the excrement of western society. The noisecore devastation was, in short, just a memory, and where there had been the explosive condensation of a brute, boundless force, echoes of apocalyptic industrial-doom now made their way in, in line with what Godflesh were doing in those same years.

After a long, mysterious intro made of leaden soundscapes, the aching Swans-like interstices fill up with post-atomic hallucinations in the form of feedback modulations ("Hatred") and the deafening guitars of "Land" and "Energy". So while the metallurgic, echo-drenched ritual of "Waste" essentially transposes the peak chaos of Disgrace to the Corpse of Sid into a metaphysical dimension, the breathless anthem of "Air" instead establishes a link between hardcore's politicized fury and the intergalactic escapes of second-era Chrome. Confirming an unstoppable experimental drive are the industrial dance of clanging metal and vocal manipulations on "?", the deafening noise-rock of "Water", and the metallic post-punk, on a par with Killing Joke, of "Ignorance", which disintegrates into the slow, immaterial "Outro", closing a circle around the earth's agony. An unpredictable masterstroke, next to which the crust-punk shards of the following "Never Mind the Napalm Here's Sore Throat" (their last record) look like a sterile return to more predictable youthful passions.

BLOOD – Impulse to Destroy (1989; Germany)

Germany's Blood had the great merit of helping spread the grindcore virus across Europe, breaking through beyond the Iron Curtain thanks above all to the classic Impulse To Destroy. Formed in 1986 in Speyer, in southwestern Germany, the band initially had fun playing a deformed, deeply sick noisecore that wasn't lacking in a healthy dose of irony either. The demos from that period were recorded in amateurish fashion by what were, all things considered, still musicians finding their feet (guitarist Bernd Eisenstein, bassist Taki, singer Geier and drummer Radtke), interested in making a racket (not for nothing was their first "abortion" called "Infernal Horror"...) amid unhinged screaming, riffs so ramshackle they seem to mimic the sound of a berserk chainsaw and, especially on "Deathcore", alcohol-fuelled ravings with neither head nor tail that even fans of the most radical noise would be ashamed to listen to. The first hints of grindcore begin to show on "Heinous Noise", even if, however you look at it, we're still squarely in lo-fi filth territory. "Spasmo Paralytic Dreams" improves things slightly, but it's only from "Recognize Yourself" onward that you get to enjoy the ripe fruit of their sound: a perverse hybrid of grindcore (the punk side of Napalm Death combined with Carcass's disgusting gore approach), black metal and pressing thrash, topped by the alien, reverb-drenched grunts of Martin "Chicken" Jäger. At the tail end of this EP, the band even indulges in a track poised between minimalism and deviant world music ("Outro (Febrile Massacre)").

Recorded during the same sessions, the tracks that would make up the full-length debut Impulse To Destroy move along the same lines. The production is deliberately "wrong" and gives the songs a massive dose of demonic aura. The opening one-two, "Wings of Declaration" and "Foulmouthed Politicians", offers primitivist blast beats and a stream of mangled rasps and frantic shrieks. The band shows it has a decent share of creativity, despite an apparent stylistic uniformity: the lineup also includes a "Dogmatize" that wiggles along at a polka pace, grind orthodoxy turned into an electroshock session ("Technical Abortion", "A Big Cake"), the guitar's spatial flare-ups on "Beyond Time And Space", the zombie outburst of "Jesus Never Lived", the pocket-sized vocal madness of "Economic Cancer", the tormented noise-grind of "Unsophisticated Sorehead" and epic pow-wows like "Blood", "Retrogression" and, above all, "The Greed", which is basically Repulsion redone by a hypnotized Beherit (and, at least in this last case, we can safely call it an absolute masterpiece!).

In the following years, the band would record better-produced records, built on more considered songwriting closer to death metal ("Christbait" and, above all, "O Agios Pethane"), but if there's a hell that grindcore fans should aspire to, it's surely to be found within the grooves of Impulse To Destroy, a record whose legendary aura has yet to stop shining.

NAKED CITY – Torture Garden (1989; USA)

When the grindcore fuse was lit by the release of Napalm Death's Scum, the ever-curious American saxophonist John Zorn wasn't about to let the chance to investigate it slip by, reusing its stylistic devices as needed in his own thoroughly personal way. In the same period (we're at the end of the eighties), our hero was also developing an unhealthy love for the entire Japanese hardcore-noise scene, in which he recognized above all the mad genius of Boredoms. This passion for every facet of extreme music would push him to write increasingly shorter tracks, in which to pack a myriad of ideas and musical solutions.

"Naked City was a kind of compositional workshop," he would say some years later. "(...) My goal was to test how far I could push the limits imposed by the sax, guitar, keyboards, bass and drums format. That was the fundamental thing for me: sudden changes carried out in an absolutely clean way. One word after another, without staying too long in the same place." With these ideas in mind, the Naked City project was launched (a name inspired by the eponymous catalogue by photographer Arthur Fellig, known by the pseudonym Weegee, but also by a Jules Dassin film), and, to give you an idea of what was going on, here's the list of musicians called in: guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Joey Baron (both coming from the jazz world), the other guitarist Fred Frith (already responsible for cultured, experimental music in the ranks of Henry Cow, Art Bears, Massacre and Golden Palominos), keyboardist Wayne Horvitz and, finally, singer Yamatsuka Eye (leader of Boredoms), whose arrival definitively tipped the scale from an initial, more or less hysterical jazz-noir toward a mad mix of free jazz, grindcore and swing, all seasoned with an imagery drawing on the works of Bataille, erotic literature and grisly sadomasochistic visions. Even if traces of grindcore can already be found on the self-titled album (I'm thinking, for example, of tracks like "You Will Be Shot", "Hammerhead", "Obeah Man"), the essential record for our story is without doubt Torture Garden, an ungraspable work that blends together all the goodness mentioned above, cramming as many as 42 tracks into barely twenty-six minutes of music. Giving a precise sense of the record's overall mood is the opener "Blood Is Thin": a noir-metropolitan intro, jazz gashes set inside furious metallic ostinatos, and bestial screams to do the honors. Madness. Pure, dizzying madness. Traces of japa-noise are not lacking: just listen to the outbursts of "Boneheah" (which Haneke would use in his feature film "Funny Games"), "Speedball", the tortuous twists of "Shangkuan Ling-Feng" or the progressive weaves of "Osaka Bondage". All of this could seem like a kind of parody of what Napalm Death, Carcass and company were doing in that same period, perhaps in the vein of O.L.D.'s first record, much loved by Zorn himself. Instead, Torture Garden does nothing less than show, live and direct, the possibilities inherent in that new form of musical torture. And so, amid earthquake-shaken guitar experimentation with inhuman crashes ("Numbskull", "The Blade"), lopsided surf music ("The Prestidigitator"), tribal-like absurdism (the title track), cacophonous explosions that detonate leaving shreds of form and content on the pavement ("The Ways Of Pain", "Sack Of Shit", "Shallow Grave"), dub exhalations wafting from grind-noise corpses in an advanced state of decomposition ("Dead Dread"), hints of mutant cabaret ("Speedfreaks"), postcards from Egypt ("Cairo Chop Shop"), country sneers ("N.Y. Flat Top Box") and dawns in the shape of a gob of spit ("Gob Of Spit"), one of the most hilariously disturbing terrorist acts in the annals of popular music plays itself out.

REPULSION – Horrified (1989; USA)

Had it been released in 1986, when, in demo form, it was still called "Slaughter of the Innocent", Horrified would surely have gained a few extra points in the race to define grindcore. As it happened, it was only in 1989 that these thirty-odd minutes, recorded in Flint, Michigan, saw the light, thanks to the involvement of the usual Earache Records, who released it on its subsidiary Necrosis Records, run by Bill Steer and Jeff Walker of Carcass. At the time, led by singer/bassist Scott Carlson, the lineup was rounded out by guitarists Matt Olivo and Aaron Freeman and drummer Dave "Grave" Hollingshead, kids determined to push their thrash-death influences to the limit, as they had already shown back in 1984-86, when they still called themselves Tempter and then Genocide (a period well documented on the compilation "The Stench Of Burning Death"). That was also the name of the demo Genocide had recorded in early 1986, surprising fans with its horror-movie-inspired lyrics, its use of blast beats, a distorted bass and a deliberately lo-fi approach. That same year, thinking back to Roman Polanski's film of the same name, the band decided to call themselves Repulsion and began considering self-releasing a record, given the difficulty of finding a label willing to bet on them. Thus was born "Slaughter of the Innocent", marked by a sound even more violent and breakneck than the first demo. Despite success within the underground, the band decided to break up, still disheartened by the indifference of the various labels. In any case, it had earned enormous respect in extreme metal circles because, even though still tied to certain thrash-death conventions, in the songs it had recorded it had managed to capture unmistakably the ongoing evolution toward ever more furious, hyperkinetic forms of the sound that bands like Slayer, Venom, Discharge, Slaughter, Bathory and so on had been focusing on. "We grew up," Scott recalls, "in a town with no future. We were pissed off, but we sure had a lot of fun while we were at it. Music was so important to us in terms of emotional release. Who knows what would have happened if we hadn't poured all that destructive energy into music..." Three years passed and, as mentioned at the start, encouraging signals arrived from England, so much so that, under the name Horrified, that material was finally distributed in a more proper fashion.

From the opening "The Stench of Burning Death" onward, we're assailed by the distorted sound of bass and guitars (just barely stained with fuzz), backed by a torrential drumming that pairs perfectly with the whirling six-string riffing, ready to pierce this deafening chaos with searing, lightning-fast solos. Rolling by, then, like a herd of bulls charging head down, are classics like the hammering "Slaughter of the Innocent", the stunning obsessiveness of "Decomposed", "Radiation Sickness" or "Six Feet Under", the ruinous stop-and-go of "Pestilent Decay", the death'n'roll assault of "Bodily Dismemberment", the frenzied primitivism of "Repulsion" and the title track, the spiraling, corrosive "Maggots in Your Coffin", while a track like "Black Breath" settles into more human tempos, without abandoning the putrid, cursed atmosphere that marks the whole record. Even though it only surfaced once Napalm Death and Carcass had already released their epoch-making debuts, Horrified was nonetheless hailed by insiders as a fundamental building block for the most violent, brutal genre of the era. Indeed, those same English masters wasted no time in speaking up, publicly thanking Repulsion for their music. In 1991, the band recorded a new demo, "Rebirth", but Scott was no longer convinced about continuing the adventure and decided to cut it short, moving to Chicago. Behind him, though, he left a legend that's still hard to kill.

TERRORIZER – World Downfall (1989; USA)

Around the mid-eighties, Oscar Garcia and Jesse Pintado are two metal fans hanging around the Los Angeles underground. Before long, they decide metal is their calling and that they absolutely need to get in on it themselves. Their first band was called Majesty but was short-lived, since listening to the new extremist trends of death metal and the nascent grindcore called for new solutions and a new name. It's 1987 and Terrorizer come into being with the addition of drummer Pete Sandoval and bassist Alfred "Garvey" Estrada, also of Hispanic descent. The impact of the sounds developed by Napalm Death was utterly overwhelming, so much so that the quartet quickly moved from thrash-death solutions (which still dominated on the demos "Nightmares" and the self-titled one from 1988) to a clearly grindcore-leaning approach, as the split album shared with Nausea would soon show. Meanwhile, though, Morbid Angel, who were getting ready to record their debut album (the epoch-making "Altars Of Madness"), had their eyes on Sandoval (and you can't blame them!) and, the moment they signed him, effectively put an end to the Terrorizer experience. To Shane Embury (who had recently joined the ranks of Napalm Death), though, it seemed like a mortal sin that that small but mighty band hadn't had the chance to record even one album. So he decided to start his diplomatic mission at the Earache Records headquarters, practically forcing boss Digby Pearson to pick up the phone and offer the guys a proper contract. So, while Sandoval was finishing up recording sessions for the first historic record by one of death metal's legends, Pintado and Garcia flew down to Florida and, together with their old friend and with help from Dave Vincent (who handled the bass parts), recorded the sixteen tracks that would make up the tracklist of World Downfall, a record destined to leave an indelible mark on the history of grindcore and beyond. Produced by Scott Burns (who would go on to work with the biggest names of the extreme metal scene), the record — recorded in just eight hours — arrives on the shores of the sinister, still very young grindcore island, moving from imperious thrash-death swells (Slayer and Celtic Frost were the names that had pushed Garcia and Pintado to pick up their instruments...), delivering a granite-like, stunning sound whose load-bearing core lies in precise, unstoppable drumming and whirling guitar riffing (often doubled by the bass). Classic tracks such as "After World Obliteration" (in which the union between thrash-death's brute rationality and grind's sudden blasts, propped up by obsessive blast beats set over ferocious double-pedal strafing, is immediately evident), "Storm Of Stress", "Fear Of Napalm", "Strategic Warheads", "Resurrection" (which alternates mid-tempo passages with deafening breathless sprints), "Ripped To Shreds" and "Dead Shall Rise" instead resemble whirlwinds of electric fury that know no obstacles, but push forward without brakes, as if driven by a primordial impulse, by an unconscious need to show the world that there's no time to waste, because every second is precious and helps to make things clear. After all, as Sandoval would later tell it, from the very start the band had had a single wish: to play fast and pissed off. To play, in his own words, "Grindeathcore Extreme Metal". Mission accomplished!

EXIT-13 – Green Is Good! (1990; USA)

After honing their formula across a trio of demos, in 1990 Exit-13 finally managed to record a proper album thanks to the German label Ecocentric Records. Green Is Good! turned out to be a real coup for singer Bill Yurkiewicz, the band's driving force, who a few years later would become co-owner of Relapse Records, the label founded by Matthew F. Jacobson. Together with guitarist Steve O'Donnell and bassist Joel DiPietro, Yurkiewicz helped expand the possibilities of grindcore through an anarchic, experimental approach that was also deeply ironic. From the very first seconds of "Anthropocentric-Ecocidal Conundrum" you can already feel the urge to cut through the genre's stylistic tropes with a parodic edge (in the vein of records like Macabre's "Gloom" and O.L.D.'s Old Lady Drivers), immediately opting for a striking gambit: an introduction built on a duet between acoustic guitar phrasing and deranged vocalizations. When, after about ninety seconds, things shift onto more orthodox terrain, it's like listening to Carcass jamming with a bunch of acid-fried freaks. That, in fact, is the blueprint the remaining tracks will follow, where we run into the semi-controlled madness of "Reevaluate Life!", "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" and "Constant Persistence of Annoyance", the hardcore-psych stragglers of "Gaia", a stab at a grind ballad (!) besieged by spastic jazzcore intrusions ("Ecotopian Visions"), the pathetic tail-end of "Self-Misunderstood Cerebral Masturbation", and the instrumental acrobatics of "The Funk Song" (not just funk, but jazz and blues too!). It's clear, then, that the "good green" referenced in the title is cannabis leaves ("We never recorded a single second of music sober!", a proud Yurkiewicz would recall years later). And yet, reading the lyrics, you realize that, however stoned they might have been, these guys were genuinely furious at humanity, the sole party truly responsible for the earth's ongoing destruction. Here, for example, are the opening lines of "Anthropocentric-Ecocidal Conundrum": Animals destroyed by the life of man / Greed and anthropocentrism have gotten out of hand! / What kind of persuasion will change man's course??? / Technology "progress" makes things worse! / We're looking at nature to see what profits can be turned, / Irrefutable proof of man's destruction but we have not learned!

Here and there you can also make out a few samples, like the theme from "Jeopardy" (the famous American game show) popping up at the start of the claustrophobic "Unintended Lyrical Befuddlement", or the "Underdog" theme (the cartoon) surfacing in "Shattnerspackle", the send-off of jokes, gags and explosions that closes out a record that Frank Zappa would surely have agreed to produce…

Before splitting up in 1997, the band would record, with Brutal Truth's rhythm section, the solid but more conventional Ethos Musick (which doesn't back down an inch from humanity's brutality, going as far as to quote, in the booklet, a cutting line from Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain: There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce), a few more EPs, a savage split album with Hemdale, and finally an oddball "Smoking Songs" (1996) in which, besides returning to their obsession with marijuana, they chose to sever all ties with grindcore entirely, focusing instead on covers of blues/jazz tracks from the Twenties and Thirties. Lunatics, in short.

Later on, Yurkiewicz would try, with the Never Healed project, to rouse from its slumber that mix of grindcore, jazz, blues, rock and assorted eccentricities that, in the early Nineties, had caused no small amount of upheaval within the extreme music scene.

NUCLEAR DEATH – Bride Of Insect (1990; USA)

Nuclear Death were one of the very first, if not the first, extreme metal band to feature a woman as frontperson. Her name was Lori Bravo, and she was a true stage animal, the perfect centerpiece for some of the wildest performances straddling the turn from the late Eighties into the early Nineties. Bravo also played bass and founded the band in Phoenix, Arizona, in March 1986, together with guitarist Phil Hampson and drummer Joel Whitfield. On the first demo, "Wake Me When I'm Dead", the trio show themselves to be in the grip of full-blown speedcore fever, and from there, moving through the subsequent "Welcome to the Minds of the Morbid" and "Vultures Feeding", they arrived at their debut, Bride Of Insect, one of the most important works of grindcore's primordial phase. And yet, across these twelve tracks Nuclear Death are far from simply rehashing the Napalm Death playbook — if anything, they hand down to the genre's history one of its most cacophonous records. To achieve what Joel Whitfield liked to call "deathrashardcorextreme music", the trio drew not only on the earliest, crudest forms of grindcore, but also injected their sound with lethal doses of proto-death, thrashcore and black metal. The lo-fi production contributed decisively to the success of a record that, even today, hits hard with its chaotic ferocity, where the drums' feverish workout and the guitar's deafening riffing forge a hellish, dissonant backdrop against which Bravo's possessed voice hurls itself relentlessly, until it bleeds, spitting out lines in which the bestiality and depravity of the human race emerge in all their shocking rawness.

The calling card is called "Necrobestiality", and on its own it would be enough to confirm everything said so far. The three musicians play as if there were no tomorrow, as if death were waiting for them just outside the recording studio. This isn't a record, it's an electroshock session, and the mind can do nothing but spawn abominations (I fuck the whore's battered corpse / and place the fetus in a bag / I smile at my handwork / and pledge my allegiance to death…, from "Corpse of Allegiance"; I lay within your viscera / cold and wet against my flesh / together we dream of darkness / and of death, my only love…, from "Feral Viscera"), the words mirroring in language what the music expresses through a psychotic flow of notes and warped timbres, a deeply alienating wall of sound precisely because it appears so bizarre, verging on surreal. A few more recognizable riffs do surface here and there, for instance in the Repulsion-style extremism of "Stygian Tranquility", while the arpeggio that opens "Fetal Lament: Homesick" is almost unsettling in its sinister cleanliness. But these are exceptions, small footholds through which one can perhaps better make sense of demonic blenders like "Cremation", "The Beloved Whore Celebration" and "Vultures Feeding". In the end, a title like "The Misshapen Horror" might be enough to give you an idea of what awaits, preparing you as best as possible for the even darker territory of the following "Carrion For Worm" (1991), made with Steve Cowan in place of Whitfield. It's a record that in some ways is even more radical, dominated by the bass's catacomb-like resonance and Bravo's cavernous, guttural voice. Tracks like "Proposing to the Impaled", "Moribound", "Return of the Feasting Witch" and "Vampirism" make the black-grind label anything but a stretch. Later, with All Creatures Great and Eaten (1992), Bravo, aided only by Cowan, crafted her most experimental record. Disturbing and paranoid, the eight tracks packed into roughly twenty minutes transform the sick deathgrind of their origins into an atmospheric, psychedelic celebration of the darkest corners of the human psyche, at times recalling Abruptum tackling the Napalm Death songbook. The horror-ambient of "Aunt Farm", meanwhile, foreshadows some of the directions taken in the second phase of their career, the one of albums like "The Planet Cachexial" and "Harmony Drinks of Me", by then far removed from the metallic extremism of their beginnings.

