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| #FOR FANS OF: Death/Grind |
'New Doomsday Orchestration' showcases two disgusting deathgrind bands whose sounds crash right into you from the first second and refuse to relent through their mind-melting onslaughts of blast beats. Where Mindful of Pripyat has a solid enough approach and balances between grinding and letting the guitar ring out its slight death metal moments, Stench of Profit plays frenetic grindcore closer to the noise side of the spectrum.
This split is a demonstration of why grindcore, despite all its chaotic energy and frantic forms, is not the heaviest of metals in the long run. Though this noisy and blatantly in-your-face music can be some of the fastest in notation and quickest to change pace, its tendency towards structural atonality and constantly ambiguous formlessness in theme lays waste without attempting to pick up any pieces. In Mindful of Pripyat, the general push is to grind down a death metal riff as mercilessly as possible. Stench of Profit attempts to be as offensive an affront to your sensibilities, their tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating description as “ignorant music for smart people” is only halfway correct.
The crazed hammering throughout these songs will eventually decay your patience for this toxic noise. Despite a longer half-life than the band following it, Mindful of Pripyat reminds me of the limitations of extreme grindcore music while at the same time conjures in me a feeling that is all too familiar with writing. Each song is a start. As has been said by smarter people than me, 'beginning is easy and continuing is hard'. Mindful of Pripyat plays one-minute starts to songs with barely ripe riffing ideas intermixed with the same raucous blazing blasts that have been done to death by the likes of Skinless, who has not changed form, and Carcass, that has pupated and exploded from its cocoon of grind to become a fantastic death metal example. Like too many of my own scribblings that will probably never get their own physical forms, Mindful of Pripyat's meager manifestations are a pile of underdeveloped blast-laden mush that has little form and even less direction. I wanted to go through this album because of the fact that I don't listen to enough grindcore. Though that makes me no authority on how to review grindcore, despite my attempt to explore a bit more with this album, it gets to the point that a series of atonal one-minute blasts and ridiculous attempts at feeble structures becomes not metal, but a dysfunctional mesh of worthlessness knitted together thematically only at the end by the sound of a Geiger counter clicking away as though it had something to do with disappointing deluge preceding it. This is no album. It's a page of notes that needs some serious editing, discipline, and time to coalesce into something worthy of the moniker of metal.
Stench of Profit is a bit more measured in its approach despite playing songs that are far shorter than Mindful of Pripyat. Reveling in its migraine-inducing madness, this band's relentless surge starts with slower blasts through seventeen psychotic songs, each faster than the one before. The album rises to a height of intensity, stripping the listener of his sanity through formless frenzied flurries. Even though it's easily noticeable where one song ends and another begins, songs like “Calve Fast”, “Divine Education”, and “The Dance of Deceit”, all clocking in at exactly eighteen seconds long, are the same thing over and over. “No Sense” is the shortest song on this half of the album and is just two blast beats separated by a slight tempo change with two screams behind it. Then again, that's really all that every song is here. There's always one change in each song as relentlessness is met with more of the same relentlessness. This isn't “ignorant music for smart people.” It's ignorant music for morons who are so ignorant that they think they're smart.
As radioactive as the decaying abandoned town of its Chernobyl-infected namesake, Mindful of Pripyat's music is a toxic punishment diminishing slightly slower compared to what Stench of Profit has to offer. The attempt at mindless fun in these two grind albums makes for a combination that shows just how much punishment a dead horse can receive from its petulant abusers. At least it's silent between some of these songs, those moments are the best that this split has to offer. I'm done trying to be nice and open-minded about it. This album is obnoxious crap. (Five_Nails)
