Baltimore’s Codex Orzhova are a highly original act.  Whether you want to call them mathcore, deathgrind, Nintendocore, Robotron/Defender grind noise, I feel Baja Blasted is the most original album for 2020.  The band released a self-titled album 2 years ago, however this album contains some of those songs and I am unsure if that first […]

For years I have seen the Collision band logo and never investigated them until now. They hail from The Netherlands and stated in 2000. They have several albums under their belt and The Final Kill is their newest release-a 7 song ep. Collision plays a hybrid blend of thrash-crossover mixed with brutal grindcore. When I […]

Have you seen those “Gonna tell my kids this was…” memes? Here’s a pretty good one. Here’s another OK example. This one is just, well, perfect. Anyway, if SOMEHOW I make it through this shit show and haven’t been rendered impotent by nuclear fallout or Lysol injection or whatever other goddamn plague is waiting on […]

Nothing like a little world chaos and a global pandemic to really get the blood pumping, amiright?! Maybe it’s just the lingering threat of societal collapse talking, but I think crust and grindcore is really on the cusp of having a moment. It’s that raw mix of anxiety-ridden rage, irremovable pessimism, and willingness to watch […]

I live in a VERY northern part of the US. So far north that if I threw a rock from my front porch, I’m at risk of inciting international hostilities with our French-speaking neighbors to the north. It certainly has some perks! Poutine and smoked meat are both readily available, and I have easy access […]

Sweet Texas watermelon! Has it been two years already? Wow…it really doesn’t seem like a couple of years have passed since Exhumed released their fan and critic praised Death Revenge, but here I am blasting my eardrums as well as my face, clean into oblivion with the aural onslaught that is Horror, Exhumed‘s seventh full-length […]

When word of the this supergroup/side project surfaced earlier this year I immediately pre ordered the album after just hearing one song. And I’m by no means a fanboy Job For A Cowboy or The Black Dahlia Murder, but when vocalist Jon Davy and fellow JFAC guitar cohorts Alan Glassman and Tony Sannicandro team up […]

I’m a little overdue on this one and frankly I didn’t really feel like chiming in with a review on Pig Destroyer’s latest platter of pain until some of the usual hype that comes with their releases died down.  They’re pretty much a love it or hate it proposition for most people at this point […]

Baltimore Maryland’s death/grind band Noisem return after a 4 year album hiatus to bring us Cease to Exist, their third and most devastating album to date. Several things have happened since their monstrous Blossoming Decay album from 2014. Sometimes fame too fast can have effects on a band. When Noisem’s debut Agony Defined came out […]

Misery Index return with their 6th full-length album, Rituals of Power and for me this is the best album, thus far for 2019.  Holy Crap, Misery Index is on fire.  As much as I liked their last album, The Killing Gods, Rituals of Power is more aggressive, upping their death/grind approach to the nth degree!  […]

Plowing their way through England’s Midlands since ’05, The Atrocity Exhibit provides a drippy, gooey take on punk-riddled sludge-grind that feels distinctly, well, English.  There’s a scuzzy take on this genre here that could only come from the UK and it’s a sound purveyed by killer fairly recent bands like Among the Missing, Mistress and […]

Finland’s Galvanizer waste no time in cranking up the Boss HM-2 Pedals and blast-beating your souls away with their debut full length Sanguine Vigil.  Having released some demo material and been around since 2013 these guys could give Rotten Sound or Nasum a run for their money.  I love the cover artwork done by TG […]

If you have ever asked yourself “what happened if black one man black metal was rendered with a classic Swedish death metal guitar tone?”, Frenchman Stephane Thirion is here to answer your question with his self released third album,  A fleur de peau (‘Sensitive’? ‘On edge’?). First off , I was thankful this wasn’t a Kataklysm […]

It’s been damn near 7 years since Belgian grinders Leng Tch’e dropped their last full-length slab of death-y, crusty doomgrind, Hypomanic.  There hasn’t been an original member left in the band since 2007, although these maniacs have stayed relatively true to form sonically over the last 3 records. For me, the filthy highpoint of the […]

Although they started back in 2000 as a black/death act with nods to early Opeth (hence the band name), now France’s Benighted is a filthy, ultra-groovy and much different beast altogether. Most of their albums, including 2011’s excellent (and, for me, list-topping) Asylum Cave, are like being flung around inside a brutal death/grind bounce house packed with […]

Grindcore mainstays Phobia are back with their 6th full length, and on this newest one they made the odd choice to introduce… clean vocals and female gothic influences?!? Ummm… No. This is straight up ass-melting grindcore, and it’s what these guys have been pummeling eardrums with for over 20 years. When you can personify the […]

Cattle Decapitation is a band that has grown a lot on me the past few years.  I wasn’t keen on their early work, but starting with Karma Bloody Karma and continuing with The Harvest Floor, this vegetable-loving four piece have continued to flesh out their crushing style on Monolith of Inhumanity. What is so interesting […]

Catheter?!?  What the hell?!?  It’s been seven years since these guys have dropped a full length, and having not heard much from them at all since then I had written them off for dead.  After doing a little research I found out that they have released two or three splits in that time (depending on […]

Ladies and gentlemen: Napalm Death have entered the building. This is their new album, Utilitarian. It kicks ass, just like their other albums. Go download it, stream it or steal the money from your grandmother to get your hands on a copy. End of review. So what more is there to be said? Why are […]

So the band Liberteer came to my attention after reviewing the recent Beaten to Death album, a grindcore album that was grindcore with a difference, and so is the debut album from Liberteer. Comprised of Matt Widener, the grindcore lineage is certainly here considering Widener’s involvement in the likes of Cretin, Citizen, Exhumed and The […]

You know if I’m reviewing a September 2011 release here in 2012, it has to be good, and holy shit is this good. Hailing from Norway, Beaten to Death consists of a few of Norway’s veteran players from short lived or middle tier bands like Insense, She Said Destroy, oh and drummer who has played […]

So here’s another reason to own a record player (and a cassette player);  Sacred Plague Records. And one of their recent releases  is the second effort from Chico, California’s Black Hole of Calcutta, a noisy, primal punk/grind/hardcore collaboration featuring members of The Makai, Transient and Mammoth Torta. Named after a 1756 incident where 146 prisoners […]

Reviewers tend to get caught up in clever descriptions, mostly because it’s sometimes hard to describe exceedingly typical things. You can’t say, for example, “It sounds like average goregrind” for every average goregrind album you review. That would either be incredibly lazy or the most honest thing a reviewer has ever done, I’m not quite […]

Brutal Truth returned from their extended hiatus in 2009 with Evolution Through Revolution, an angular, violent extension of the sound they developed on 1997’s Sounds of the Animal Kingdom. End Time sees the band unleash a blistering whirlwind of grinding fury, continuing the developments of Evolution with a slightly meatier production and a noisier and […]

Yup. You read right. This death metal/grindcore band from Finland is called Blastanus. Luckily, their second, self-released album is more impressive than their moniker as Collapse delivers 11 songs and 43 minutes of punchy Euro sounding death/grind that should please the fans of Aborted and maybe newer Cephalic Carnage and such. There’s thick, beefy guitars, […]