RIGHTEOUS PIGS – Stress Related (1990; USA)

Before joining Napalm Death, with whom he'd make his debut on 1990's "Harmony Corruption", guitarist Mitch Harris had fronted Righteous Pigs, a band from Las Vegas, Nevada. The original lineup also included second guitarist Stephen Chiatovich, drummer Scott Leonard and singer Joe Caper. A couple of demos paved the way for their 1989 debut, titled "Live and Learn". It was a savage concentrate of thrash-grind, a still somewhat unoriginal effort held back by a production that was too flat. The record you absolutely must track down, though, is Stress Related, recorded with new drummer Alan Strong. Compared to the debut, the leap in quality is staggering, as demonstrated right away by "Eulogy", which slows down and speeds up with a knife between its teeth, rocked by Caper's bestial grunts and propelled by Harris's thrash-death riffing (mostly at mid-tempo). The record picks up where Terrorizer left off, but ends up surpassing that blueprint thanks to more adventurous songwriting, which shows off dynamically alive compositions like "Boundries Unknown" or "Open Wound", perfect examples of tension built through a rational sequence of build-up, release and savage discharge.

The guitar tone is always distorted but overall "catchy", while the rhythm section, though not especially inventive, still manages to provide an elastic, vibrant backdrop. Listening to tracks like "Turmoil" and the title track, then, means sampling the swollen density of a sound that, while keeping in mind the lesson of extreme music's latest outpost, recognizes as essential the need to also produce hooks that are genuinely catchy. In short: brutal but with reason, sharp but with groove. Righteous Pigs' grindcore is, then, more than a genre — it's a state of mind, a non-place where, even within the brief span of a single song (take, for instance, "Overdose", which boasts one of Caper's best vocal performances), the youthful fury of punk-hardcore, the grim intellectualism of death metal and the driving structures of thrash can all converge. Sure, the breakneck bursts that Napalm Death had institutionalized once and for all just two years earlier often return to obliterate everything, but the band wasn't interested in retreading the path already carved out on their debut; rather, they wanted to move along the fringes of a crossover that, among other things, also enabled a shift from lyrics about double penetration, excrement and the like to far sharper ones, addressing themes such as the oppression of capitalist societies ("Crack From The Pressure"), cosmic spaces yet to be explored ("Boundries Unknown"), or the earth's "desert" future ("Ruinous Dump").

ASSÜCK – Anticapital (1992; USA)

One of the most enduring cults of the grindcore saga is undoubtedly that of America's Assück. Formed in 1987 in Saint Petersburg, Florida, out of drummer Rob Proctor and guitarist Steve Heritage's shared passion for the hyperkinetic hardcore of Septic Death, Assück managed, across a handful of EPs and two albums, to forge an entirely original sound. Their early output (the demo "Born Backwards", the EP "Necro Salvation" and the split with O.L.D., the latter being the high point of their first phase), released toward the end of the Eighties, still showed a band overly deferential to the British model. Then, starting with their second EP, "Blindspot", their pitch-black deathgrind began to take shape, hybridizing the Napalm Death blueprint with a cavernous death metal. Every track rages between scorching accelerations and mid-tempo passages where even gore influences surface. That same year, 1992, the band released its most representative work, Anticapital, recorded at Morrisound Studios under the supervision of Scott Burns — names every fan knows to be inextricably tied to the fate of Florida death metal.

From the opening "Socialized Crucifixion" onward, the hallmarks of their sound are on full display: extremely heavy, dirty, dissonant riffing; drums with a booming, stentorian tone (played with tremendous technical skill by that same Rob Proctor who, a few years later, would briefly turn up in the ranks of Discordance Axis); a growl — singer Paul Pavlovich's — murky and diseased, spitting anarchist venom against the Power structure and every form of social conditioning (Your lifesblood has been systematically drained away by those who rule over you. Shouts and screams of freedom fall on deaf ears as our intellect is discredited and displayed on the gallows of our lives). Seventeen tracks in a little over a quarter of an hour: from the devastating assaults of "The Thousand Mile Stare", "October Revolution" and "State To State" to the twisted structures of "Epilogue", passing through the Angkor Wat-style decompositions of "Population Index", the mid-tempo interludes of "Spiritual Manipulation" and the sharply grooved stop-and-go of "Civilization Comes, Civilization Goes". Five years would pass (a stretch that saw a couple of tours both in the States and in Europe) before we'd see the band at work again. It was only in 1997, in fact, that Misery Index came out, their swan song. The sound had darkened, growing slightly more chaotic and less "punk", while the voice of Heritage — who had taken over from the departed Pavlovich — worked in a lower register. Listening to this new quarter-hour of music means repeatedly running into the ghost of Immolation. To be fair, Assück are still very much dealing in grindcore, yet it's impossible to revisit tracks like "QED" (with its unforgettable opening line: Dare to speak of hope and aspiration. These are foul words, manufactured idols and the bait of lemmings) or "Salt Mine" (built on a menacing mid-tempo), just to name the opening pair, without thinking of the moves deployed by the band behind "Dawn of Possession" and "Here In After"; likewise, the resemblance between Pavlovich's growl and that of Ross Dolan leaps out immediately (though, for the record, Pavlovich has always cited Erich Keller of Switzerland's Fear Of God as his main influence). In short, Misery Index is a deathgrind pandemonium, a claustrophobic tour de force carved out with maniacal fury ("Talon Of Dominion", "Sum and Substance") but also capable — as in "Wartorn" — of masterfully balancing rough blast-beat progressions with epic decelerations. A record that's undeniably gripping, yet still doesn't quite surpass its predecessor, both because it's more monolithic and because Heritage's vocal performance is slightly less incisive than the one Pavlovich delivered on Anticapital.

BRUTAL TRUTH – Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses (1992; USA)

In the Eighties, Dan Lilker was one of those musicians perpetually chasing new experiences. In 1981, together with Scott Ian, he had co-founded Anthrax, one of the pivotal bands in the evolution of thrash and speed metal. After recording the album "Fistful Of Metal", Lilker decided to start Nuclear Assault, only to find himself, shortly after, drawn back in by his old friend Scott Ian — again as bassist — for the S.O.D. (Stormtroopers Of Death) project, which gave birth to the legendary "Speak English or Die", one of the classics of crossover thrash. Still, his craving to play increasingly extreme music, combined with the spreading grindcore virus, pushed him to found one of the era's most visceral bands, Brutal Truth, recruiting drummer Scott Lewis and guitarist Brent McCarty. The trio's first effort was the highly compelling demo "The Birth Of Ignorance", but it was only with the arrival of singer Kevin Sharp and the release of their first full-length, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses (on Earache Records), that the band earned a place of honor in the arena of the planet's most violent, uncompromising genre. Destined to remain one of grindcore's cornerstones, the record (which also features a contribution from Exit-13's Bill Yurkiewicz — guest vocals, noise, animal sounds, according to the liner notes) thrives, in any case, on a deep fusion of the Napalm Death blueprint with the rock-solid Floridian school of death metal (Obituary, Death, Morbid Angel), as shown by tracks where slower cadences tend to take over: "Birth Of Ignorance", "Time" and above all "Unjust Compromise", with noise-abyss passages injecting further doses of malaise into a record dominated by apocalyptic scenarios. Naturally, there's no shortage of tracks that floor the accelerator without hesitation ("Stench Of Profit", "Ill-Neglect", "Denial Of Existence", "Walking Corpse", "Regression-Progression", right up to the explosive, blistering "Blockhead" (barely seven seconds long) and "Collateral Damage" (a track that, at just over two seconds, earned a spot in the Guinness Book of Records for the shortest video ever made), dragging the listener into a whirlwind of iconoclastic fury, between blasphemous grunts, guitar strings stretched to the breaking point, and savage thermonuclear detonations underpinned by storms of blast-beats (something the early Kataklysm, among others, would take note of). A true sonic counterpart to the bleak collage that graces the cover. Extreme conditions demand extreme responses, indeed.

When, two years later, the band decided to bring noise, industrial and sludge elements into its sound, the result was Need To Control (with Rich Hoak stepping in for outgoing member Scott Lewis), an album for which the term “post-grind” still fits perfectly. But while the band was staring the future straight in the eye, it essentially ended up circling back to its past. “With that record,” Sharp would say, “we went back to our roots. I grew up on punk, and only got into metal later.” That punk spirit — its banner proudly held up by the cover of the Germs' “Media Blitz” — helps push the death-metal accents of the previous album into the background, making room for a more pronounced grindcore sound filtered through an industrial approach reminiscent of Fear Factory (just listen, for instance, to the striking arrangements of “Mainliner,” “Displacement” or “Godplayer,” the latter even embellished with the sound of a didgeridoo). Something similar had already been hinted at, if in a more muddled way, on the 1993 EP “Perpetual Conversion,” on which the band went as far as blending techno, Ministry and satanic vocalizations (“Perpetual Larceny”). Wedged between the ambient-noise musings of “Ironlung” and “Crawlspace” and the epic atmosphere of “Ordinary Madness,” on Need To Control the band instead shows itself far more confident in the direction it's taking, letting loose the point-blank assaults of “Black Door Mine” (with Bill Yurkiewicz on vocals), “Judgement” and “Brain Trust,” the up-tempo rush of “Turn Face,” and the ear-splitting racket of “Bite The Hand,” all tracks marked by an impeccable production that lets every single instrument and every single note stand out.

On the EP “Kill Trend Suicide” (1996), the band kept broadening the range of its style, showing a more chaotic, “punk” approach (the savage opener “Blind Leading the Blind,” or the raw D-beat of the title track), but also venturing into passages that come across as a bit too “over the top” (“Let's Go to War”) or, under the protective wing of Exit-13, drifting more decisively away from grind orthodoxy (“Hypocrite Invasion,” “Zombie”). Slightly more convincing, on the other hand, is “Sounds of the Animal Kingdom” (1997), a record that mediates between the rock-solid epic quality of Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses (“Vision,” “Soft Mind”), the “post-” framework of Need To Control (“Pork Farm,” “Fisting,” “Sympathy Kiss”) and the furious visceral energy of “Kill Trend Suicide” (“Fucktoy,” “Jemenez Cricket,” “Average People”). Either way, the closing twenty-two minutes of “Prey” (essentially a few-second loop repeated endlessly with mounting intensity) weigh the record down more than it can bear.

IMPETIGO – Horror Of The Zombies (1992; USA)

In 1987, bassist Stevo Dobbins and guitarist Mark Sawickis were two teenagers obsessed with music and horror movies who amused themselves making fanzines. Stevo also played in a band called SGT, but things didn't last long. So Mark got the idea of trying to do something together. That's how Slow Death was born (named after an Accüsed song). Then, following the example set by Carcass, they grabbed a pathology manual and picked a more “accurate” name. They settled on Impetigo, a skin infection. Their first demo, “All We Need Is Cheez,” was recorded live and shows little trace of the gore-grind of their major records, coming across essentially as more or less noisy rock with a playful, parodic streak. It would be the following demo, “Giallo,” that brought them face to face with the true essence of their inspiration.

Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, their full-length debut released in 1990, would make Impetigo the leading act of the American gore-grind scene. Introduced by horror-movie samples (the very title, after all, references Ruggero Deodato's 1977 film of the same name), the tracks on this classic amount to a nonstop parade of disgusting regurgitations, belches and rock 'n' roll riffs tinged with degenerate crust-punk, all steeped in a pestilential atmosphere of death — but a death that cackles and has the time of its life. Yes, indeed... because Ultimo Mondo Cannibale is, in its own way, a fun record, one that translates the gospel of grindcore into something less terrifying, ready-made for kids raised on horror movies and video games, somewhere between a Misfits poster and a Cramps one. It is, in any case, a less cohesive work than Horror Of The Zombies, its follow-up released in 1992. With a more fitting production, this absolute classic of American gore-grind was recorded live in the studio, with a few post-production tweaks to solos and vocals. It's a record that's if anything even more fun, even though the feeling of being smack in the middle of a forest crawling with cannibals is as strong as ever. It opens with the legendary “Boneyard,” galloping along on an irresistible groove (much like “Staph Terrorist” or the exhilarating “Defiling the Grave”). Then “I Work For The Streetcleaner” hams it up like death crashing a booze-soaked party, elbowing its way between black humor and sudden lashes of ultraviolence. More solemn and atmospheric, the programmatic “Wizard Of Gore” alternates doom-thrash weight with sudden blast-beats, while “Mortuaria” could be the perfect soundtrack for a graveyard tour... Truly astonishing, meanwhile, is “Cannibal Ballet,” which crosses a recording of an African tribal ritual with Stevo's horrifically distorted voice reciting a poem an old friend of his had sent him just days before. The band's love for Ruggero Deodato's film returns in “Trap Them And Kill Them,” whose lyrics reference his controversial “Cannibal Holocaust.” Closing things out, “Breakfast At The Manchester Morgue (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie...)” slows down and stretches out, unwinding into a lysergic solo that leads us by the hand toward our own grave.

Even though it leans more toward death metal, Horror Of The Zombies is, in this writer's opinion, the definitive statement of the Impetigo sound, a record that would have an enormous influence on countless bands within the gore universe (one for all: Japan's Catasexual Urge Motivation).

ANAL CUNT – Morbid Florist (1993; USA)

For as long as he was with us (until June 11, 2011), Seth Putnam never stopped being, at bottom, an anarchist, ferociously pissed off at the world, at technology, at human barbarity, at stupidity; he never stopped going after Jews, gay people, poor people, and so on. With him, though, it was genuinely hard to tell where seriousness ended and the joke began. Maybe he was messing with people; maybe he wasn't. Or maybe a bit of both. Either way, with his band Anal Cunt (also known as AxCx or A.C.), the man from Boston (born there in 1968) brought a healthy dose of chaos to a grindcore scene that was already, by its very nature, subversive and frowned upon by rock's respectable crowd.

After lending his “talents” to forgettable thrash-metal outfits like Executioner and Satan's Warriors, in 1988 Seth decided it was time to do something bolder and more provocative. First off, he chose the most offensive, stupid name imaginable: Anal Cunt. He then got in touch with guitarist Mike Mahan and drummer Tim Morse and started racking his brain over a mishmash of noise and hardcore that was, to put it mildly, rough around the edges. The demos that followed one after another bear witness to a ramshackle, blistering sound, crammed into microscopic tracks that resemble outright premature ejaculations. As for the recording quality, the less said the better... After all, isn't it true that when Seth called Tim Morse to convince him to play with him, he told him point blank: “We're gonna play noise. No songs”? And noise it was, at least at first. Little by little, though, the seed of grindcore began to take root within that chaos, paradoxically making their music more intelligible (take that definition with a huge grain of salt!) and helping spread that sound overseas too, given that many of the bands looking to Napalm Death, rather than drawing inspiration from the English band's first two seminal records (still little known in the US at the time), were instead following the more death-metal-oriented variant found on a far less inspired but better-known record, “Harmony Corruption.” The Anal Cunt sound came to be labeled “noisecore,” “noisegore” or “noisegrind,” something Giulio of our own Cripple Bastards described as “the most anti-musical and nihilistic face of extreme music of those years,” a genre also embodied by England's Sore Throat (I'm obviously thinking of the blunt-force extremism of Disgrace to the Corpse of Sid) and Switzerland's Fear Of God (go back and listen to their self-titled EP from 1988, just to draw a parallel between Erich Keller's inhuman screams and Seth's).

Precisely to set the record straight, after the utterly wrecked “88 Songs E.P.” (1989), in 1990 the band produced one of the maddest, most extreme experiments in the history of “rock” (?), 5643 Songs E.P. Here's the story: between September 23 and 24, 1989, Seth and sound engineer Marc Lindhal decided, using a 16-track recorder, to record a different song on each track. They then had all sixteen tracks play simultaneously, once, twice, three times, and so on, layering everything until they achieved an unprecedented sonic inferno, an electric tornado slapped around by screams and subhuman grunts, a noisecore bloodbath that would go on to become an outright cult object. Not long after, the band even allowed itself the luxury of turning down Earache Records' offer to reissue the EP for the European market. Then, in 1991, came the first ever acoustic (!) noisecore record, “Unplugged EP.” But the Anal Cunt record that matters most here is the one that began taking shape with the EP Morbid Florist, released at a point when Seth had by then decided to bring some order to all that mess. There were, in any case, also reasons tied to the distribution of their material: the band toured often, but many of their releases had by then sold out. So the idea was to find better distribution through a deal with a heavyweight label. There were two options: Earache and Relapse. Earache, however, proposed using the new material as the A-side of their first proper album, but the band didn't yet feel ready for such a step, so they decided to consider Relapse's offer instead. Morbid Florist (whose tracks were, for the first time, lightly touched up with overdubs) came out at the end of September 1993, with a black-and-white cover featuring a photo of Pete Shelley sporting an upside-down cross tattooed on his forehead. The photo had been taken from the cover of “Homosapien,” the second record by the former Buzzcocks member, and Seth picked it because, in his own words, “He was the gayest looking person I could find in my record collection that day.”

With John Kozik on guitar, the trio packs what is probably its single most important legacy into these seventeen and a half minutes, turning grindcore into a theater of the absurd where every element is pushed to the point of the utterly unbelievable. The annihilating, schizophrenic explosiveness of tracks like “Some Songs,” “Chump Change,” “Siege” (which, in a mere twenty-eight seconds, delivers a medley of three songs by the band responsible for the landmark “Drop Dead”), “Even More Songs” or “Morrissey” (the day before recording, Seth had gone to a concert by the former Smiths frontman and decided to use that as a title...) rests on inhuman screams, guitar swarms that sound like chainsaws gone berserk, and whirlwind blast-beats that end up amounting to full-on carpet bombing. The raw intensity of “Song #5,” meanwhile, veers toward monolithic sludge-doom fits of rage, while “Unbelievable” lays waste to the 1990 EMF classic (“that fxcking gay song by E.M.F.,” naturally!) with a regurgitation of bile and spit mixed with blood. These aren't songs, they're shards of misanthropy raised to the nth power, as confirmed too by the Rapeman nod pushed to its most extreme consequences on “Song #6.” A few more intelligible riffs can be heard in the otherwise frantic weave of “Grateful Dead” (no, it has nothing to do with the storied Californian band!) and in “Radio Hit.”

