15. Pretty Little Flower - Jackhammering Deathblow Of Nightmarish Trepidation
pretty little flower aka P.L.F. aka pulverizing lethal force (?) are the only 'legacy' grindcore band that really impressed me in 2018. these guys have been consistently good for 20 years now so everyone out there already knows what they're all about, they were doing this shit when i was still downloading weird al songs off napster. fast thrashy riffs and Bryan Fajardo drumming. here's to another 20 years!
14. Durian - Everything Faster Than Everything Else
members of amputee and chainsaw to the face. frenetic grind with 8 songs in 2 minutes. very promising. according to the band there's some yes riffs that they ripped off for this release, i'm not a yes fan so i can't pick them but maybe someone else can?
13. Born Backwards - Demo
named after an assuck song and that's a decent comparison point for their sound too, although this duo have more of an obnoxious noisegrind outlook. raw noisy and stupid, how its supposed to be.
12. Haggus - Gore, Gore And... More Gore
well... it does what it says on the tin. these guys play mince in the vein of agathocles or archagathus except with pitchshifted goregrind vocals (this EP even includes an archagathus cover). there seems to be a lot more slow stomping punk parts compared to, say, archagathus though. these guys also released an LP this year but i prefer this EP. amazing production. only for the severely braindead grind freaks.
11. Incinerated / Landfill - Split
only the landfill side seems to be on youtube but i prefer the incinerated side and mostly want to talk about incinerated. incinerated are so sick, they sound like mortician but with acoustic drums and without the movie samples. all their riffs are basically just a low bass rumbling sound and every single noise the vocalist makes is 'urggh'. it's the best. in 2018 incinerated also released a split with sulfuric cautery which reaches the same heights. the landfill side is good too, straightforward noisy grind with a napalm death cover. ya can't ask for more.
10. Vomi Noir - Toutes les Métamorphoses de la Mort
oldschool noisy goregrind like 80s carcass. pierre from blue holocaust is apparently a member. lyrics are in french but i assume they're disgusting.
09. Melting Rot - Irreversible Surgical Failure
this one has my favourite cover artwork of 2018 i think. boneheaded low-end grind like incinerated or mortician but with more variation in tempo. great production.
08. Caustic Wound - Grinding Terror
thick, sludgy grind. i really enjoy the war-metal-esque pick slides and solos they throw in occasionally. the production and vocals would slot it in with the current wave of cavernous death doom if the songs werent so short and the drums not skittering along at such a pace. one to recommend to your death metal friends perhaps?
07. Flesh Salad - The Flavor Of Failure
i don't know much about this band except they're from ohio (like many good grind bands these days) and there's a member named 'hepatitis steve'. thanks steve! mincegore with a really twangy guitar sound. one for the hemdale and pizza hi five fans. delicious!
06. Altars - Altars
this has an ex-member of in disgust, in my opinion in disgust should be up there in the pantheon of 00s grindcore with insect warfare, wormrot, etc. sorely underrated. anyway, this band has more of a death metal feel, sometimes it reminds me of a beefier morbid angel or terrorizer.
05. Six Brew Bantha - Blight
y'know how when trump won in 2016 every third liberal cretin was saying 'at least there will be some great punk music!' as if:
1. we could somehow get the 00s pop-punk zeitgeist back for "american idiot 2"
2. the punks all liked obama and were peachy happy 2008-2016 just waiting for a republican to be prez again so they could spring into action.
anyway, this album has the hardcore punk attitude and stop-start energy of bands like magrudergrind, yacoepsae, quattro stagioni. labyrinthine marathon songs that have no obvious starting or ending point. these guys have been around for roughly a decade now so they're the second-longest running band in this list after plf i'm pretty sure. this album is all tension and feels like its gonna fall apart at any moment - guitar hooks appear and disappear just as quickly and the lyrics are more akin to a political tract rather than something written to accompany music. the album is book-ended by samples from "Brother, Wont You Join In The Line" by ewan maccoll:
The Government is working. toiling night and day -
Planning your destruction in a scientific way:
They ask for you to trust them and let them have their head,
You'll find you have no problems, but you'll also find you're dead.
kind of weird that i put this album at #5 considering i have a lot to say about it. this album represents the best of grindcore; a frenzied manic leftist punch to the gut in our times of bleakest reaction.
04. Lunk - Reek Of Perspiration
meatheaded morons with a great gimmick. this band is also from ohio and i think one member used to be in pizza hi five. gotta love that snare.
03. Shitgrinder - Eternal Death
australian duo with a very tight and no-nonsense oldschool sound. reminds me of insect warfare or death toll 80k. the production is really pummeling, doesn't just blurr along like many grind releases. i think its the punchy bass drum and snare that makes it sound like the riffs are caught up with the drums and shaking along. catchy and eminently mosh-able.
02. Lurid Panacea - Demo II
this demo is wild. this is the guitarist of incinerated (melbourne victoria, australia) and the drummer of sulfuric cautery (dayton ohio, usa) and i guess they just send each other recordings over the internet (?). maybe with this and all those hagamoto projects coming out lately we're past the point of grindcore 'bands' having to be present in the same country. their first demo was also released in 2018 but this one's better. this reminds me of a goregrind version of an early xbrainiax recording. or its like some tasteless brutal tech-death album except not overproduced and they gotta get through every song in 30 seconds. would probably be held up as some transcendent outsider art geniuses if we lived in a good and funny world.
01. Heinous - The Basement
these guys have been releasing excellent splits, EPs etc for a couple years and the full-length continues that high standard. solid grind with sick slower mosh parts and pitchshifted vocals extremely loud in the mix. reminds me even of non-grind bands like revenge or pissgrave in their single-mindedness and commitment to bad taste. great dissonant guitar solo at the end of the last song which plays like a laughing wink considering its placement on the album. i see heinous have already released a split with SxOxTxE in '19 which is just as nasty as this album. here's to a productive 2019 everyone!
karphead posted:my immediat thought is that i really wish tpaine still posted
yea, ill try to fit in more funny band names / song titles next time
lo posted:i dont really pay attention to grindcore so this is cool. cheers goat man
thanks, writing short blurbs about a band like 'haggus' on rhizzone is inherently funny to me. i need to start thinking about synonyms for 'fast' and 'brutal' for the next time i do this. about 2/3rds of these releases are available for free on bandcamp.
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:08. Caustic Wound - Grinding Terror
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2gU2Vjrnog[/video]
thick, sludgy grind. i really enjoy the war-metal-esque pick slides and solos they throw in occasionally. the production and vocals would slot it in with the current wave of cavernous death doom if the songs werent so short and the drums not skittering along at such a pace. one to recommend to your death metal friends perhaps?
doom chugga doom doom
