We’re going to do something a bit different today – I’ve been joined by Janice from Heavy Blog HR. She’ll be monitoring the content I’m contributing and, if we’re lucky, she might pipe in with her sanitary, milk’n’cookies thoughts. Grind, powerviolence, cursing, and quality TV shopping – you’ll find them all in this week’s super sick edition of Grind My Gears. Make sure you keep your office computer locked or I will infect it with pornogrind viruses.
Ultra-Fast Crust Convenience
Escuela Grind have already been featured in GMG this year – their ridiculously fun PPOOWWEERRVVIIOOLLEENNCCEE EP keeping me entertained for minutes – but the release of this three-track music video from their upcoming LP Indoctrination is just too fucking good not to have as the feature this time around. It’s a shopping channel from grind hell, making just about as much sense as the end of Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive (one guy pulls a rocket launcher out of his spine and the other basically hadoukens the entire planet in response. The tracks are great of course, but it’s all sealed up in this demented, garish package. Can’t wait for the full release in March.
Janice – “This is absurd and, at times, quite problematic. While I understand the violence is meant to be intended as slapstick, I can’t help but worry that young grind fans might make their at-home seppuku kit. My kids definitely will not be watching this shopping channel. I don’t like it, but I can’t fault the production values. No further issues from me”
WAKE Up, Grab A Little Brush and Fucking WAKE Up
It only seems like a hot minute ago when WAKE last released a steamy dose of murky, atmospheric grind from the chilly reaches out of Outer Canadia, but two years on from Misery Rites we’re getting Devouring Ruin. The wall of sound production on new tracks “This Abyssal Plain” and “In the Lair of the Rat King” is pretty devastating, with the guitars cutting through all of the blasting and bombing going on everywhere else. WAKE are so adept at dipping into the dissonant, microtonal attack of Heavy favourites Artificial Brain, and a fresher comparison would be in TEETH. Incredibly technical, savagely intense.
J – “The artwork is very pretty but I don’t quite understand what’s going on. I’m going to press play now and- oh my! This man is positively beastly. He seems to be growling at the rest of his band for not including them in their noisemaking. How long do I have to listen to this for? Four more minutes? How do their arms and legs not get tired playing this? I’m a bit sweaty after that.”
Rest In Powerviolence/THAZ4EVA
Baltimore’s The Heads Are Zeros are apparently no longer a thing. This is shite news. Their deadly melting pot of grind, mathcore, and digital-diarrhoea-down-a-spiral-staircase sounds raised the trio into the same kind of territory as Gridlink and Maruta, but with a more manic edge to everything. This final release – a single microphone live recording – serves as a posthumous flag-raising to the weird and magic sounds the band shat out onto the world. It’s rough as fuck and definitely in stark contrast to the crisp, deadly edges of the band’s recorded material, but it’s still better than your friend’s dad’s cover band. Shout out to the fifteen people half-clapping in each break.
J – “Has anyone told the members of this group that they are meant to play songs AT THE SAME TIME. This is what happens when you give children video games and caffeine. Reminder to self – contact Rockstar Games and Monster Energy. This simply can’t go on.”
Chat Shit, Get Shit On
GMG has been running long enough for me to forget who I’ve covered before, but I have that deja vu feeling I’ve written about Choke before. Maybe I’ve just listened to them. Who has time to keep track of everything they listen to when the average length of a record is less than ten minutes? This new fifteen-minute (yeah, I know – fucking up the average already) spitball from the California powerviolence outfit is rowdy, racuous, and ready to fight your dad in a no-shirt, glass-hands kickboxing match like in the greatest martial arts movie of all time – Jean Claude Van Damme’s magnum opus The Kickboxer. If you can’t get past the title (It’s hard to talk shit when you’ve got no teeth) then you’ve probably never even seen the movie and I don’t want to talk to you anymore.
J – “I don’t what Matt is talking about or who Jean Claus Damage is but I certainly do not enjoy this. Music should be enjoyed with friends and family, not used as a tool for these spiteful, sorry youths. And by Blue Lives when they say “Blue Lives Don’t Mean Shit” I certainly hope they aren’t talking about the brave men and women who serve as our police force. They are here to protect and serve, they mean just as much as anyone else. What kind of question is that? Yes, if you must know, I am indeed a white woman”
So FUCKED You Don’t Even Know It
One day the head honchos here at Heavy Blog are going to realise I just write about the same five or six bands all the time and kick me to the curb faster than one of the blasts on the new FUCKED EP. Made for TV Misery sees Myrtle Beach’s most notorious one-man grinder lean hard into powerviolence structures and beats, leaving some of the more blackened and noisy material in his grubby rearview mirror. There’s still a nice sense of familiarity on this newest cut though – there’s one really short track in the middle that basically builds up one riff and lets it blow up, and then there’s the prerequisite slightly longer track that is a bit more experimental and not just ass-blasting distortion filth. If you haven’t listened to me about FUCKED yet, you never will. Coward.
J – “I’m starting to feel like I was invited here as a joke. This isn’t music. This is white noise and button pressing on a broken keyboard sent straight from Hell. And the name? Awful. How they ever expect to make money with a name as crass as that I can’t understand. I’ve basically had enough. My ears hurt. My eyes are sore. I’ve even pooed a little. And what the heck is wrong with a good TV movie? I’ve enjoyed everything the Lifetime channel has put out for years now. That’s it, I quit.”
We are now looking for a new HR representative. Please send any and all applications to [email protected]. Make the subject line “Grind My Gears – What The Fuck Is Matt Thinking?”.