After signing to Earache, the band finally recorded a proper album, but the result (“Everyone Should Be Killed”) wasn't exactly thrilling. Only in 1997 did another interesting move come along, thanks to I Like When You Die, on which their noise-drenched grindcore takes on... um... “classic” overtones, gravitating around relatively more recognizable structures. The album — whose title was originally meant to be “You're Gay,” complete with a mirror on the cover (yes, Seth really was a total joker...) — spreads a whopping 52 tracks across barely forty-two minutes of music, steamrolling through insults and assorted grievances, scattering flashes of black humor along with plenty of cheap irony. Backed by Josh Martinalla on guitar and Nate Linehan on drums, Seth delivers here one of the most convincing and devastating (and therefore hilarious!) performances of his career, tearing through apocalypse-tracks/blasphemy-tracks with (note the sheer quality of these titles!) “You've Got No Friends,” “You Keep A Diary” (one of their absolute peaks (?)), “You've Got A Cancer,” “You Are An Interior Decorator,” “You Look Adopted,” “You Kid Is Deformed,” “Ha Ha Your Wife Left You,” “Your Favorite Band Is Supertramp,” and, once again, “You Keep A Diary” and “You're In Coma.” By the end of the record, you don't know whether to smile or grab an axe. When in doubt, just hit repeat.

BRUJERIA – Matando Güeros (1993; Mexico)

Before the arrival of Brujeria, grindcore hadn't managed to take much root in Central America, having to contend with far more established genres like thrash and death metal. Even so, it was above all in Mexico, toward the end of the 1980s, that the new sonic monster codified by Napalm Death and Carcass (bands whose music circulated thanks largely to tape-trading) began taking its first steps among the metaleros, who were also being stirred up by homegrown bands like Anarchus (whose “Final Fall of the Gods” had a massive impact on the local scene) and the early Cenotaph. The fuse that set off the bomb of Mexican and Central American grindcore was lit by Brujeria, a band formed in 1989 between California and Tijuana with the intent of playing a mix of grind and death metal for “la raza” — for their own people, in other words — a choice that also explains their decision to sing only in Spanish.

The first offspring of what was initially a five-piece led by one Dino Cazeres (codename Asesino), who around the same time also helped found Fear Factory, was called “¡Demoniaco!” and leaned on hefty grooves and a horrifically filtered voice (“Papa Capado” is the standout moment). From the very start, the band's members tended to hide their identities, using pseudonyms and performing disguised as “drug lords” on the run from FBI agents. In the meantime, the lineup changed often, and over time they found themselves collaborating, more or less steadily, with Cazeres, Jello Biafra (whose Alternative Tentacles label would release their second EP “¡Machetazos!” and the single “El patron”), Billy Gould of Faith No More, Shane Embury of Napalm Death, Nicholas Barker of Cradle Of Filth, and many other musicians from the international metal scene. The record that turned them into classics of the most blasphemous, disturbing deathgrind is Matando Güeros (1993), fronted by a cover that says it all (that severed head would go on to become their mascot, affectionately nicknamed Coco Loco). It's a record that takes the Napalm Death sound and slows it down into an Impetigo-level groove-grind, but one that's more claustrophobic and marked by grinding guitars as well as a simple but effective rhythm section. A groove-grind further decorated with lyrics (satanism, drugs and sex being their obsessions) balanced between revolutionary spirit and savage irony. Alongside moments that try to directly recapture the annihilating pathos of records like Scum or From Enslavement To Obliteration (“Santa Lucia,” “Greñudos Locos,” “Seis Seis Seis,” “Cruza la Frontera”) and others that fly the flag of horror-metal (“Narcos-satánicos,” “Verga Del Brujo/Estan Chingados,” “Castigo del Brujo”), or thrash-death left to settle into a noise-induced vertigo (the instrumental “Chinga Tu Madre”), or again tracks built on altered tones and stunning dissonance (the demonic anti-gay invective of “Culeros” and, above all, a “Molestando Ninos Muertos” boasting some remarkable guitar work), there are also passages built around noticeably catchier structures, like those of the storied title track, destined to remain their favorite child.

Less grindcore and more death metal, hardcore and thrash on the follow-up “Raza Odiada” (1995), a record loaded with groove and even more politically charged (on the invective against Republican senator Pete Wilson, a staunch opponent of illegal immigration, the mic is handled by Jello Biafra: Pito Wilson – El rey de racistas / Pito Wilson – Sera presidente / Pito Wilson – Te quiere ver muerto / Pito Wilson – El cristo de ódio).

DEAD INFECTION – Surgical Disembowelment (1993; Poland)

After the release of Reek Of Putrefaction by Carcass, the goregrind virus spread across Europe thanks to a large group of bands that drew inspiration, more or less openly, from the English masters. Among the leading names of that movement of followers of the "stench of putrefaction" cult were the Swedish Regurgitate ("Effortless Regurgitation of Bright Red Blood"; 1994) and Necrony ("Pathological Performances"), the Finnish Xysma (the 1990 Ep "Above the Mind of Morbidity"), the German Gut (the "disgusting" "Odour Of Torture"; 1995), the Czech Pathologist ("Putrefactive & Cadaverous Odes About Necroticism"; 1992), the Spanish Haemorrhage, with a whole string of split-albums, the Dutch Last Days Of Humanity (whom we'll talk about later) and the Polish Dead Infection. It's precisely the exploits of the latter that are worth retracing, since with Surgical Disembowelment (1993) they managed to deliver one of the finest examples of "classic" goregrind. But let's take things one step at a time.

At the end of the Eighties, in Białystok, in north-eastern Poland, Fatal Error were active, a band whose rapid evolution would give birth to Dead Infection. Its members were guitarists Tocha and Mały, drummer Cyjan and bassist-vocalist Kelner. In June '90, in Poznań, they played their first gig, and a year later released the tape "World Full Of Remains", whose poor audio quality only amplifies the sense of disorientation conveyed by the hyper-guttural vocals and the guitars turned into a harsh-noise stream. Things would go better with the other tape, "Start Human Slaughter", better produced and loaded with groove, in keeping with the Impetigo echoes that, through the practice of tape trading (the exchange of recorded cassettes among enthusiasts), arrived from across the ocean. Tracks like the massive title track, a "Tribe of Glutinous Tissue" saturated with doom echoes, the elastic cadences of "World Full Of Remains" and the granite-like ones of "Peritonitis" nonetheless point to a sound still rich in death-metal influences. Influences that, on the debut Surgical Disembowelment, wouldn't be entirely abandoned, but would definitely take a back seat, making room for one of the most recognizable sounds in goregrind.

The opener "Maggots In Your Flesh" boasts one of the most memorable openings in the genre: a circular riff from the (heavily down-tuned) guitars on the left channel; the drums entering on the right channel, starting to lay down an epic mid-tempo, while Kelner spreads his curses. It's a putrid, sickly vision (bye bye, Carcass!), but rarely has a vision of this kind been so thrilling: Hideous maggots in your flesh / Your rancid guts are a maggot's meal. / Stinking flesh, / Rotten brain, Blue insides, / Putrid lein. / Maggots go out from your throat, / When you cough up yellow pus. In "Torsions", paroxysmal runs alternate with colossal slowdowns and lightning-fast solos. "Undergo An Operation" is traumatized by an increasingly inhuman vocal timbre, "Xenomorph" boasts a more technical riff, while the groove becomes even sturdier on "After An Accident" and "Deformed Creatures". For many fans, though, their most representative record is actually the following "A Chapter Of Accidents", released two years later. It's a work that presents some significant novelties: 1) instead of continuing along the "pathological" furrow of previous releases, the lyrics sketch out small tales of everyday horror; 2) Kelner's voice is heavily distorted through the use of a pedal distortion unit, to the point of resembling, as someone put it, the bark of a dog guarding the gates of hell... 3) Cyjan's drumming is more dynamic, resulting in a whirling succession of measured patterns and oppressive blast-beats. All that said, however, it's impossible not to notice that the tracks tend to repeat pretty much the same blueprint, ending up a bit tedious over the long haul.

DISRUPT – Unrest (1994; USA)

At a certain point during the Nineties, the echo of the crust-punk (a radicalization of hardcore and anarcho-punk) of Discharge, Extreme Noise Terror, Crude SS, Mob 47 and Doom made itself strongly felt across the States.

Disrupt were, together with fellow countrymen Nausea, Destroy!, Deformed Conscience and Dropdead, one of the most responsive bands in capturing the excitement that those sounds conveyed. The band from Lynn, Massachusetts, had nonetheless also fallen under the spell of grindcore, so that, after a very long series of Eps and split-albums, it came naturally to them to start playing what would later be called crustgrind. Anarchists to the core, Disrupt were led by two vocalists, Jay Stiles and Pete Kamarinos, who had started the project in 1987. But in Lynn, as in nearby Boston, there wasn't much room for their music, so much so that, if they wanted to play live, more often than not they had to travel to New York.

The first and only full-length, that Unrest which still fuels its legend to this day, only hit stores in 1994, by which time the band's split-up had already been announced and all its members were looking for other pursuits. Nevertheless, across thirty tracks and fifty minutes, this record says everything there is to know about the Disrupt sound: whirlwind guitars riffing in perfect crust-punk style, deranged drums slamming between D-beat and blast-beat, voices dueling between witchy screams (including female ones, courtesy of Alyssa Murry) and bestial howls, and, last but not least, the inevitable grind jolts, naturally erratic and without warning. And yet, behind the huge racket, and despite moments that seem intent on preserving intact the annihilating appeal of as-fast-and-extreme-as-possible (among others, "Tortured In Entirety", "Religion Is A Fraud", "We Stand Corrected", the unstoppable rage of "Same Old Shit", "Critics" and "Deprived"), there lurks a not inconsiderable degree of catchiness, a compelling melodic charge that could even evoke Pegboy (after all, the first few seconds of the opening "Domestic Prison" must mean something...) and that elsewhere also brings to mind the sweeping progressions of Hüsker Dü (is it a hallucination, or does the intro of "Smash Divisions" seem to quote that of "Broken Home, Broken Heart"?).

KATAKLYSM – Sorcery (1995; Canada)

The earliest incarnation of Kataklysm remains, to this day, one of the most violent and intelligent forces in the "extreme" universe, capable of delivering, on their debut album, an incredibly ferocious and creative version of deathgrind. Formed in 1991 in Montreal, Quebec, the band had its most lethal weapons in drummer Max Duhamel and, above all, in vocalist Sylvain Houde. The former was responsible for drumming that was nothing short of devastating, loaded with blast-beats so fast and forceful that they earned the description "northern hyperblast". Houde, on the other hand, was the charismatic leader, a cult figure capable of inhuman performances (look something up on YouTube and let me know!) and the author of lyrics heavily influenced by mystical themes and the mythology of H. P. Lovecraft. After he left in 1996, following the release of "Temple of Knowledge (Kataklysm Part III)" (a record that let the band's death-metal soul emerge more decisively, giving us some of the most memorable tracks of that genre), his trail has gone practically cold (the last, never-confirmed sighting had him working as a DJ in a Montreal club!), but the silence surrounding his figure is offset, among insiders, by a respect and veneration that show no signs of fading, so much so that quite a few consider him among the greatest, if not the greatest, vocalist in extreme metal (this writer is among the staunchest supporters of that view). Suffice it to say that, without him, Kataklysm — starting with the rather modest "Victims of This Fallen World", which tried to ape Fear Factory — ended up flattening out into increasingly generic solutions, light years away from the fiery, wholly original pages written with that frontman who resembled some deranged Christ.

Before reaching their actual debut, the band had gone through the release of a few demos and Eps. The first, "The Death Gate Cycle of Reincarnation" (1992; inspired by the "Necronomicon"), was recorded with drummer Ariel Saied and presented an already sturdy but still unripe sound, laid out across three panels: the progressive deathgrind of "Frozen in Time", torn open by the ultraviolet solos of Jean-François Dagenais' guitar and tortured by Houde's monstrous pipes; the melodic runs of "Mystical Plane of Evil"; and the Sabbath-esque weaves with melodic shades of "Shrine Of Life". Having recruited Duhamel, the band (rounded out by bassist of Italian descent Maurizio Iacono) produced a far more interesting "The Vortex of Resurrection", containing primordial versions of three tracks that would later end up on their first album. That same year, '93, after signing to Nuclear Blast, came "The Mystical Gate of Reincarnation", i.e. a reissue of the first demo with the addition of a bonus track... and what a bonus track! "The Orb of Uncreation" is, in fact, one of the band's greatest masterpieces, a superhuman deathgrind assault that leaves you stunned by its animal force. It's the worthy prelude to the debut, Sorcery, set for release in February 1995.

Moving seamlessly between grind and death, more or less controlled chaos and manic accelerations, bursts of madness and animalistic grunts, "Sorcery (Kataklysm Part II)" already says everything about a band that has by now reached an impressive degree of maturity. Throughout the record, the sound is an impenetrable yet elastic wall of distortion, drum-pounding and acid froth. Something never heard before, and still unmatched today. Kataklysm prop up the deathgrind superstructure with Sabbath-like lineage, echoes of the Gothenburg sound (especially early At The Gates, as shown by Dagenais' work on the chord progressions), and brutal implosions in which the drums unleash some of the most devastating blast-beats ever recorded. On "Mould in a Breed (Chapter I, Bestial Propagation)", Houde is a truly vicious ogre who slashes the track open in several places, resolving growls, screams and grunts into an annihilating vocal tour de force, while the track climbs in stages over mechanics already reminiscent of Monstrosity-era "Millennium". The thrash epic acts as a prelude to "Whirlwind of Withered Blossoms (Chapter II, Forgotten Ancestors)", whose hallucinated runs sound like a burlier, more psychedelic Napalm Death. The epically unfolding riff of "Feeling the Neverworld (Chapter III, An Infinite Transmigration)" immediately dissolves into yet another (ir)rational melee, and at this point special mention should also go to Dagenais, whose guitar rails, howls, outrages, caresses and duly stabs these chameleonic sonic monoliths, carving melodic refrains into steel ("Elder God", with Houde's voice managing to cover a full four registers within two lightning-fast lines!) and drawing instrumental boundaries where boundaries seem impossible, such is the ferocity with which the band tears into the material ("Garden of Dreams (Chapter I, Supernatural Appearance)"; the "mathematical" grindcore of "Once... Upon Possession (Chapter II, Legacy of Both Lores)", the psychic bombardments of "Dead Zygote"). The lyrics of this last track might just give us a clue as to Houde's state of mind during the recordings: As the Sun's Rays, Destroy... The stained glasses... / I scream... VICTORY... / When I run to bash... The front doors... / ..INFINITY. / Light beams of... / Wonderful Fire! / ... Burns Me. / Soul freed! Happiness avenged Me... After so much devastation, the first few minutes of the progressive-thrash instrumental "World of Treason (Instrumental Vibrations)" — which evokes Metallica — glide like a kite over the rubble of a now-abandoned city.

By delving into the more dramatic and visionary side of deathgrind, Sorcery established a fundamental paradigm for the genre's future development. Still, without a voice this incredible, it's hard to hope to do any better.

CATASEXUAL URGE MOTIVATION – The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders (1996; Giappone)

Catasexual Urge Motivation gave life to an original synthesis of goregrind, industrial, death-metal and doom that reached full fruition across the twenty-two tracks of The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders, a record in which their passion for serial killers triumphed without mincing words (a passion that, incidentally, the moniker already hinted at, given that its meaning refers to the violent urge to sexually possess someone — women especially — and that its acronym, C.U.M., stands for semen...). The project (one of the earliest examples of cybergrind) took shape in 1992 in Tokyo thanks to the Kanai brothers (Tomoaki and Ujin). Unable to find a drummer worth the name, the two decided to use a drum machine, affectionately nicknamed Cyber EMF. Meanwhile, while Tomoaki (who went by Sadochist Ejaculata) took care of the music, Ujin (Sadochist Spermata to his friends) handled the lyrics, the artwork and, let's say, the ideological side of things. It was only in 1996 that a foreign label, the German Deliria Productions, took an interest in them, inviting them to put out a record. The two had already recorded a few 7"s, tapes and demos and thought of reusing that old material, but Deliria also pushed for new, unreleased material to be produced, just to have a good sixty minutes of music to put on record.

The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders sounds as if Impetigo (paid homage to here with a mighty cover of "Defiling the Grave") had decided to team up with Godflesh: a funereal, mostly mid-tempo goregrind made of tectonic distortions (if it also brings to mind the very earliest Drogheda, give me a shout!), subhuman grunts, industrial beats and danceable accents, whose manifesto is well represented precisely by the opening "Mutilation, Rape And Serial Murder As Modern Metaphor", a track that, if you manage not to get hypnotized by its deathly atmosphere, could even be called catchy... While the drum machine is the pivot of every sonic structure, it's the guitar, with its pestilential tone, that dominates the scene, riffing away sick and slimy, like a chainsaw soaked in clotted blood enacting the mimicry of a sadistic ritual. The following "Supraliminal Psychosadistic Motivation" highlights, instead, another fundamental feature of the record: the layering of voices, or perhaps it would be better to say of merciless death-rattles, that sketch out an ever more disgusting and oppressive web, the perfect sonic metaphor for tracks whose titles leave no doubt about the violent and immoral (!) imagery driving the two Japanese brothers: the geometric "I Have a Good Knife for Penetration", the "speculative" framework of "Philosophical Diary of Habitual Murder" and "Murder Is Better Than Birth", the hammering "Multiple Parasexuality Disorder" (which, given its rock'n'roll structure, would have appealed to Suicide, had they only been able to foresee cyber-goregrind too, back in that distant 1977), the elastic "Murder Is Art, Accepted by Many Artists" or the feverish "Vivid Stains in Hematomania's Delirium".

In every track, murder is always portrayed as a direct counterpart to the sexual act, since a knife or a gun are nothing but extensions of the killer's own body: The knife is my hand / The gun is my phallus, they sing in "I Am As Beautiful As I Have Killed". Their fascination with serial killers leads them all the way to paying explicit tribute to one of them, as happens in "He Shot Her Down and Ate Her Flesh...", where they extol Issei Sagawa, the student who in 1981, in Paris, killed a female university friend, abused her corpse and then ate parts of it. It's a fascination rooted in a kind of philosophical premise: the only truly free man – as "Mass Murder, the Only Way to Become God" suggests – must be conscious of his own animal instincts, beyond good and evil. This same premise would also guide them through the Vampiric Motives venture, which in 2000 resulted in a split with Poland's Neuropathia, still steeped in hatred and obscene malice. In 2003, Razorback Records would release "Nekronicle", a compilation of tracks drawn from demos, 7" splits and a few unreleased songs.

