Though they have been around since 1991/92, and have released a fair amount of demos, this is only the band’s 4 full length album, and its a solid take on brutal death metal with a dash of grindcore. Picture US act Hateplow with a more brutal, Comatose Recordings, death metal approach and you get a good idea of Grog’s competent if hardly ground breaking sound.

Formed by veteran members of the Portuguese scene from acts like (Scent of Death, Decayed, Switchtense, The Firstborn, Neoplasmah) the delivery and execution is confident and competent. The album is 14 songs blazes by in a little over 40 minutes, so it blends grindcore and death metal in both aesthetic as well as style and substance.

There is nothing incredibly memorable about any of the songs, except that they are savagely paced with rarely a let up. The grindcore based riffage and brutal vocals with a few screeches are all violently rendered with a solid productions that’s perfect for the style. Throw in song titles like “Savagery”, “Sterile Hermaphrodite”, “Uterine Casket”, “Gut Throne”, and “Cardiaxe”, there is no mystery as to how the band sounds. It’s pure blunt force trauma. A few grindcore grooves barge their way in once in a while such as start of “Gut Throne” or “Cardiaxe” but they are short lived and steamrolled by blast beats and burps pretty quickly.

There is a album ending curveball in the 6 minute “Katharsis – The Cortex of Doom and Left Hand Moon”, which sounds like a different band altogether with a lurching slower pace and a semi growled spoken word vocal delivery. There is even an acoustic/electronic break. It’s a bit like Napalm Death‘s Diatribes era stuff and does not quite fit in, but I can appreciate the attempt to break the otherwise predictable, if brutal mold.