Opening with a sustained burst of feedback and slowly building noise, Magrudergrind are back, ready to tear off faces with the aptly-titled “The Protocols Of Anti-Sound.” It’s both a statement of intent and reinforcement of their standing in the music spectrum. An intense, grinding force full of blast beats, dirty, slicing riffs and bitter, angry howls, Magrudergrind is the sound of discontent. Short, sharp and gloriously intense fans of Phobia, Pig Destroyer, Insect Warface and Apartment 213 will be sweating through their palms to get at this. Politically aware and pissed off like all good punk messages are delivered single-mindedly and quickly, with as many casualties as possible.
The vocals may be the focal point most of the time, but the drumming is really the star turn in this tornado, able to shift from groove-laden to hyper intense blasts without losing any of its power. The groove may be important, but it’s when Magrudergrind let go into full force, pulverising grind that it really grabs you, especially the thump of that snare being pounded, jagged guitar lines being strewn about like so many worthless company shares.
Other highlights in this quickly, passing shit-storm are the big bass riff during “Assimilated Pollutants,” “Fools Of Contradiction,” which has a great groove right at the start and “Bridge Burner.” In fact, that one is massive sounding, like a bulldozer rumbling around between Admiral Angry, Kylesa and early Mastodon. A slower, intense pulsing creation to what they usually unleash it sits perfectly as it’s got the heft of Godflesh and offers a break from the super fast brutality that’s come before hand and follows soon after. But it’s no respite.
Mixing things up, “Heavier Bombing” opens with a “99 Problems” Jay-Z like hip-hop beat and lazily delivered “gettin’ down with the grind, gettin’ down with the grind, Magrudergrind,” before shredding like a barbed wire explosion. Their use of samples is also excellent, driving home points otherwise missed in the fray, like the uncertainty of identity of “Cranial Media Parasite.” Elsewhere, “Excommunicated” has the intensity and power of Converge, “Rise And Fall Of Empires Past” a brief brick through your front window.
You may see kids at Bring Me The Horizon shows wearing Cannibal Corpse t-shirts and everyone and their kid sister seems to be filling their Deathcore with blast beats and piggy growls but play this for them and they’ll be leaving in tears. There’s no time to be fashionable with these guys – they’d cut your fringe off and shove it up into your guts. Brilliantly uncompromising and thoroughly unrepentant while the rest of the world is wallowing in depression or trying to look for some light at the end of the tunnel, these guys are laying it out straight and telling it as it is.
(This content originally appeared on Blistering.com)