CLOTTED SYMMETRIC SEXUAL ORGAN – Nagrö Läuxes VIII (1996; Japan)

Psychedelic-sludge-grind? A bizarre oddity that could only come from Japan, specifically from Tokyo, where in 1993 singer Gorepper 5, guitarist Super A.F.P., bassist Bizarre Taitei and drummer Popcorn (average age, 16 and a half), after some thrash-metal and death-metal experience, decided to try their hand at grindcore. Thus were born Clotted Symmetric Sexual Organ (also known by the acronym C.S.S.O.), a band influenced by Sixties and Seventies psychedelia, by rock'n'roll (they often used the label "grind'n'roll" to describe their sound) and by manga. Their name only began circulating among fans in 1996, the year Nagrö Läuxes VIII was released, an album that approaches grindcore with the same playful, anarchic spirit as Exit-13, producing a thoroughly unorthodox, wired and moderately experimental sound. Every track is thrown off balance by eccentric choices ranging from cartoonish runs ("Daddy's Home") to bizarre percussive inserts ("256", "Very Very Blue Belly", "Psycho 65"), through bursts of bile amid an atmosphere of generalized madness ("Kyoshikanga", "Rolling The Zen", "Penisnatchter"), zombie-party music ("Spartan"), surreal micro-interludes ("Bara Bara Man"), 16-bit music ("The Song Without Rice") and japanoise ("A Trigonometrical of Mokuba"). Their career would continue with several splits, including one with Milan's Nuclear Devastation (purveyors of apocalyptic goregrind) and America's Total Fucking Destruction (poised between crust and grind), on which the four Japanese musicians pushed their eccentric character to even greater extremes, mixing electro binges, playful jams and psycho-noise dissertations. Then, on "Are You Excrements?", they would give themselves over to a whirlwind of heavy psychedelia tinged with noise, madness and, of course, grindcore.

HEMDALE / EXHUMED – In The Name Of Gore (1996; USA)

Among the countless split albums of the grind epic, a place of real significance is deserved by this In The Name Of Gore, the title under which America's Hemdale and Exhumed decided to join forces in the name of their shared passion for that rotten, claustrophobic sound whose glorious origin lay with Carcass. Released on Visceral Productions, this split had the merit of best defining the coordinates of American gore, helping to boost its standing among fans of the most extreme music.

Hemdale hailed from Mentor, Ohio, where they had formed in 1993 and arrived at this appointment with history already carrying, besides a couple of EPs, a split album shared with Exit-13, one of the favourite bands of bassist/singer Matthew J. Rositano and drummer Craig Rowe (rounding out the trio was guitarist Mike Lehmann). At first their sound leaned more toward death-metal, before gradually sliding further and further into grindcore territory. Exhumed, on the other hand, had a few more years of experience under their belt, having been born in 1990, when leader Matt Harvey (guitar and vocals) was just 15 and obsessed, besides the Liverpool masters, with Impetigo, Repulsion, Terrorizer and Entombed. By the time they recorded the tracks for In The Name Of Gore, the band was rounded out by bassist Ross Sublett, second guitarist Derrel Houdashelt and drummer Col Jones.

Opening the dance is Hemdale, with a "Delicious Gory Fun" that is perfect gore butchery, in which venomous guitars, razor-sharp screams and catacomb-deep growls (Rositano shifts effortlessly from psychotic delirium to zombie death-rattle) stand out alongside the dry snap of the snare drum. Across their thirteen compositions, Hemdale prove themselves smarter than the vast majority of bands operating in the goregrind orbit, thanks to more dramatic songwriting that, in some respects, already looks ahead to the future. Still, it's Exhumed who really call the shots, tearing out of the gate with a "Horrendous Member Dismemberment" that runs through dizzying accelerations driven by blistering solos in the heavy metal orbit, death-oriented mid-tempos (an influence reaffirmed, at the close, by their cover of Possessed) and animalistic grunts exhaled at breakneck speed. Keeping their tracks consistently "enjoyable" (even when the gore element turns more extreme – "Necrovores: Decomposing", "Torso", "Masochistic Copromania", the devastating "Disinterred, Digested, and Debauched") is a healthy injection of groove (even at death'n'roll tempo, when called for – see "Bone Fucker" or "The Naked and the Dead") and swift melodic passages that create a wholesome sense of disorientation (take, for instance, those in "Septicemia (Festering Sphinctral Malignancy, Part 2)"). In the years that followed, the band would refine their mix of goregrind and death-metal on albums such as "Gore Metal", "Slaughtercult" (another high point of their career) and "Anatomy Is Destiny".

HUMAN REMAINS – Using Sickness As A Hero (1996; USA)

Despite a scant discography, Human Remains (from Hazlet, New Jersey) remain one of the most innovative bands in extreme metal. Originally influenced by Ripping Corpse, who forged an incredibly powerful blend of death, thrash and classic hardcore, this combo would go on to deliver some of the most adventurous chapters in deathgrind, exerting no small influence on Discordance Axis too, the band that drummer Dave Witte would later join.

The first incarnation of the band formed in 1989, but it was only a year later that the quintet – completed, besides the aforementioned Witte, by Teddy Patterson III (bass – later replaced by William Carl Black), Steve Procopio (guitar), Jim Baglino (guitar) and Paul Miller (vocals) – recorded a first demo that, despite being weighed down by a rather flat production, already showed substantial songwriting chops. The tracks, in fact, didn't just juxtapose death riffage, sudden accelerations, devastating blast-beats and psychotic screaming, but tended to synthesize the players' varied stylistic inclinations into a surreal mix of technical prowess and ecstatic brutality. The grindcore matrix (most evident within the convulsive folds of a track like "Imagine") is the backdrop against which the band projects a musical vision that, given its geometric edge, even seems to push toward mathcore solutions (indeed, quite a few industry observers point to our heroes as the architects of one of the most important premonitions of the The Dillinger Escape Plan adventure). Two years later, a second demo clarified their intentions further, with even more experimental tracks: the twisted Righteous Pigs of "Chemical Life", the delirious progressive grind of "Fictitiously Vivid", the dramatic visceral quality of "Of The Same Flesh" and the sulphurous Pestilence of "Sight Beyond Sickness". "Admirations Most Deep and Foul", released the same year, delivered three more essential moments: a "Mechanical" that, true to its title, turns their music into a perfect mechanism in which violence and reason go head to head; a "Fragrance Of Souls" that makes Morbid Angel sound remarkably like a Nuclear Death nightmare; and the thrash-grind horror of "Symptoms Of The New Society".

These are works as scant in running time as they are stylistically futuristic. The triumph of their inspiration, however, is found in the only genuinely official EP of their career. It's 1996, and Relapse Records can't resist releasing that Using Sickness As A Hero, which definitively carves the name Human Remains into the history of the most evolved, most arty deathgrind. Even on a purely instrumental level, this is the quintet's most substantial statement: Miller's passionate screaming (a cross between Martin Van Drunen and Scott Ruth) is the emotional abyss that tries to condense all the explosiveness of a tormented music into a single point; the rigorous but alienated guitar work of Procopio and Baglino gives voice to a latent anguish, which emerges in its full devastating force in the most chaotic moments, when Witte's drumming – elsewhere powerful but essentially "recognizable" – turns the blast-beat into a genuinely cathartic experience. Rounding out the picture is Black's distorted bass, the last handhold in a sound riddled with spasmodic tension. Opening the record, "Weeding Out the Thorns" maps out the band's range, advancing through virulent bursts, flashes of lucid despair, dissonance and noise maximalism. "Waste Of Time" latches onto your ears with its unbearable ferocity, made of jagged guitar figures and devastating blast-beats propagating with geometric precision. The jagged structures of "Rote" (with superb guitar abstractions!), "Swollen" and "Human" are balanced out by the relatively sing-song phrasing of "Chewed Up and Spit Out", a track in which their obsession with Rush comes through like a revelation.

Unfortunately, the band would never get another chance to prove themselves. "By that point," Witte would recall, "we were already tired of what we were doing. Each of us wanted to move in different directions, so we started to feel the strain of playing together. So we decided to pull the plug and follow our own paths."

The name Human Remains would resurface forcefully in 2002, when Relapse Records itself gathered all the material the band had produced into the compilation Where Were You When which, needless to say, comes absolutely recommended!

MÖRSER – Two Hours To Doom (1997; Germany)

You look at the cover and immediately think of a black-metal record. Yet in Two Hours To Doom by Germany's Mörser, there's practically nothing black-metal about it at all. What you get instead is what was known, around the mid-Nineties, as the "bremen style" or "per koro sound" – a thoroughly bastardized cross between European-style screamo and American metallic hardcore, genres that Mörser ended up embracing with visceral dedication. The result is one of the most explosive and experimental works of European grindcore in the second half of the Nineties. Then again, a band boasting two bassists and no fewer than four singers (on top of a guitar and drums), was bound to come up with something interesting.

At the start, back in 1995 in Bremen, this octet was fascinated by hardcore (Merel, Acme and Rohrschack above all), but over time they also began drawing on metal material (Pantera, Bolt Thrower), before eventually falling head over heels for Carcass. It was this last band that pushed them decisively toward a more aggressive style, one that would already bear fully ripe fruit on their debut Two Hours To Doom, released in 1997 on Per Koro Records. "At the start," recalls Denny, one of the singers, "our intention was to make the most fearsome, chaotic record ever. So we recruited all the friends who shared our same musical passions and started rehearsing. Maybe on that first record we weren't playing perfectly yet, but I can say that stuff was exactly what we wanted to do. It was pure stuff."

Playing flawlessly? I'm not sure what that would even mean, but the more you sync up with these twenty-two tracks, the more perfection starts to feel like a relative concept. Whether we're talking about "pure" stuff or inspired stuff, that much is beyond dispute. Just as it seems clear to me that the rhythm section is one of the tightest and most versatile in the whole grindcore-contamination field, matched by a guitar that's razor-sharp, rough, noisy or ambiguously melodic depending on the moment. The upshot of these alchemies – you can hear it from the very first seconds of “Kirchgang” – is a sound that uses the grindcore superstructure to synthesize screamo practice, death-metal growl, postcore architecture and punk epic, reserving the most cathartic release for its blast-beat-driven, vocal-and-instrumental-paroxysm flashpoints (the thermonuclear blast of “Löffle Mich, Herr Assessor”, the electrostatic discharges of “Beschwerde” or those of “Parapsychopath”, where they mix with grim Fear Factory-style scansion, the emotional siege of “Drei Säcke Voll Gold” and that of “79 min. hölle”, introduced by the riff from Carcass's “Corporal Jigsore Quandary”). Against the backdrop of these various instrumental scuffles, the vocals chase or square off against each other in an increasingly explosive game of tension, alternating between piercing shrieks that echo the guitar's whirling figures and miasmic growls that let an anguished stench of death seep through the bass lines. Every so often, brief melodic figures push through, and when they're not squaring off against raw chasms of torment (“Nicht Im Film”) or serving as a prelude to ruinous digressions (“Vier Wände”), they emerge from uncontrolled blast-beat eruptions and electrical cataclysms (“Hohe Schule”), or resolve into desolate arpeggios that end up conjuring menacing apotheoses of sheer terror (“Doom (The Divine Gift)”). Elsewhere, if the jazzy bass-drums exchanges of “Mörser”, or the rapid-fire ones of “L. A. (Venice Beach 6 P. M.)”, prove – as if it were still necessary – an above-average level of instrumental skill, the anthemic abrasions of “Armageddon Rise” and “Lichtschalter” shed light on the more straightforwardly gripping side of a music that, in the closing, instrumental title track, even hints at a “post-” variant of their art.

This important work was followed by a thoroughly dignified split album with The Swarm aka Knee Deep in the Dead (a powerhouse Canadian powerviolence/hardcore act), the rock-solid deathgrind of “10,000 Bad Guys Dead” (with songs that average longer but are overall less creative) and then, after a nine-year hiatus, the wholly forgettable “1st Class Suicide”.

NASUM – Inhale/Exhale (1998; Sweden)

Remember the 2004 tsunami, the one that slammed into the coasts of Thailand, killing thousands upon thousands of people? Well, one of the victims was named Mieszko Talarczyk, guitarist and singer of Nasum. After that tragic event, the band from Örebro, a town in southern Sweden, ended their run after a career spanning more than a decade. The band had actually formed in 1992 out of the passion of guitarist Anders Jakobson and drummer/singer Rickard Alriksson, on the back of their experience with Necrony. Mieszko Talarczyk joined the two a few weeks later, ready to lend his contribution to what would become, for many, the most important grindcore outfit at the turn of the millennium. Their fame began to grow enormously following the release of their debut album, Inhale/Exhale, a record that, despite not always being memorable in terms of pure creativity, ended up becoming a blueprint for what grindcore would turn into just a few years later: a genre finally able to draw in a wider audience, despite an ever-increasing level of brutality.

Nasum's records are like sturdy jolts of adrenaline, delivered through songs that stay intense throughout, even when the band eases off the pressure to lean on death-metal mid-tempos or crust-punk perversions. Every one of their albums has its own slice of fans ready to swear that yes, that one right there is the band's masterpiece. However you want to look at it, I think it's undeniable that the above-mentioned debut, released in 1998 on Relapse Records, is a hugely important work because, beyond having inspired a host of bands, it captures a sound that, while looking to the genre's masters (Napalm Death and Carcass above all) without turning its nose up at Scandinavian hardcore solutions, also manages to look ahead to the future, presenting itself in a deliberately modern guise thanks to excellent production, scrupulous songwriting and enviable technical skill.

Left alone after Alriksson's departure, Anders Jakobson and Mieszko Talarczyk threw themselves headlong into an annihilating experience, opened by a “This Is…” that "programmatic" barely begins to describe. The songs are all very short, sometimes extremely short, but capable of condensing all the power and fury of a grindcore that eyes the modern world with cynical detachment, mounting a scathing critique of its horrors. While the drums strain in every way to keep things on track amid the electric deluge, proving remarkably versatile in the process, the guitar fires away furiously between screamed pandemonium (“Diggin In”, “It's Never Too Late”), shrieks like a saw gone mad (“I See Lies”), moves through more recognizable riffing over galloping cadences (“There's No Escape”) and grooves that light the fuse for more cerebral detonations or more measured jolts (the title track, “The Rest Is Over”, “Disappointed”, “Shapeshifter”, “Worldcraft”), trading blows like pocket-sized anthems (“Feed Them, Kill Them, Skin Them”), launching into the occasional solo in epic-metropolitan mode (“Closing In”) or along deafening straightaways that sound like a call to arms (“Shaping The End”). The broadsides of “The World That You Made” owe more than a little to Brutal Truth, the attack of “For What Cause” is in line with certain metalcore of the era, while the pace of “No Sign Of Improvement” even takes on a thrash-like shape. Closing things out, “Can De Lach”, the longest track at just over three minutes, moves between suspended atmospheres and blistering accelerations.

A powerful debut, in short, followed by the no less compelling “Human 2.0”, “Helvete” and “Shift”, marked by a drier sound and, on average, more intricate songs.

KOREISCH – This Decaying Schizophrenic Christ Complex (1999; Inghilterra)

If I had to get straight to the point, I'd say that listening to This Decaying Schizophrenic Christ Complex, the sole work by England's Koreisch, means approaching the grindcore tradition with one ear tuned to the deformed, anarchic solutions of James Plotkin's Phantomsmasher project, and the other to the mechanical devastation of Today Is The Day's “Sadness Will Prevail”. That's because the band from Sheffield, the steel city, though raised in close contact with grindcore, tested themselves by leaning heavily on industrial, doom, dark-ambient, noise and sludge-metal. The result was one of the most intense sounds of the late Nineties.

This still largely unknown quartet was made up of singer Chris Meadows (whose feverish bark partly recalled the late, great Johnny Morrow of fellow countrymen Iron Monkey), guitarist Simon (who attacked his instrument with the same maniacal ferocity as a serial killer closing in on his prey) and a rhythm section (drummer Lee and bassist Foster) that unleashed wave after wave of carpet bombing. And yet, you wouldn't peg them as capable of such devastation as the three and a half minutes of opener “Justification By Faith” go by, an ambient haze out of which emerge the sinister notes of “In Heaven (Everything Is Fine)”, a song born from the twisted mind of David Lynch and set to music by Peter Ivers for the film “Eraserhead”. But soon enough “Forced Attrition” dots the i's, delivering a take on industrial-grind with tribal overtones (echoed later by a menacing “Caress This Violation”, of which Steve Austin, master of "prevailing sadness", would surely be proud). “Submerged Tao Fixation” is another dive into the rarefied unease of the human psyche, here viewed from the perspective of a Taoist monk caught up in his rituals, while on “The Kevorkian Solution” that same unease is suggested through the juxtaposition of musique concrète and liturgical vocalizations. Amid this alternation of fullness and emptiness, of metaphysical surrender and apocalyptic din, “A Premonition of Lifes Erosion” and, right after, the first part of “1 Inch Stab Wound”, reach us as the first unmistakable signs of their grind lineage. But this is grindcore taken to its most extreme consequences. If you can picture, even while trying to shield yourself during the harrowing slaughterhouse scenes (can you find better words for it?) of “Preordained Incarceration”, “Bleed Like Christ” (which even lets psychedelic leanings surface) and, above all, “4000 Years Of Suppressed Dissection” (one of grindcore's absolute masterpieces, of any era or latitude), Discordance Axis tackling the bloodiest material of Neurosis or Today Is The Day themselves, then you're at least partway there. The word “carnage” might come in handy too. Faced with the monumental sonic storm of “Eclectic Powder Burn”, Meadows' desperate scream seems like a mere trifle, yet it testifies to the psychological depth of these compositions which, at least in their more expansive moments (think also of the closing “The Eating of Food Sacrificed To Idols”, over seventeen minutes of galactic hisses, found sounds, microwaves, electric shrieks and vocal manipulation), resemble the sonic equivalent of a slow, dramatic death agony.

UNRUH – Setting Fire To Sinking Ships (1999; USA)

Straddling the line between grindcore and metalcore, Texas's Unruh produced, in the space of just five years, two albums well worth rediscovering, above all Setting Fire To Sinking Ships, which, on the eve of the new millennium, not only brought their career to a close but also stood as the most mature fruit of their whole output. Repeatedly described as a cross between Pig Destroyer and Converge, or as a synthesis of early Brutal Truth and Helmet, Unruh delivered a real jolt to the extreme scene thanks to songwriting of real substance, built above all around Bill Fees's frenetic drumming and Ryan Butler's versatile guitar work. At the start of their career – back in 1995 – Unruh were still finding their way between hardcore and speed-metal, but slowly the Earache roster and the tormented metalcore of Rorschach (one of Butler's favorite bands) began leaving ever deeper marks on their imagination. Their first effort, “Misery Strengthened Faith” (1998), opened with a raw-as-hell “Salt Lake Of Fire And Brimstone”, then moved through crust grinders (“Compost”), sludge-grind couplings (“Jab Job”, “Mercitron”) and searing anti-capitalist flare-ups (“Fear And Loathing Among The Working Class”).

