If you buy one grind album this year… I mean, I’ll be honest, I don’t really follow grind besides occasionally listening to a record or a playlist here and there. So this is fairly likely to be fairly close to the top of my best of grind releases. But I digress.
Things that are great about “extreme” metal: it’s preposterous; it is fast; it involves shouting a lot; lyrics are best when you can’t understand them; the songs are short. What’s not so great: the airless boy-y humourlessness of it all; guitar people are boring people; fascism.
So what Beaten to Death do very well at is realising that grind is fairly ridiculous and being largely irreverent. No doubt you’ll listen and hear a line from your Napalm Death–Carcass–Extreme Noise Terror sorts to Gore Beyond Necropsy or, y’know… that stuff. But there’s some fairly hilarious gestures here: major keys, jangly bits, a really can’t be arsed bio on their Bandcamp site (“Beaten To Death was created in 2010 by bla bla bla bla released four albums and a bla bla bla bla live shows that bla bla bla hope you do too. Bios are boring. Who gives a shit anyway? All you want is to hear the music, am I right?”). None of the signs of the not-really-hilarious Anal Cunt-style baiting though. There’s a funny thing that happens when they have blastbeats and chuggy grind next to open, almost REM-y major jangly chords where it feels a bit like hanging your head out of a speeding train while someone nearby is playing indie. The whole (very short) album is well into the realm of irreverent but it’s not sloppy — all the playing is exceptionally together, the changes tight, the recording suitably brutal (there’s a really quite disgusting guitar tone throughout). Piss-taking is apparently the order of the day, so calling a track “Grind Korn”, which sounds like a sped-up Korn riff (a bit), then goes all jangly works nicely. Top track title is probably “Catch Twentyfvck”. Or possibly “(Intro To The Next Song)”. Unlike a lot of this kind of fare, there’s just enough to separate the tracks if, like me, this isn’t your bread and butter music — it’s all at the full-tilt, fast, blastbeats kind of level, but there’s an ebb and flow of intensity — while the jangly bits seem like a deliberate piss-take at first, they actually do a good job of providing relief. Ideas don’t seem to get used twice, but there’s none of this bollocksy disingenuously jumping from idea to idea. Different vocal takes are recorded / processed differently enough to give a bit of contrast (which is to say it’s not your bedroom grind affair). Basically, these lads clearly know what they’re doing and sort of don’t give a fuck about what they’re doing (but give a fuck at the right times).If you only buy one grind album this year [etc].
-Kev Nickells-