The peak of their creativity came the following year with Setting Fire To Sinking Ships, an album on which singer Mike Edwards's lashing screams tear through like a tornado across the disorienting, jagged frameworks of “Spoonful Of Tar” (surprisingly opened by about a minute of acoustic guitar-and-piano duet), “Disdain”, “Friendly Fire” and “Five Year Wager”. None of these songs are ever the product of lazy ideas, because Unruh know full well that if they want to do justice to their rage, if they want to give musical substance to their invectives, they need to build highly dramatic structures, like that of “Faded Tattoos” or, even better, that of “Complex”, which also carries traces of doom, more or less evident too within the folds of “Layman's Gallows”. Quite the sonic slap in the face, showing just how versatile a genre grindcore can be, and how far it is from being an end in itself...

CEPHALIC CARNAGE – Exploiting Dysfunction (2000; USA)

Among the genre's greatest innovators, Cephalic Carnage zeroed in on grindcore's most experimental and visionary side, transfiguring its primal brutality into a thoroughly original sound rich with influences drawn from seemingly far-flung musical worlds. After all, from a band that describes its own sound as “Rocky Mountain hydro-grind”, you can hardly expect to hear the same things Napalm Death or Carcass were playing. Well, sort of – but subjected to a process of deformation and displacement no doubt aided by the massive amounts of marijuana consumed by every member of the band. In that respect, they can even count themselves lucky, since weed has long been legal where they're from (Denver). It was in the Colorado capital that the band formed in 1992 on the initiative of Leonard “Lenzig” Leal (vocals) and Zac Joe (guitar), who recorded the demo “Scrape My Lungs” without yet having a clear idea of which direction to take, so much so that they barely got anything done for about four years. It wasn't until 1996 that the two expanded the lineup, bringing in drummer John Merryman, Steve Goldberg on guitar and Doug Williams on bass. This quintet recorded the EP “Fortuitous Oddity”, which, despite being hampered by less-than-pristine production, let the weight of an overflowing creativity shine through. The first to believe in them were the people behind Italy's Headfucker Records, who went as far as inviting them to record their debut album, Conforming To Abnormality, released in 1998. It's an absolutely essential work straddling grindcore and death-metal, even if it still lacks a bit in terms of cohesion. The first few seconds of “Anechoic Chamber” already offer some clues to their eccentricity: a casual drum-machine beat, dub-like shadows, some playful percussive back-and-forth, a ringing telephone. After about forty seconds or so, they launch into their first tour de force, gripped by death-metal schizophrenia and grind paroxysm. Next comes the controlled madness of “Jihad” (Jihad is a bunch of shit because so many perished because of it!), moving through sudden tempo changes, doom saturation and flashes of black humor reminiscent of Exit-13, also evoked by the delirious, sluggishly diffused harmonics that appear on “Wither”. Leal's growl is so cavernous and guttural that it becomes disgustingly bizarre. On “Regalos de Mota”, the intricate drumming is just one of many draws in a track that captures a band in a state of grace, also capable of the incredible “Extreme of Paranoia”, a number that gives us the exact coordinates of a music that, through the medium of sonic extremism, wants nothing more than to tear down genre boundaries, running here through string-driven flurries and psycho-jazz whirlwinds, unhealthy lounge oases, dizzying Sabbath-esque brawls, acid-drenched madness in the style of Clotted Symmetric Sexual Organ, doom-laden long takes of grief, questioning interludes and, for dessert, techno-noise beats... Where I come from, that's called genius.

But there's method to this madness, as shown also by the lengthy “Waiting for the Millennium”, anchored to Merryman's elastic drumming, the true driving force behind the infernal machine of "cephalic carnage".

A machine that two years later would release Exploiting Dysfunction (put out by Relapse Records), which makes their sound even more disturbed and disturbing. Programmatically, the first track ("Hybrid") echoes the multiform nature of their compositions, the utter schizophrenia of music that this time around pushes their infatuation with grindcore toward more explicitly progressive territories, so it's no surprise that liquid guitars and near-fusion sketches coexist with scorching sludge-doom clashes, noisy masses sucked into black holes, and so on. While here and there indulging in wild, though fairly brief, displays of power ("Drive To Insanity", "Molestandos Plantas Muertos!" – which evokes Brujeria's "¡Machetazos!" EP –, "Paralyzed by Fear"), the band prefers to perform long, cerebral dissertations like "Rehab" (where death-doom jolts share the stage with mathematical jazz-metal progressions), "Cryptosporidium" (torn apart by psychotic whirlwinds within an ever more jagged instrumental continuum), "Invertus Indica (The Marijuana Convictions)" (where the band's obsessions return in ever more grandiloquent forms, while the slow parts seem to suggest an ongoing psychic collapse), and elsewhere carving monstrous indolence into rock-solid walls ("Gracias"). And while "The Ballad Of Moon" draws grind splinters from Neurosis-like nightmares, "9 Feet Of Smoke" crushes all their influences into a blender-instrumental and "Eradicate Authority" alternates catchier parts with pachydermic Black Sabbath debris. All pieces of an exciting mosaic that reaches its apex with the fifteen-plus minutes of the eponymous track, a long tracking shot in which the band vents all its creativity, riding through psychedelic detonations, vocal samples, flights of fancy, colossal slowdowns within gore orbits, spacey vanishing points, and a long descent into the abyss of harmonic chaos.

The band's fame, at this point, grows enormously within the extreme music circuit and, obviously, for fans the wait for their next moves starts to become unbearable.

Lucid Interval arrives two years later, establishing itself as their most scientific record. Where its predecessor (which contends with it for the title of the band's best album) gave free rein to the musicians' madness, this third work shows more balanced songwriting, a more geometric overall design. The first two tracks, "Scolopendra Cingulata" and "Fortuitous Oddity", form a single instrumental prelude, alternating mechanical scansions and furious detonations. "Anthro-Emesis" then opens onto tech-deathgrind scenarios that outline the essential coordinates of the whole work, entirely built on a continuous emotional see-saw where sturdy grooves, gore irradiations and abrasive experimentalism bordering on psychedelia, jazz and post-rock (listen, for example, to the astonishing "Pseudo", one of the highest points of their career, but also the closing "Arsonist Savior", which winks more than once at fusion) are only the brightest signs of the hybrid nature of their sound, always ready to deconstruct even what, on the surface, appear to be more orthodox moments ("The Isle Of California", "Rebellion", "Zuno Gyakusatsu", "Redundant", even the swedish death-metal variant of the title track). Another highlight is "Black Metal Sabbath" (introduced by a sample taken from David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me"), a track that, as the title suggests, applies unhealthy black metal within the folds of doom. Marijuana, naturally, plays its part too, even inspiring the guys to a mariachi interlude ("Cannabism").

The band's most creative phase is, at this point, over, though the subsequent releases (starting with the EP "Halls Of Amenti", released the following November, containing a single nineteen-minute track that veers toward sludge-doom solutions) are certainly worth rediscovering, if only because they're never dull.

CRIPPLE BASTARDS – Misantropo a senso unico (2000; Italy)

Hatred, nihilism, misanthropy, moral disgust. God is dead, everything is permitted, but everything is useless. So life is shit. It's probably from here, from this line of reasoning, that Giulio "the Bastard" set off into the world of extreme music when, at just fourteen, he founded in Asti, together with his friend Alberto "the Crippler" (17 years old), what would become one of the best Italian extreme music acts, as well as one of the most respected names in the grindcore scene: Cripple Bastards. From their very first steps, when they were still called Grimcorpses, their sound was akin to the grind-noisecore of acts like Seven Minutes of Nausea, Fear Of God and Sore Throat, but bit by bit they would also absorb crust-punk and hardcore traits, maintaining a "precarious" balance that would define them to this day. On "Your Lies In Check", their 1996 debut for Ecocentric, chilling outbursts reminiscent of Anal Cunt ("Without A Shadow Of Justice", "Imposed Mortification", "Irenic", "The Outside World") coexist with vicious profanity ("Images Of War/Images Of Pain", "Prisons", "Danas Je Dan Za Lijencine"), some oddities ("Disagreeable Selections", "My Serenity") and moments leaning toward an almost breezy punk-rock ("1974", "Vital Dreams", "Stimmung", "Ragman"), inspired by the Croatian band Patareni, "who today", Giulio recalls, "are complete unknowns, but who in the Grind scene of the first half of the Nineties had introduced this very punk-rock-ish style into Grind". Surprisingly, Cripple Bastards also allow themselves a couple of covers: "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson and "We Can Work It Out" by the Beatles. All things considered, the message of "Your Lies In Check" is very simple: the world is a terrible place to live in. Let alone Italy: L’Italy del perbenismo, l’Italia dei leccaculo / è la patria dei coglioni che non usano il cervello / han bisogno di qualcuno che li affoghi nello schifo […] Soffoco in una strada affollata di apatia, / intossicato dalla merda che ingoiate tutti i giorni, sings Giulio on "Italy di merda".

But four years later, on Misantropo a senso unico, things would get even worse and, therefore, even better... Considered by many their masterpiece, the album was recorded by a line-up that, alongside Giulio on vocals and Alberto on guitar, featured Schintu The Wretched on bass and Walter Dr. Tomas on drums. With the number of tracks cut down to 16 (when the previous album had as many as 69!), the band was able to concentrate all its influences and all its hatred to the fullest, delivering one of the most nihilistic and brutal sonic statements Italian music has ever produced. Backed by a cover depicting the incidents of rock-throwing from overpasses, sadly common in Italy at the time, the album stands out above all for Alberto's outstanding guitar work. Fulvio "Hatebox" (who, after the album's release, would actually take Alberto's place in the band) would say: "As for Alberto's guitar style and choice of tones, to this day I still consider his techniques, along with Agata's from Melt Banana, to be unheard of in hardcore and grind. They were at least fifteen years ahead of their time. Alberto came up with things that, in my opinion, were inconceivable for that era." But Misantropo a senso unico also marks the expressive triumph of Giulio's voice, here practically tortured, pushed to the limits of its possibilities, brutalized so it could truly "say" all the pain, disgust and ferocity besieging him. His lyrics, naturally in Italian (because only in one's own language can one truly say what one "feels" deep down), are endless spits of misanthropy. The gaze is attentive, but detachment and the absence of emotional scaffolding are necessary. Il cinismo e la sociopatia sono il sole sul deserto che ho in me, he screams on "La repulsione negli occhi". And on the title track, he makes a point of stating: La gente mi fa schifo, lascio tutti alle spalle, tiro dritto fino all’ultimo. And as if that weren't enough, the vinyl's label proudly displayed the following words: Ti auguro di crepare… oggi. While on the back: No alla soluzione. Tu sei il problema. Inside, raw images of mutilated bodies, in perfect Carcass style, completed an utterly bleak picture, echoed by explosive music suspended between punk/hardcore accelerations ("Il Sentimento Non è Amore", "Il Tuo Amico Morto") and noisecore rampages (truly terrifying are those that tear through "Rapporto Interrotto" and "Nascere per violentarsi"), nihilistic extremism ("Dio è solo merda" is a track that needs no comment...) and oddities planted right in the middle of the destruction (the turbo-folk intermezzo of "Sogno un mondo senza…", which digs up a vintage Celentano!). Closing the record, "94 x flashback di massacro", a reworking of the demo included on the 1993 four-band split tape (Cripple Bastards, Grimcorpses, Harsh Feelings and Filthy Charity). Pure madness at the tail end of a historic record.

DISCORDANCE AXIS – The Inalienable Dreamless (2000; USA)

Destined to become one of the most important names in grindcore, Discordance Axis formed in the early Nineties in New Jersey, thanks to the initiative of singer John Chang and guitarist Rob Marton, two long-time friends who had already shared the Sedition project. The addition of the phenomenal drummer Dave Witte (ex Human Remains) was the icing on the cake. Initially, the heaviest influence was that of Napalm Death's From Enslavement To Obliteration, the album that obsessed Chang for a long time. The first years went by between sporadic rehearsals and split-albums, then in 1995 their first full-length finally arrived. "Ulterior" is perfectly in line with the influence of the English masters, though Witte's drumming and Marton's guitar work do everything they can to shake the sound loose from all-too-predictable dynamics. Amid moments that already hint at future experimental developments ("Ruin Trajectory"), others that clearly echo Japanese hardcore ("Human Collateral"), and yet others where thrash roots become more exposed ("Harmony Battery"), the album (also weighed down by a rather flat production) goes by without leaving particularly deep marks, momentarily suspending judgment on the trio's actual potential. Thanks to Chang's origins, during this period the band keeps playing regularly in Japan, where they come into contact with those madmen in Melt Banana, with whom they immediately decide to collaborate. The result is a split on which the band shows it's refining its sound, with songs that are on average more original. It's above all Marton's guitar that triumphs, in a constant, whirling interplay of saturated riffs and jagged accelerations that we'll find again, in an even more polished form, on the band's second album, Jouhou (1997).

This is the moment when Discordance Axis reveal themselves to the grindcore world as one of the most original and creative acts around, having by now achieved a truly enviable cohesion. Listen, for example, to the fifty-three seconds of "Vertigo Index" and you'll understand what I mean. While Marton keeps relentlessly grinding out torrential electric swarms, Witte remembers he once played in one of the most original bands straddling death-metal and grindcore (the aforementioned Human Remains), engineering percussive segments where patterns and blast-beats become a single mass of surgical power. As for Chang, here he finally blossoms, master of a monstrous voice in which growls, screams and pure blasphemy fight for center stage. "At first", he would recall, "to train my voice I used to drive around listening to S.O.B. records. Once home, I'd wait for the apartments near mine to empty out, so I could put on truly extreme stuff. Then I'd start screaming at the top of my lungs, trying to refine my technique..." Chang, the otaku, the manga and anime fanatic who screams and rants because, ultimately, this is one of the many possible ways to shut the world out of one's own perspective, filling the void with parallel worlds, abstractions, other possibilities. His greatest passions? Votoms, Evangelion, old-school Gundam, Ideon, Yamato, Dougram, Macross and so on. Not to mention his love for Philip K. Dick's books... The music of his Discordance Axis is born, then, from the meeting of grindcore's annihilating force, the experimentation and madness of many Japanese bands, a healthy dose of powerviolence, and the will to create genuine "pseudo-worlds". On Jouhou all this is in seething flux. The three of them are no longer content with just slamming the door over and over, talking tough for the mere sake of causing chaos; at this point they want to get inside the folds of the discourse, break down its propositions, just to rebuild the genre's syntax through vertiginous tempo changes, instrumental acrobatics and bursts of dissonant clamor. It's not yet their definitive album, though it has plenty of admirers, but this second chapter of their saga nonetheless has the undeniable merit of having planted the seeds that, three years later, would blossom into the apocalypse of The Inalienable Dreamless. So here, around the radioactive storm of "Nikola Tesla", gather shards of systematic devastation ("Panoptic", "Come Apart Together, Come Together Alone"), echoes of old thrash records put through the meat grinder ("Information Sniper"), obtuse maximalism ("Rain Perimeter", "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said"), math-grind and japa-noise on their honeymoon ("Damage Style", "Typeface"), epileptic outbursts ("Numb(Ers)"), all the way to more atmospheric solutions ("Reincarnation"). Then, something changes in Jon Chang's soul.

"When I was recording the band's first two albums, I was a very angry person and that's what I wanted to convey through the music. I was really messed up, I wasn't very sociable, basically I really couldn't communicate with the people around me. On The Inalienable Dreamless there's a lot more than just anger. When I finished recording it, I felt like a different person. For me, writing that record was a cathartic experience. I worked on it for two and a half years, always demanding the utmost from myself. While we were on tour in Japan, I watched this 'anime', 'Evangelion: Death and Rebirth' [one of the two animated films that, after recapping it, bring the TV series 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' to a close, ed.]. When I walked out of the theater, I had completely changed my perspective on who I was and on who I wanted to become as an artist." And, again: "Back then I had a working knowledge of Japanese. I watched Evangelion and understood 15 percent of what I saw, but emotionally, I understood 100%! Watching that film was a bit like witnessing the death of a friend".

All the core themes of that story (courage, loss, the need for approval from "distant" parental figures, maturity, and so on) had, in short, an extremely powerful impact on Chang's psyche, who, besides suggesting that source through the song titles on The Inalienable Dreamless, tried to transfer its emotional weight into music that grew ever more explosive and harrowing. So if Hideaki Anno himself (who had written and directed that series after four years of deep depression) once said that "Evangelion" "contained" his whole life, one could likewise argue that, through that series, The Inalienable Dreamless is Jon Chang's very own life, offered to us across seventeen different panels. Marton and Witte stay in the background, but are anything but secondary. They represent, in fact, the musical skeleton around which Chang's raw flesh desperately tries to gather itself, agonizing amid his own lyrics like a soul burning in the flames of hell.

For many, The Inalienable Dreamless is the greatest grindcore album of all time and, if that might strike you as too bold a claim, at least try to agree with me that these grooves contain a radical rethinking of the fastest and most extreme possible, without which it's genuinely hard to speak of modern grindcore. Thanks also to a more fitting production, the sound of Discordance Axis finally shines with a dazzling light, and everything seems to be definitively in its place: Chang's bloodcurdling voice (who said he drew inspiration from Borbetomagus saxophonist Jim Sauter!) and Marton's explosive, dissonant, chameleonic guitar, both forced to stay, despite everything, within the "form" set by the metronomic yet versatile drumming of an outstanding David Witte. Thus, the thermonuclear ostinatos of "Castration Rite" and "Sound Out the Braille", the compressed cadences and progressive shifts of "Oratorio in Grey", the razor-sharp on speed accumulations of "Angel Present" and the "math" ones of "The Necropolitan" and "Pattern Blue" all bring to mind an inhuman exasperation of the Human Remains lesson. Rationally visceral or viscerally rational, Discordance Axis insist on intensity because that, in the end, is what grindcore owes everything to. Nothing is left to chance, not even a single note. But this only becomes clear if you choose to pierce the impenetrable wall of noise, only if, among other things, you deconstruct with heart and mind the zombie roars of the title track or the existential ones of "Jigsaw" (the latter marked by melodic progressions that foreshadow the light at the end of the tunnel) and "Compiling Autumn", which contains some of the album's finest lyrics: Between one life and another / there is a brittle pitch / painted burgandy and ochre / at a steady clip to winter / all the moments trapped in our hearts to be relived / with half myself destroyed I’d rather die alone. Worth noting too is the floating structure of "The Third Children" and the slow-motion agony of "A Leaden Stride To Nowhere", which never reaches a final collapse, instead resolving into the last, furious assault of "Drowned".

Marking its distance from other grindcore releases, past or present, is a DVD packaging featuring a sea horizon overshadowed by an immense sky.

In 2001, before disbanding, the band took part in a split album with 324 and Corrupted, delivering another page of stunning intensity ("Ikaruga") and an unexpected drone-ambient shroud ("Berserk"). In 2005, "Our Last Day" would then see several artists take on Discordance Axis material: Mortalized, Cide Projekt, Gate, Melt Banana, Noisear, Gridlink and, above all, Merzbow, who remixes the entirety of The Inalienable Dreamless, condensing it into sixteen minutes of noise-rock delirium.

GROINCHURN – Whoami (2000; South Africa)

Africa found its grindcore standard-bearers in the South African outfit Groinchurn, one of the first bands from the continent to sign with a foreign label (specifically, the German Morbid Records). Christo Bester (vocals and bass), Mark Chapman (guitar) and Sergio Christina (drums) all came from death-metal backgrounds, having played in bands such as Sepsis and Desecrator, before joining forces in 1994. Their first demo, "Human Filth", was recorded in just three hours and is a furious dose of old-school grindcore, echoed a few months later by the better-produced "Every Dog Has It's Decay". Their first official record is 1997's "Sixtimesnine", showcasing an utterly eclectic grindcore (with gore-tinged peaks) open to the most disparate influences (for the industrial textures of "XXXXX", they even drew inspiration from Skinny Puppy). This formula (which the band itself dubbed "Africore") was refined, after a settling-in effort ("Fink"), on the sprawling thirteen tracks of Whoami (2000). While the main beacon of their journey seems to be the most versatile side of Brutal Truth, tracks like "Fickle World" or "Elude" carry echoes of Rage Against The Machine (Chapman's six-string work, after all, owes more than a little to the instrumental intelligence of Tom Morello), while Biohazard's groove-metal elbows its way among the psychedelic flare-ups of "Everything You Know's a Lie", "Blown Off Course" and "Quiet Please". Elsewhere ("Da Vitameen Green"), their passion for old-school hardcore emerges (though never so strictly as to rule out a wonky Hawaiian solo, or a flurry of backwards vocal samples), along with a nod to the driving crust frenzy of Disrupt ("Coughin'").

What's striking isn't just their ability to turn grindcore into a canvas onto which an apparently endless number of musical solutions can be projected, but also the sheer quality of the interplay. So, between wild exchanges and more ordinary moments, the record culminates in the nearly ten minutes of "Buy The Way", one of the most experimental moments of their career, caught between industrial-noise scansions and rap-metal assaults.

Following the excellent response, the band managed to play a handful of shows both in Europe (where they got tangled up in a hilarious misunderstanding with the Austrian police, who spent hours searching their camper van for marijuana!) and in the United States. Tired of the limitations of the South African scene, in 2001 (the year in which they took part in several split albums, and in which the compilation "Thuck – Grinding South Africore, The Early Days" was released, gathering material from their early years) they finally decided to relocate to the Czech Republic, backed by former Krabathor manager Petr Hejtmanek. But over the following six months, relationships within the band grew increasingly strained. So, towards the end of that same year, after returning home, the band decided to close the book on their thrilling adventure.

PARADE OF THE LIFELESS – The Anatomy of a People’s Bondage (2000; USA)

Crossing the deranged paroxysm of O.L.D.'s debut with the adventurous spirit of Discordance Axis (and, by extension, Human Remains) and the whirling epic scope of japanoise, at the dawn of the new millennium the American band Parade Of Lifeless (a moniker borrowed from an Assück song) set off one of the most traumatizing experiences in the grindcore universe, as documented on The Anatomy of a People's Bondage, their only recorded output. The lineup, built around vocalist Derrick Kowalewski, guitarist/bassist Paul Kozlowski and drummer Jim Miller, managed to rattle listeners' ears with barely half an hour of scorching stop-and-go, relentless blast-beats, jazz interludes, and monstrous spazzcore convulsions. Aside from the acoustic detour of "Is Suzy Going To Be Late?" and their cover – still torn apart by sudden bursts of bile – of "The Wind Cries Mary" by Hendrix, the whole record celebrates an instinctive and chaotic brutality, made of erratic jolts ("Flash In The Pan"), catastrophic rollercoasters offering glimpses of Naked City (the title track, with Kowalewski a worthy disciple of the Yamatsuka Eye cult), blistering guitar obstinacy ("Blue Eyed Jesus"), tech-grind sucked into space-time vortices ("Oddball"), and furiously geometric weaves like "Doug Flutie Loves His Kiddie Porn" and "Yes And No", where the guitar work clearly bows to the Procopio/Baglino duo of Human Remains. But the definitive moment of their art is undoubtedly "The Mind's Quicker Than The Eye", a parade of instrumental aberrations that, while winking at Dillinger Escape Plan, also drags in a few violin phrasings by the hair.

REINFECTION – They Die for Nothing (2000; Poland)

Since labels can be such fun to play with, if a friend asked me what kind of music the Polish band Reinfection plays, the only honest answer would be a blunt "brutal death-goregrind". A stretch? Not at all, given that the pillars around which this Polish outfit's music revolves are precisely the most suffocating brutal death-metal and the most cadenced goregrind. Still, it's the visceral intensity with which these guys tackle the material that earns them a special mention. So, as is only right, let's jump back in time – to 1994, to be exact.

In Przysucha, a small town a hundred kilometers south of Warsaw, you could once stumble upon a metal band searching for a reason to exist, called MOB. It was led by a certain Pajak who, eager to explore new territory, decided to launch a new project, naming it Reinfection. The idea was to straddle the line between grindcore and a particularly explosive brand of hardcore. That early period, however, left little behind. Then Pajak decided to start a family, said his thanks and left. So, between lineup changes and a handful of scattered shows, the band only managed to seriously promote its music following the release of the demo "The Edge of Her Existence" (1998), whose sound quality left much to be desired. Even so, over a thousand copies were sold, so much so that the band – by then settled as a quartet (Martin, guitar; Mlody, drums; Rudolph, vocals; Michal, bass) – soon began writing the material that would end up on They Die For Nothing. That record was the culmination of a long refining process that had led them toward a sonic brutality so monolithic it left even the most seasoned listeners rattled. Backed by a voice that swings between bottomless growls and piercing screams, bass, guitar and drums stitch together gargantuan devastations played amid the flames of hell, mostly unleashed at breakneck speed. When needed, though, Reinfection also prove capable of colossal mid-tempos and hulking grooves (the title track, "The Pedophile's Odour", "The Limit of Virginal Weakness"). Bloodlust, perversions and other gore-soaked themes make up the lyrical framework of an exercise in annihilating maximalism, carved out by the inhuman blast-beats of "An Institute of Bloody Anatomy", the savage brawls of "I Feel Smell of My Victim" (pierced by a brief "clean" solo), the jagged abominations of "Skin Torn Off the Genitals", and that manual of catchy ferocity that is "A Morgue Filled with Rotting Corpses". As if that weren't enough, the surgical precision with which the musicians handle the various instrumental passages makes the listen even more traumatic. Chapeau!

SWARRRM – Against Again (2000; Japan)

Swarrrm's first EP was called "Chaos & Grind": talk about knowing exactly what you want. After all, when it comes to extreme music, the Japanese never hold back, always diving headfirst in search of disturbing, abrasive sounds. And so it went with grindcore too, a genre that found plenty of admirers in the Land of the Rising Sun, achieving fairly notable results as early as the late Eighties thanks above all to S.O.B. (Sabotage Organized Barbarian), authors of the classic "Don't Be Swindle" (1987), in which massive thrashcore influences were still clearly recognizable. And while numerous bands followed the lead of Napalm Death and Carcass without much personality of their own, the menacing Gore Beyond Necropsy experimented alongside legend Merzbow with a frightening hybrid of grindcore, noise and electronics, reaching alarming levels of madness on 1997's epic "Rectal Anarchy".

Just a year later, Swarrrm released the EP mentioned above, kicking off a musical trajectory that would lead them to conjugate a schizophrenic grindcore that made no secret of its unhealthy passion for screamo, powerviolence and japanoise, genres that would always carry significant weight in the economy of their sound.

The Kobe quartet's first fully mature fruit arrived right at the dawn of the new millennium with Against Again, a record that once and for all defined their formula, powered by a chameleonic bass (Futoshi), drumming (Chowrow) as precise as it is frantic, razor-sharp yet versatile guitar (Kapo), and a voice (Hatada) for which "possessed" would be an understatement. "Brain" immediately shows that Swarrrm aren't interested in grindcore orthodoxy, but in its scientific reworking through an arty lens, carried out in memory of at least a decade's worth of sonic terrorism. Hence the intricate frenzies of "Never Believe", the melodic accents that carve out space amid the delirium of "Illitate" (opened by a sample lifted from the Coen brothers' "Barton Fink") or that bloom like post-rock abstractions within the folds of "Pain", the disfigured hymn of "Self-Abhorrence", and the geometric brutality – clearly indebted to Discordance Axis – of "Hear My Voice", "Despair" and "Hatred/Intend To Kill", tracks that stretch the genre's possibilities by heightening its emotional charge. It's no coincidence that one of the terms used to describe their music is "emotive chaotic grind", which is exactly what comes to mind listening to the overwrought weaves of "H.T.D." and the almost progressive structure of the title track.

The following Nise Kyuseishu Domo (2003) is, if anything, even more anarchic and intense, though overall less cohesive than its predecessor. By this point, the quartet clearly knows its own potential, tearing fiercely and uninhibitedly through tracks that increasingly resemble the sonic transcription of a psychopath's outburst. It's no surprise that the japanoise influence grows even more substantial, with the guitars mostly generating noise-drenched spirals that besiege the songs with webs of feedback, only occasionally making room for more relaxed phrasing or sweeping bridges. Traces of piano pop up in "Don't Mess With Texas", a mandolin opens "Scilence", "Herzog" could pass for a solid post-rock instrumental if it weren't obsessively kicked in the face by demonic screams, "Damn" is propelled by a space-funk bass (!) and ends up sketching a grandiose sci-fi metal fresco. In the background, Hatada's voice – as well as that of Oka-z, who replaces him on most tracks – is by now a feral rasp spewing boundless despair and nihilistic venom.

From the very first seconds of "Snow", the following "Black Bong" (2007) instead ups the ante in sheer recklessness, revealing an even more bizarre version of a band that, by now, seems to be drifting further and further from its original grindcore roots. While their infatuation with black-metal grows more pronounced ("Cherry Tree"), as does their interest in melodic death metal, whose echo can be traced above all in the use of tremolo riffs and the epic cut of certain progressions ("Fissure", thrown into chaos by an utterly deranged coda; "Road", charged with unbearable tension), heavy metal quotations emerge almost like hallucinations (the opening of "Sky", reminiscent of Judas Priest's "Breaking The Law"; the lightning-fast guitar phrasing of "Light"), along with "desert" sketches, destabilized though they are by uncontainable noise-psychedelic flare-ups ("Wind") and hints of vitriolic ballads amid an atmosphere of psychic collapse (the title track).

THE BERZERKER – The Berzerker (2000; Australia)

Originally, Berzerker was the solo project of Luke Kenny, a Melbourne DJ and programmer who caught Earache Records' attention thanks to his techno remixes of Morbid Angel and Deicide tracks. Invited to record an album by an enthusiastic Digby "Dig" Pearson (who would later call them "the most original extreme band on the Earache roster"), Kenny brought in his friend Sam Bean (bass and guitars) for help, before recruiting two more guitarists (Ed Lacey and Jay). The self-titled album they debuted with in 2000 is a brutal concentrate of cyber-deathgrind made of savage projectiles powered by techno beats, dizzying accelerations and mechanical shocks. Dominating the scene are the techno-industrial machine-gun bursts of the drum machine programmed by Kenny himself (a distorted Roland TR-909, whose torrential bombardment we hear on "Ignorance"), while the guitar lays down riffs that dart between Carcass and Ministry. Rounding out the picture are a series of samples, electronic-noise upheavals (listen, for instance, to the harsh-noise inferno of "95") and sudden explosions that amplify the sense of post-human disorientation that has always set their music and live shows apart, to the point of pushing them to perform wearing repulsive masks. While tracks like "Forever", "Burnt", "Pain", "Massacre" and the aptly-titled "Mono Grind" reveal the grindcore influence up close (obviously reread through a digital-cybernetic lens not unlike that of, say, America's Dataclast), some numbers offer solutions where the "atmospheric" weight of the electronics diversifies the palette, as happens on "Chronological Order Of Putrefaction" and "February" – the latter even managing to grant us a moment of nostalgic wonder before being mangled by a runaway jackhammer. "Humanity", for its part, chooses the path of an android dance track cooling down. Closing things out, the symphony of hisses and distortion that is "Ode To Nash", between growls traumatized by acid clots and full-throttle chaos, sends everyone home without so much as a goodnight.

From the very first track, "Disregard", the following Dissimulate instead shows a desire to deepen the band's grindcore influences, while keeping intact the techno-industrial superstructure which, in some cases (I'm thinking of "Failure" or "Pure Hatred"), is delivered in an utterly savage manner, when not overloaded with hysterical tension ("The Principles and Practices of Embalming", "Paradox"). Compared to its predecessor, Dissimulate is at once a fiercer and more calculated record, but not necessarily a more creative one. If anything, their songwriting here seems to flatten out into more homogeneous solutions, occasionally favoring melodic refrains ("Betrayal", for example) or anthemic progressions ("Last Mistake"). Preceded by a full minute of dead silence, the record closes with Carcass's "Corporal Jigsore Quandary", reworked their own way, of course...

324 – 冒瀆の太陽 (Boutoku No Taiyo) (2001; Japan)

324 deliver an imposing, crushing brand of grindcore, hailing from Tokyo, Japan, where the quartet formed in the late Nineties. Here's what you get: a guitarist (Morichang) churning out riff after riff, remembering both his teenage love of punk and the Napalm Death poster he probably still keeps stashed somewhere; a bassist-vocalist (Masao Yamamoto) pumping out sludge-noise lines while screaming like a man possessed, unleashing a furious stream of consciousness that latches onto your jugular and refuses to let go; a drummer (Sakata) pounding away obsessively, oscillating between D-beat and jagged blast-beats. What else? Naturally, the fourteen slaps in the face that make up 冒瀆の太陽 (Boutoku No Taiyo) (a title meaning "The Sun of Desecration"), kicked off by "Silence Before Silver Screen," which welcomes us with a web of feedback, tribal percussion, a majestic riff and a maximalist assault reminiscent of Benümb. How many grindcore records can boast such a convincing opener? While you mull that over, what's promised in those first few minutes turns into a terrible, brutal reality, an annihilating and paroxysmal sonic deflagration (so it seems the cover art wasn't chosen at random after all...). Not even twenty-four minutes to claim their spot in the sun, between adrenaline surges ("Quarter Moon"), ruinous accelerations ("Red Origin Still Streaming", "Plastic Dream"), self-destructive gallops ("Disgusting Flower"), scraps of choruses burning in flames ("鏡の森", "Swinging Skull"), punch-for-punch exchanges ("Broken Clock", "New Dimension"), exhilarating instrumental interplay ("Crawl in the Transparency") and racket made of raw, blind stubbornness ("Cobalt").

The band would have to wait a full five years to release new material. "Rebelgrind", in fact, wouldn't come out until 2006, thanks to the involvement of Shane Embury, who released it on his own Feto Records. It's a solid record, one that lets the band's sludge and hardcore influences emerge forcefully, producing a sequence of overexcited tracks dominated by the rough "punk" guitar of new arrival Shinji.

ABADDON INCARNATE – Nadir (2001; Ireland)

Once, Steve Maher, singer and guitarist of Irish outfit Abaddon Incarnate, answering a question on why he'd decided to play deathgrind, said: "Because every time I listen to that stuff, I feel good. Besides, I've been obsessed with those sounds since I was about twelve. Back then I was hooked on Napalm Death, Carcass, Deicide and Morbid Angel." That passion was initially channeled into the project Bereaved, shared with guitarist Bill Whelan and bassist Rob Tierney. Drummer Olan Parkinson would join later. That experience, hovering somewhere between black and death metal, lasted a good five years, before Maher & co. decided to adopt the moniker Abaddon Incarnate. That was 1994, but their official debut, "The Last Supper", wouldn't come out until 1999, boasting the mastering support of James Murphy. At that point, though, the band was still very much a work in progress, somewhere between Cryptopsy and Impaled Nazarene. The event that would give their career a decisive push was a trip to Sweden, where they recorded (with Cory Sloan in place of Rob Tierney) Nadir (2001), with Mieszko Talarczyk of Nasum behind the mixing desk.

The record is one of the best-kept secrets of European deathgrind, boasting a devastating impact in which the primal ferocity of grind blends beautifully with the tectonic groove of death metal, while the constant back-and-forth between the two vocalists (one delivering a cavernous growl, the other possessed by a demonic scream) makes the listen all the more disturbing. The guitar work is also remarkable, capable not only of muscular riffs (in which one can clearly hear the influence of Jon Levasseur) but also of unleashing venomous blades of feedback (just listen to the noisy racket that forms the backbone of the superb "Hunger Allowed No Choice", from whose infernal weave gore-soaked fumes emerge) or searing on-the-run solos ("Victory or Annihilation", "Pogrom"). When things get a little more complex, as in the case of "Funeral Procession", the band revisits thrash memories at a pow-wow pace (occasionally shot through with grind epilepsy of exquisite taste: "She Hates With A Marble Heart"), or opens up onto epic post-metal vistas (the instrumental "Progeny"), dispelling more than one doubt about the state of their creativity (on that note, lend an ear also to the intro of "Seditious Thoughts, Part 2", where even jazz echoes surface). The first part of "Traumatic Stress Solution" also dips into the sludge cauldron, launching into a gripping harmonic progression. When, on the other hand, the sound gets excessively heavy, it's like listening to the Carcass of "Reek Of Putrefaction" redone by Fear Factory with broken-down instruments. This is music devastated by fearsome spasms, subjected to an emotional pressure that's at times immeasurable.

CEREBRAL TURBULENCY – Impenetrable (2001; Czech Republic)

The former Czechoslovakia has always had a fairly lively and stimulating grindcore scene, capable of gifting genre fans with some rather interesting acts: among others, Ahumado Granujo ("Splatter-Tekk"; 2003), Jig-Ai (the self-titled 2006 album), Alienation Mental ("Ball Spouter"; 2002), Carnal Diafragma ("Space Symphony Around Us"; 2006), Ingrowing ("Cyberspace", 1998; "Sunrape", 2003). One of the most interesting, though, remains Cerebral Turbulency, born in 1993 out of the shared passion for extreme metal of two teenagers from Ostrava (in today's Czech Republic), drummer Michal Cichy and Mirek, later joined by guitarist Dan Vajico and bassist Robert Šimek. Their first demo, "Right to Choose" from 1995, still leaned toward a fundamentally thrash-death style, but by the time they officially debuted with "As Gravy" (1997), the thrash matrix of their sound had been completely swept away by their growing passion for grindcore, a genre that had slowly seduced them. The record thus offers up a robust and at times morbid deathgrind. Meanwhile, in order to better control their music and its distribution, they decided to found their own label. That's how Khaaranus Productions was born, its first fruit being the release of their second record, "Forces Closing Down" (2000), heavily influenced by the goregrind of Last Days Of Humanity (from whom they also borrowed the idea of filtering the vocals through heavy pitch-shifting) but also mindful of the extremist antics of Anal Cunt, whose echo, besides showing up in the cover of "Radio Hit" (rechristened for the occasion as "Radiohelium Hit"), can be heard loud and clear in the most destructive and noisy moments. Among the twenty-six tracks, marked by convulsive blast-beats and a guitar tone that's always saturated and immensely powerful, there's also room for two more covers, Brutal Truth's "Ill-Neglect" and Agathocles' "Enough". Some moments, though — "Smash the Nazi Shitheads", "Unknown Idea" — already foreshadow the more compelling, anthemic solutions of Turbulency. The latter, widely considered their best record, was made by a lineup that, besides Michal Cichy and Robert Šimek, included guitarist Adam and singer Robin, whose animalistic grunts mesh perfectly with the rock-solid structures of a band that, by this point, is a generator of compelling brutality. Across its thirty-five minutes, the record delivers anthemic, gore-obsessed mania ("Yes! Legitimate"), frenetic progressions recalling Nasum's Inhale/Exhale (one of their declared influences) in a less maximalist guise ("My Inner Mate"), zombie-like backing vocals ("Fear of Indifference"), epic solos that rise up like warnings to resist at all costs ("Adios a las Corridas"), putrid outbursts ("For Money but From the Heart") and a quirky little divertissement featuring samples and scratching ("Development").

With the EP "Germ Of Error", they would then veer toward more menacing and deafening territory, at times evoking a more human version of The Berzerker. For the occasion, the band coined the term "hyper grind roll", a definition that certainly fits a record that crashes down on our ears like a tornado, recalling the Napalm Death of the controversial "Diatribes".

PIG DESTROYER – Prowler in the Yard (2001, USA)

When guitarist Scott Hull, alongside his Agoraphobic Nosebleed venture, decided to form Pig Destroyer, he said the main driving force was a desire to return to the genre's original essence. No more digital-cybernetic experiments, in other words, but a healthy dose of violence, coupled with a psychotic and highly destructive approach. Joining Hull on this new adventure were singer J. R. Hayes and drummer John Evans. Pig Destroyer's earliest cries were heavily influenced by Anal Cunt, a band Hull had played with around the time of "40 More Reasons to Hate Us" (1996). Thus, "Explosions In Ward 6", their first recorded effort, is a record made of rather chaotic grind-noisecore assaults that are nonetheless far from unworthy, though hampered by a production that wasn't quite up to par. Among its curiosities is a sample lifted from Pasolini's Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom. Three years later the band released what is probably its most representative record, Prowler In The Yard, in which grindcore's violence and speed merge with thrash, metalcore and sludge influences, giving rise to an utterly compelling formula capable of winning the genre a wider audience. After the digitized-voice intro of "Jennyfer", the record pours tons of bile into our ears, between wild bursts ("Cheerleader Corpses", "Ghost of a Bullet", "Tickets to the Car Crash"), recontextualized Dark Angel mid-tempos ("Trojan Whore", "Strangled with a Halo"), death-metal regurgitations via Mortician ("Heart and Crossbones"), Slayer shadows lurking menacingly behind more structured arrangements ("Mapplethorpe Grey", "Preacher Crawling") and doped-up razor slashes of unhealthy groove ("Naked Trees", "Snuff Film at Eleven", "Sheet Metal Girl").

With no bass in the mix, Hull's guitar takes on the job of infecting this music with omnipresent, powerful phrasing, while the drums punctuate every frame of the delirium with surgical precision, all while always giving the impression of being one step away from brutalist collapse. Rounding out the picture is the inhuman voice of J. R. Hayes, one of the genre's finest vocalists. After the first eighteen tracks, the magnificent "Hyperviolet" marks a clean break. It is, first of all, the record's first long track (the others, up to that point, had topped out at a minute and a half at most), but it's also a more experimental sonic construction, letting the mathematical fury of Discordance Axis and the visceral quality of Today Is The Day make out hard before slowly dissolving into a drone-psychedelic shroud. There's then room for the sludge-doom of "Starbelly", the geometric thrash-grind of "Junkyard God" and the tank-like "Piss Angel", rounding out a perfect final four-track run that caps off a hugely important record, whose lashings of uncontrolled fury would be radicalized on the following "Terrifyer" (2004), though overall less original than its predecessor. "Phantom Limb" (2007), on the other hand, would present numbers that were on average more measured and "human", with an ear firmly tuned to Slayer's songbook. Their latest effort, "Book Burner" (2012), is decent, but not much more.

AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED – Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope (2002; USA)

Agoraphobic Nosebleed caused a stir in 2003 when they released Altered States Of America, a record in which they crammed a full 100 tracks into just over twenty-one minutes of music. It wasn't a record (years earlier, for instance, England's Sore Throat had reached 101 tracks on Disgrace To The Corpse Of Sid), but what piqued the interest of extreme-music fans were shards of cybergrind fired off at the speed of light, in a climate somewhere between the absurd and the surreal. Dominating the scene, besides the samples, was the no-holds-barred duel between the drum machine (often sounding uncannily like an actual machine gun) and Scott Hull's guitar, which produced razor-sharp riffs ready to drill through the ears of us poor listeners. The "altered states" weren't just, geographically speaking, those of a nation now on the brink of collapse (as confirmed by lyrics dedicated to the rot of American society), but also those of the minds of musicians who, just to leave no doubt, indulged elsewhere in pure synthetic deformations, closer to a sickly ambient-noise (take, for example, "Rectal Thermometer", "Bombs with Butterfly Wings", "The Fag vs. the Indian", "Keeping a Clean Kennel" or "Firearms for All Faiths") or to deviant forms of techno-industrial ("4 Leeches (40,000 Leeches)", "Absurd Boast", "Obi Wan Kaczynski"). That record didn't come out of nowhere, though — in fact it drew much of its lifeblood from its predecessor, Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope. According to Village Voice critic Phil Freeman, this work was grindcore's "Paul's Boutique" (Beastie Boys), thanks to its dense outpouring of samples, blast-beats and ramblings often bordering on the incomprehensible.

At that time, Scott Hull was joined by Richard Johnson (bass), Carl Shultz (vocals) and Jay Randall (vocals, sampler, sequencing, electronics). Across the 38 tracks that make up the record, for a total of 33 minutes of music, an experimental cybergrind triumphs, marked by industrial overtones, riffs like bullets, overexcited vocals, chaotic samples, electronic perversions and runaway drum machines. Some friends lent their contributions to a record that, second by second, increasingly resembles an electroshock session: Pete Ponitkoff lends his voice to the offensive "Repercussions in the Life of an Opportunistic, Pseudo-Intellectual Jackass", Brutal Truth's Dan Lilker romps around idiotically on the cover of "his own" "Hang The Pope", Killjoy sinks his teeth into "Machinegun" while Cephalic Carnage's Lenzig Leal materializes among the bloodied gears of "Razor Blades Under The Dashboard". Compared to its more famous successor, Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope is a record in which many of the band's influences are more evident, starting with the Godflesh echoes heard on "Doctored Results" and the thrash-death influences surrounding "Ceremonial Gasmask", moving through the hardcore phrasing of "Manual Trauma" and "Time Vs. Necessity", the recontextualized Black Sabbath of "Grandmother with AIDS" and "Organ Donor", the powerviolence of "Hungry Homeless Handjob", the satanic ambient of "Chalking The Temporal God Module" and the deformed one of "Narcissistic Stimulant", the hallucinated Slayer of "North American Corpse Desecration", the goregrind redone by Ministry of "5 Band Genetic Equalizer" and, finally, the techno of "Fuckmaker". Need we say more?

ANTIGAMA – Intellect Made Us Blind (2002; Poland)

Formed in Warsaw in 2000 on the initiative of guitarist Sebastian Rokicki and drummer Krzysztof "Sivy" Bentkowski, Poland's Antigama debuted a couple of years later with a lethal concentrate of math-grind embellished with jazz accents and packed into precarious progressive structures. Released by Milan's The Flood, Intellect Made Us Blind is a record built on overflowing drumming, forever teetering between chaos and geometry, a guitar churning out claustrophobia and alienation like there's no tomorrow, and a voice (Łukasz Myszkowski) that sounds like the death rattle of a madman desperately trying to untangle the knots in his own mind. A suffocating, sickly production, one that doesn't shy away from psychedelic shadings, does the rest. The record opens quietly: "Pendemorphia", a cinematic low flight that seems to sweep through the ruins of a ghost town. Just the right amount of tension, in other words, before the storm, which begins to break with "A Tendency To Sleep", an eardrum-splitting machine that grinds forward through steel blast-beats, titanic architectures, guitar riffs that seem to mimic the screeching noise of a chainsaw, and atonal discharges of neurotic fervor whose echo will also be felt within the folds of "Filth And Pain", marked by a nightmarish deceleration in which the voice essentially mimics the agony of a terminally ill patient locked in a cold, empty cell... The minute and a half of "Come And Go" spits out bile at full tilt, while "Spare Some Change" is the sound of a strange creature cooked up in a laboratory, half living flesh (grindcore), half synthetic matter (a hybrid of crust-punk and industrial metal). More measured and relatively less cryptic is the design of "Synthesis", which mulls over stop-and-go dynamics and clusters of blast-beats. Built on a powerful structure, "Everything Is Normal" then turns deathgrind into a science-fiction odyssey, complete with a cyber-horror maelstrom of a coda. For its first minute and a half, the framework of "Savior-Vivre Mastas" certainly harks back to the genre's founding fathers (think a cross between Napalm Death and Brutal Truth), but what follows sweeps away any nostalgia, carving out a path toward a triumphant, atmospheric metallic epic.

With the cover of “Fala” (a song by fellow countrymen Siekiera), the band builds a bridge back to their hardcore roots, while the closing improvisation is an ambient-jazz-noise ordeal in which the neurosis of the whole record dissolves into a vat of acid. Even today, the band remains one of the most beloved names on the grindcore scene, thanks to an experimental streak that has essentially stayed intact. If you want more, you might also track down “Discomfort” and “Zeroland”, though both fall short of what still stands as their masterpiece.

BENÜMB – By Means Of Upheaval (2003; USA)

Within the terrifying crossroads of grindcore and powerviolence, California's Benümb stand as one of the most threatening and convincing bands around. Active since 1994, the band has gone through numerous line-up changes, releasing several split albums and appearing on various genre compilations, before finally debuting on the long format with the intense but still unpolished “Souls Of The Martyr” (1998). Withering Strands Of Hope would do better, defusing, across its 32 tracks (barely over twenty-three minutes of music), sonic devices that in only a couple of cases run past the one-minute mark — confirming a destructive intent wholly bent on making its point immediately and at any cost. In 2003 came their masterpiece, By Means of Upheaval, recorded, fittingly, at the Tsunami Sound studios in Moss Beach. How else to describe the barrage unleashed by the band if not as a full-blown natural catastrophe? While the lyrics focus on the themes of American neocolonialism and its violent campaign of oppression — above all economic — aimed at spreading the seed of an ever more unbridled capitalism, the music of By Means Of Upheaval explodes in the ears like a tornado of shredded, layered guitars forming an asphyxiating shroud of terror, while the drums hammer away possessed and the vocals cling with all their strength to the vortex of notes and rhythmic drives. In short, the opening “Cesspool of Human Sewage” wasn't lying: we're in Hell, and we'll probably stay there forever. It's not easy to account for individual tracks here, because this is the classic album-as-experience, to be savored from start to finish, letting its shards of rage and virulent extremism wash over you. Still, just to throw out a few hooks: “Mesmerized By The Insignificant” crumbles into a dissonant scrawl of strings, “Judicial Failure” slows down and skids terrifyingly like a tank out of control, “Devour, Discard, Advance” tells us, in a clean twenty-eight seconds, why you start a band when you're pissed off at the world and why music can save your life (for those who don't believe it, no point explaining: they're already dead), “Swallow Conviction/Defecate Guilt” fools around with a riff that reeks of a piss-take, the twelve seconds of “S.A.N.D.E.R.S.” trigger a feedback short-circuit, mangled while “Medicated Into Submission” fills us in on their ideas about doom. Needless to say, you'll have to crank the volume up until the walls come down.

CURSE OF THE GOLDEN VAMPIRE – Mass Destruction (2003; Inghilterra)

Justin Broadrick has never forgotten his time with Napalm Death, and the grindcore virus has often resurfaced to make its case. In 2003, spurred on by another superior mind, Kevin Martin, he found himself involved, under the banner of the Curse Of The Golden Vampire project (which, five years earlier, with the help of that other terrorist Alec Empire, had already released a debut straddling breakcore and free-jazz), in the making of one of cybergrind's most heretical records. The music of Mass Destruction has been described as “scum'n'bass,” where “scum” is really just a veiled way of saying that Napalm Death's first record spun often in the minds of the two English hooligans during the sessions. The title, on the other hand, doesn't mince words, because what the pair cook up across these thirty-six-odd minutes of music is a genuine sonic slaughterhouse, set up to destroy — at least in theory — the capitalist system. “Total Annihilation of Self” kicks things off and you're immediately submerged in hammering blows, nihilistic lacerations and miasmic fumes. “Parasite”, meanwhile, rests on a thrashcore riff spinning in a monolithic loop, while the vocals collide in a whirlwind of bleeding wounds. The disintegrating whirlpools and clearings of anguished torment of “Iron Ghetto Man Crusher”, the blended delirium and nightmares of “The Myth of Democracy” and “United Snakes of America”, the infernal lashings of “Mind Vs. Body” and the surreal frenzy of “Vermin” are matched by the free-jazz ghosts swirling behind the digital-core walls of “Manslaughter”, the increasingly chaotic and all-consuming scores of “End Civilization” and “Insecticide”, the grind spit resolved into a violent robotic expectoration on “Sewer Life”, and the gargantuan lurches of “Oil Money”. This is a record, rest assured, that will blow the minds of fans of Berzerker, Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Genghis Tron.

THE LOCUST – Plague Soundscapes (2003; USA)

Despite the diversity of their inspirations (screamo, powerviolence, new wave, death metal, Japanoise, even a trace or two of Rock In Opposition), America's The Locust can rightly be seen as a mutant offshoot of cybergrind. Actually, if we want to follow the band members' own indications, we should be more precise and write: spazz-(cyber)noise-grind, that is, an extremely noisy and chaotic grindcore, made up of sudden tempo changes, assorted synthetic madness and an almost unbearable aggressiveness. It's music that, according to guitarist Bobby Bray, tends to mirror the way our brain functions when faced with an ever faster and more complex society. Led by bassist and vocalist Justin Pearson, The Locust love performing live dressed in suits that turn them into full-on humanoid insects, ready to descend on the crowd with a barrage of ultra-condensed tracks, mixing sci-fi Moog regurgitations, flayed guitars, spastic bass lines, blunt blast-beats, piercing screams and heavy doses of black humor.

At the very start of their adventure — we're in San Diego, 1995 — the band was still deep in its powerviolence infatuation, as shown by the split shared with Man Is The Bastard. It would only be with the release of the 1997 “Locust” EP and its self-titled LP that their sound would take on the “definitive” shape we're interested in here. On the EP, though, there was still little room (not even ten minutes) to let loose the overflowing creativity that, just a year later, would shake up the American underground. Twenty tracks in a little over sixteen minutes, from the computer-music inserts amid the blast-beats — like punches to the face — of “Moth-Eaten Deer Head” to the hyper-technological modern-dances of “An Extra Piece Of Dead Meat”, from the geometric stride of “How To Build A Pessimistic Lie Detector” to the lumbering cadences of “Twenty-Three Full-Time Cowboys” (after all, with those uniforms, they must have had Devo on the brain a little!), from the electro inserts of “Dog Without A Collar (Run Over Red Rover)” to the noisecore annihilation of “Normal Run Of The Muck (Compensation For Conversation)” and “Well I'll Be A Monkeys Uncle”, passing through a sci-fi take on Naked City with “Nice Tranquil Thumb In Your Mouth”, the wave-symphonic scuffles of “The Perils Of Believing In Round Squares” and the idiotic counterpoints of “Kill Roger Hedgecock”. An absolute madhouse.

The formula would be perfected on the following Plague Landscape, a record that in some ways is even wilder and harder to pin down, with The Locust delivering instrumental performances that thoroughly justify all the labels that, over the years, have been used to describe their music. Plague Soundscape is, then, a perfect example of the spazz-(cyber)noise-grind mentioned earlier, here certainly more experimental and futuristic, almost as if it were a cross between Discordance Axis and Melt Banana locked inside a DeLorean. Even production-wise, the record is more polished than its predecessor. With the help of Alex Newport (already known for his work with Melvins and Sepultura), the band radically changed its approach to recording, spending far more time in the studio. “At least at first, it was genuinely crazy,” Pearson recalls, “spending three days choosing the right drum sound, when in the past, in that same span of time, we would have recorded and mixed an entire album...”. What we hear, then, is a sonic roller coaster (or rather, to paraphrase their own words, a catastrophic car crash — but with keyboards! (!)) that, across its roughly twenty-one minutes, slaps our ears with lightning-fast mathematical exchanges, increasingly unhinged synth games, rhythmic irregularities, sudden bursts of madness, dizzying accelerations, instant stop and gos, robotic flashes in outer space against monsters attacking earth (as in “Pickup Truck Full of Forty Minutes”), lopsided chants, right up to the pure abstract delirium of a track like “Can We Get Another Nail in the Coffin of Culture Theft?”. Hard to ask for more!

HEAD HITS CONCRETE – Thy Kingdom Come Undone (2004; Canada)

“Music is healing. It is. Our healing, obviously... Playing with all that energy, doing it in the most intense way possible, is tremendously liberating for us.”

These are the words of Darcy Bunio, guitarist of Head Hits Concrete, a Canadian outfit that, between 1999 and 2004, wrote some of grindcore's most visceral, chaotic and annihilating pages. The band, founded in a Winnipeg basement by vocalist Mike “Soiled Depends” Alexander, never managed to record a proper full album, settling instead for a demo tape, three EPs and a couple of split albums (with the Dutch My Minds Mine and the American Bodies Lay Broken). All of that material can now be found in one place thanks to Thy Kingdom Come Undone, a compilation assembled just a few months after the band's split by Crimes Against Humanity Records. And, indeed, it really would have been a crime against humanity to let that material fade into obscurity.

Of all the bands examined here, Head Hits Concrete is probably the most overlooked, almost as if the marginalization the band experienced (partly due to a radical political ideology) during its first incarnation (the band did reform, first for a tour with Brutal Truth and then, last year, to release the 7" “Hollowed Out Human Husk”) had never fully lifted its weight off them. In any case, for anyone who has had — or will have — the pleasure of crossing their path, the music alone is enough to shatter the wall of silence, thanks to a triumph of anarchic, feral brutality that often evokes, running through the ears, a glorious liaison between Discordance Axis (the structural complexity beneath the impenetrable surface, the dissonant yet geometrically inclined guitar work, the lyrics vomited rather than sung) and Blowhole's “Free Metal”. To think about the music of Head Hits Concrete (a name the band picked while listening to the identically titled track by The Locust) means reckoning with a deafening roar organized into distinct blocks of meaning. Which is to say that behind their seemingly disjointed scores, apparently lacking any clear direction, there's real logic at work, so the ear has to stay sharp and taut, almost as much as their music itself. From turbulent mixtures of skins, strings and mangled syllables emerge nebulous question marks or infinitesimal melodic temptations (“Letter To The Editor”), minimalist whirlpools (“Racial Warrior”), stunning slow-downs (“Apparatus”) or unison phrasing (“Disgrace Land”), neurotic accelerations (“Dead Children, He Laughed”, “The Practical Impossibility of Denying Emotion”), the whirling guitar interplay of “Of This Divide”, the suffocating blast-beats and flares of agony of “(Your Name Here) Eats Fucking Lead”, but also the “math” fragmentations of “Stabbed at 6, News at 11” and “Hole In The Head” (the latter with sludge-doom overtones), the harmonic collapses of “Intent Action Effect” and blood-soaked anthems like “Mechanical Separation”. Elsewhere, the sound turns darker and more claustrophobic, taking aim at an enraged version of Assück (“Day One”), or settling into garage-punk territory (“Bottom Lining”), which at times harks straight back to the genre's earliest days, when the very word “grindcore” was still just a mirage in Mick Harris's mind (“Fraud History and Market Economies”, “Penal Abolition”). The shape-shifting noise (its ecstatic transcendence, one step from chaos) of “The Pastors Cock Is in My Mouth (Hooray!)” hints, between the lines, at the harsh-noise extremism of “Jubilee” and the pure nihilistic wreckage of “Mitakuye Oyasin Demo” and “Neo Nazi Public Execution” (something halfway between Fear Of God and Harry Pussy). And yet, despite all this racket, the guys don't take themselves too seriously. Isn't that a raspberry at the end of the last track?

BLOCKHEADS – Shapes of Misery (2006; Francia)

France's Blockheads hail from Nancy, where they formed in 1992. Initially drawn to death metal, they gradually drifted toward crustcore before veering into grindcore under the influence of Napalm Death. Many months of rehearsals produced a demo (“Haashaastaak”) that began circulating their name in the right circles, so much so that in '94 they found themselves opening, as a support act, for Loudblast and Carcass. The following year came “Last Tribes”, a self-produced debut released on their own label, Blockheads Tribe. The record is a punk-grind assault carried out blade in hand, while the lyrics show that these guys are anything but naive, taking fierce stances against the atrocities of the modern world. After “Watch Out”, in 2002, having signed to Bones Brigades Records, “Human Parade” marked the beginning of the more mature phase for a band that had by then settled into a five-piece made up of Xav (vocals), Antoine (guitar), Nico (drums), Pay (bass) and Fred (guitar). Hardcore spices were added to the grindcore, while the crust leanings survived, giving the whole thing an often imposing, claustrophobic feel, with tracks that don't shy away from mid-tempo structures, as heard in “It Will Eat You” or “(...)”.

It would only be with Shapes Of Misery, though, that Blockheads could truly call themselves satisfied, thanks to some twenty tracks in which all their influences come together into a devastating, furious mosaic, starting with the relentless massacres of “Bow Down”, “Borders” and “Misery”, which push toward the genre's outer limits through an all-or-nothing approach that, while leaving no room for second-guessing or half-measures, still enriches the tracks with feverish mid-song breaks (“Fuck Off And Die”), epic moments of release that materialize for just a few seconds amid the storm (“Despair”), or hymn-like barricades urging you never to give up (“Business Intelligence”). Seven full years would then pass before we'd see them in action again. And while “This World Is Dead” is a record of consolidation, it certainly doesn't bore and doesn't cut any corners, gritting its teeth and shouting out the name of Nasum.

GENGHIS TRON – Dead Mountain Mouth (2006; USA)

Although often lumped in with cybergrind, America's Genghis Tron are a wild card even within that genre, moving between sonic territories that are often quite far apart from one another. The only one raised on a strict diet of metal (grindcore and black metal, to be precise) is guitarist Hamilton Jordan, while Mookie Singerman (vocals and keyboards) spent his teenage years focused mostly on post-hardcore, with a particular soft spot for Drive Like Jehu, and Michael Sochynsky (keyboards and drum machine) was for a long time an IDM and electronic-music devotee. When the three decided to share their passions, they spontaneously felt the urge to play something together. At that point, the only thing that could possibly come out was something like electro-cyber-grind/spazzcore! In short, what you can hear on Dead Mountain Mouth, their debut album released in 2006 on Relapse Records. Their name had already begun circulating in the right circles thanks to the EP “Cloak Of Love”, though the sound wasn't fully mature yet.

Besides bringing to mind an IDM version of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, the record was also clearly looking to The Locust, drawing from both bands the idea of an explosive mix of electric brutality and synthetic delirium, as shown by the very first gut-punch of opener “The Folding Road”, which, in rapid succession, throws down a brief prelude of electronic bleeps, unstoppable jolts of atomic grind, tracking shots dominated by sinuous Moog waves and a pulsing techno beat. On “Chapels”, the spazzcore snarls bring to mind Frodus trapped inside a blender, while the emotional unease of the paranoid ballad “From The Aisle” surprises, incredibly suspended somewhere between the most listless Neurosis and the alienated Neil Young who used to lurk in certain dark Grifters universes. Somewhere between desperate screamo and fourth-hand electro-clash moves the title track; hyper-grind and machine-gunned beats, meanwhile, make “White Walls” a breathtaking concentrate of ferocity, capable of unsettling Atari Teenage Riot aromas, partly diluted by an electro coda complete with melodic flashes. Placed at the midpoint of the record, the instrumental “Badlands”, with its more relaxed phrasing, cuts in two an increasingly fearsome, rock-crushing monolith. The extremism of “Greek Beds” then continues the infernal journey, stacking up adrenaline surges, thrash-beats and industrial/death, only partly stripped bare by the perfectly synth-pop-style intro and, later, by the doom brooding of “Asleep On The Forest Floor”, still haunted by Mookie's delirious screams. The grand finale is entrusted, instead, to “Lake Of Virgins”, a last bastion of violence steeped in desperate melancholy. Two years later, “Board Up The House” would offer less schizophrenic solutions, leaning further into the melodic side of their songwriting.

LAST DAYS OF HUMANITY – Putrefaction In Progress (2006; Olanda)

The Dutch Last Days Of Humanity deserve a place of honour in the history of extreme music for creating one of the most violent records ever made, Putrefaction In Progress, a record that set a point of no return in the definition of so-called gorenoise, the ultimate outpost of the long exchange of favours between grindcore and noisecore.

The band's original core took shape in the autumn of 1989, when bassist Erwin de Wit and singer Hans Smits, regulars at the Soos Plock youth centre in Volkel, where they came into contact with grindcore culture, decided, inspired by Fear Of God, Napalm Death, Anal Cunt and Seven Minutes Of Nausea, to experiment on their own with those aberrant sounds. It was at Soos Plock itself, on 30 December of that same year, that the two got the chance to perform live. Last Days Of Humanity had officially been born. At that time, their music was nothing more than a terrifying concentrate of voices and guitars filtered through pitch-shift, as shown by the early demos, above all "Human Atrocity", recorded with the other bassist Dennis Dekkers and drummer Glenn Jagers in the studio of a bluesman who had to down quite a few beers to come to terms with what he was hearing: more or less something that instantly turned Napalm Death into a boy band. What was most terrifying were the vocals filtered through a Digitech Whammy FX pedal, which lowered their pitch by one or two octaves, turning them into an infamous bark: "Exactly what I was looking for! A voice that sounded like the scream of a pig," Smits would later say. After recording splits with the German Vulgar Degenerate, the Belgian Confessions Of Obscurity and the Swedish Rakitis, the band only managed to release its first official record in 1998, recording it in just two days.

"The Sound Of Rancid Juices Sloshing Around Your Coffin" is a deranged, bestial ode to Carcass's Reek Of Putrefaction, translating into obtuse, deliberately ugly music, made of pitch-black atmospheres, sickly riffs, gurgling vocals, chaotic blast-beats and even noisecore explosions, as in "Submassive Obliteration", "Liquidized Disgorgement" or "The Smell Of The Dead". In some cases ("Slithered Limbs", "Hacked Into Red Mush", "Consumed In Gore") the band also tries to give its scream of disgust and pain a bit more structure and detail, perhaps drawing on memories of Impetigo ("Cannibalistic Remains", "Putrid Mass of Burnt Excrement", "A Reeking Pile Of Septic Brainfluid"). At the close, however, "Festering Fungus Infection", with its more pronounced groove, seems to anticipate what we would hear two years later on Hymns Of Indigestible Suppuration. With Smits out of the picture due to personal problems, the line-up at that point included the usual de Wit alongside a second vocalist, Bart Bouwmans, drummer Marc Palmen and guitarist William Van De Ven. Refining the formula of the previous record, Hymns Of Indigestible Suppuration presents more polished, better-produced tracks, marked by more coherent songwriting. That said, the level of brutality hasn't dropped at all — quite the opposite! It's precisely this attention to detail that ends up highlighting the sheer explosive force of the whole, letting every instrument emerge properly, without burying its contribution under waves of distortion or clusters of out-of-control frequencies. The first forty seconds of the record are absolutely unforgettable: a pig's grunt (well, the filtered vocal...) and a woman's lascivious moans seem to foreshadow some out-of-the-ordinary coupling, only to be buried under a gore-grind jolt that sweeps everything away without mercy. "48th Cut" is a genuine anthem, if goregrind has ever had one! The band's boundless hatred finds worthy sonic counterparts in the epic moves of "Intoxicated" and "The Taste Of Festering Vomit", amid the increasingly disturbing circles of hell of "From Flesh To Liquid Mess", "Orgasmic Abortion" and "Purulent Odour In Stoma", while some rather... erm... friendlier passages manage to break through, despite the titles doing everything they can to induce nausea, in "Acute Palatable Hemorrhage" or "Perforated Festered Scrotum". All the tracks stem from a crossing of Napalm Death's dizzying accelerations, the groovy cadences of Cock and Ball Torture and the noisecore of Anal Cunt. The following five years passed between splits, appearances on various compilations and the release of a live album ("The XTC of Swallowing L.D.O.H. Feaces", recommended only for the truly diehard fans).

These were years in which the band was working towards a new sonic direction, effectively perfecting the stylistic devices of gorenoise, a merciless deformation of goregrind that resolves into a sonic flow bordering on atonality. Even though Last Days Of Humanity themselves had been, perhaps unknowingly, among the forerunners of this subgenre with the demo "Human Atrocity", the first conscious examples of gorenoise date back to the mid-Nineties, a period in which Adam Rotella (from Hauppauge, New York State) began producing repulsive musical waste under the moniker Anal Birth. Records like "Infant Butchering" or "Chopped Up Infant Cunt" are genuine musical infernos where every sound source is literally disfigured by a nihilistic sneer. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the protagonists of the harsh-noise scene of the last decade had listened to them on the sly, maybe on the toilet. As for Last Days Of Humanity, it would above all be drummer Marc Palmen's passion that pushed them towards the gorenoise totem. Starting in 2002, Palmen began recording a number of cult tapes under the monikers Biocyst ("Gastrojejunostomy" dates from 2002, three quarters of an hour of digestion captured live), Faces Of Gore and Urine Festival. This new direction would first take concrete shape in the 2004 split shared with the Brazilian Lymphatic Phlegm, even though the results were mediocre. A year later came the Ep "In Advanced Haemorrhaging Conditions" (2005), announced as the band's last gasp before splitting up. In a scant eight minutes, Last Days Of Humanity presented their extremely violent take on gorenoise, but it was only a foretaste of what we would hear a year later on the legendary Putrefaction In Progress, which crams 41 tracks into a scant twenty-five minutes of music (with one exception, every track (?) runs between 6 and 55 seconds). Despite having announced their split months earlier, the Bones Brigade managed to be talked into promising one last studio record. For the occasion, singer Erwin De Groot was shown the door and Hans Smits was called back in.

Somewhere I read that Putrefaction In Progress is not a record to be listened to, but to be endured. Exactly. You can't approach a record like this thinking you can master it, perhaps rattling off the usual prejudice-laden platitudes. Instead, you have to surrender to its inhuman, hypnotic sonic holocaust. Because that's what this is. A sonic holocaust that turns the entire goregrind tradition into a terrifying scene of destruction, essentially pushing the sound that Carcass had defined in the late Eighties to its most extreme consequences. After Putrefaction In Progress there is only the genre's flatline. No breaks, no lyrics... Only blast, blast and blast: a terrifying wall of noise...: these were the words that accompanied the record's release. It was more than a warning. Much like the cover photo, for that matter: a corpse's torso on which the signs of putrefaction are more than evident. And so, the music of these Last Days Of Humanity is simply the soundtrack to that repulsive process. A process that begins the moment life gives way to death, the moment the body turns into a corpse, into what, to put it in Jankélévitch's terms, is no longer a human being but an unnameable scrap, a filthy residue. Following this logic, then, it's worth arguing that this Dutch band's goregrind is no longer what we knew, but its final sediment, its terminal precipitate, its ruinous collision with raw, naked noise. Last Days Of Humanity put goregrind's corpse on display, generating a brute sonic mass, an agonised distillate of mechanical obsession (the metronomic, hyperkinetic drumming) and abnormal chaos (the filthy pulp that results from the clash between one of the most terrifying voices ever to appear on record — which, indeed, no longer needs words ("no lyrics"), only endless variants of the primordial scream — and the guitar's "all-consuming" riffing). But it's a chaos that hides structures, that invites a broader view. Every single track, then, is just one piece of an overall design that, on more than one occasion, if you fall into sync with these monsters, can even push you towards ecstatic exaltation. That said, listening on headphones is not advised. Better to position yourself right between the stereo speakers, because a record like this has to be "lived" with your whole body... not just listened to with your ears...

Compared to the Ep "In Advanced Haemorrhaging Conditions", the production here is more on point, as shown right away by the forty-two seconds of "Covered With Faeces As Decoration", a manifesto track that, while retaining something of the groove of Hymns Of Indigestible Suppuration (the same goes for "The Beauty Of Perfection In Sensible Cruelty", "Sexually Imminent Perverted Deviant", "Deliberate Full Corporal Slicing With A Cleaver", "Continual Septic Waste"), nonetheless proves to be well beyond those standards, aimed as it is at a catastrophic minimalism that, in any case, doesn't seem to invite pure and simple nihilism so much as a ruinous, violent palingenesis.

Beyond the infernal enclosure built by Van De Ven's guitar (tuned to ever-lower pitches and mostly intent on generating swarms of insidious harsh-noise, only occasionally punctuated by some more recognisable figure), the bass of Rogier Kuzee — pretty much buried in the mix regardless — and the drums (though perhaps it would be better to say the snare...) of Marc Palmen (whose performance comes across as a payback against drum-machine devotees, as well as the irrevocable apotheosis of the blast-beat, amid a delirium of cymbals getting smacked around — because, if in the beginning there was the blast-beat, it's only right that we return to the blast-beat with "infinite" devotion — and "Infinitive Putrefaction in Progress" is in fact the title of one of the tracks here!) — amid all this churn the unspeakable barks-shrieks-crashing vocals-screams-liquefied growls-horrifying bellows and curses (what else, really?) of Smits stir and thrash, in an inexorable vortex into which converge all (and I mean ALL) of the genre's vocal atrocities (a few names?: from the Carcass trio to Robot of Gore, from Jaro of Dead Infection to André Luiz of Lymphatic Phlegm, by way of Rikard Jansson of Regurgitate, Edgar of Disgorge and the Artur/Pierścień duo of Squash Bowels). In the midst of these terrible post-mortem snapshots/splinters, there are lightning-fast breaks like gulps of poison ("Visible Stains Slashes & Marks Of Self-Disgust", "In The Wards Of Large Scaled Decompositions"), obtuse instrumental digressions (once again "Infinitive Putrefaction In Progress"), zombie-charges ("A Delightful Scenario Of Depravity", "A Demonstration In Disassembling The Bodily Numbless"), stop-and-go through the shredder ("Immersing The Body In A Cesspool Of Lye As A Satisfying Method"), satanic maximalism ("The General Attributes For Partial Trunk Separation", "Disconnected The Cranium With A Sense Of Peculiar Interest"), lightning-quick accelerations like epileptic fits of depravity ("Fragrant Facial Purulence"), doom-tinged glimpses steering towards quasi-symphonic scenarios ("Slithered Limbs (Adorable Congestion Of Body Remnants)"), guttural accumulations on the brink of drift ("Persuaded In Legalized Cannibalism", "Behold The Freshness Of Tenderised Human Meat") and, then, THE DRIFT, the point of no return within the point of no return, the definitive short circuit, the destruction's single unbroken shot, moment after moment: "A Divine Proclamation Of Finishing The Present Existence", three minutes and eleven seconds of the purest journey to the end of the night, with Marc Palmen pulverising his snare. Ecstatic exaltation, as mentioned a little earlier. Exactly. Ecstatic exaltation, on a definitive record.

DEPHOSPHORUS – Axiom (2011; Greece)

Astrogrind: put that way, it sounds like a gamble, almost a paradox. And yet, if you've made it this far, you should have realised, even just in passing, that grindcore isn't simply brute force and speed, but that many of its most interesting pages have been written precisely by bands ready to widen the spectrum of possibilities. Well, the Greek Dephosphorus are just among the most recent champions of this drive to rewrite the rules of the game, without thereby disowning the genre's founding fathers. The people behind this Athens-based project (guitarist Thanos Mantas and singer Panos Agoros) are thus ready to revisit the genre with massive doses of postcore, black metal and noise (Neurosis, Unsane, Leviathan, Swans, Godflesh and Dødheimsgard are just some of the "other" influences they like to cite when asked to reveal the ingredients of their music). What makes it all unique, though, is a cosmic feeling that emanates from every one of their tracks, an aspect that also justifies the choice of moniker, which refers to a deity of space whose purpose is to seek the meaning of existence, only to end up trapped in endless wandering. Now, at first they were meant to be called Phosphoros, but then, remembering Mayhem's "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas", they decided to add the particle "de", settling the matter with a definitive Dephosphorus. Despite having released two further records after their debut Ep (the interesting "Night Sky Transform" and the uneven "Ravenous Solemnity"), it's to that very Ep that one must return to get the exact measure of the band's style.

In the seven tracks that make up Axiom, in fact, there's everything you need to explore this umpteenth reworking of grindcore, one able to stay balanced between the adrenaline-fuelled charge of its origins and the hallucinated intensity of post-experimentation. The calling card is called "Collimator": wild breaks, torrents of distortion, dissonant flashes and astral detours. "Continuum" confirms some excellent guitar work and overflowing drumming (Nikos Megariotis), while the title track, having taken its running start from thrash, presses hard on the accelerator of postcore vertigo. Amid this uncompromising layering, the masterpiece "Indulge Me In Silence" even sneers over the corpses of black metal and crust-punk, while Agoros's voice (a brutal rasp that desperately erupts in choked regurgitations, somewhere between Luc Lemay of Gorguts and Martin van Drunen of Pestilence/Asphyx) spews venom left and right. The record closes in glory with the call to arms of "The Long Crossing", which back then seemed to transfigure the rage of Athens' streets into screams and savage riffs, mirroring a country on the edge of the abyss.

At this point, all I can say to you is... enjoy the listen!

(23/11/2014)

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