Balatonizer
Occlused in Ottusity
Dark Reign
And on a strictly more underground and raw tip, you have Italian cult grindcore savages Balatonizer. And my god, they perfectly capture the pulpy essence of what grindcore should be. Twenty-seven songs, mostly under a minute in length, raced through and executed with ghoulish abandon. Occlused in Ottusity (don’t ask) takes its cues from the more blood-soaked nether regions of death metal, the hyperspeed punk thrashings of grindcore and horror-obsessed wall of white-noise of gorecore. The antecedents and forefathers of this sound are easy to pick out, and it’s good company: Early Carcass and Napalm Death; Mortician looms really fucking large (probably larger than any other single influence); cyber-speedfreaks Berserker; and the new school of gorecore led by worthies like Mental Horror, Pig Destroyer and Cattle Decapitation. And there’s a huge Suffocation undercurrent running throughout. The band, consisting of vocal, guitar, bass and drum programming (much like the aforementioned Berserker, early Mortician and industrial music), use electronics to push their serrated assault beyond the bounds of humanity into this hyper-violent red zone, where the disparate instrumentation blurs into one long scream of pain. Bass is a distorted body blow, guitars race along, careening out of control, drum machines seemingly short out every 20 seconds (as the song ends), and vocals switch between gruff intestinal grunts (Suffocation) and high pitched rasped screams (like classic Napalm). A very interesting point of departure for Balatonizer and specifically on Occlused in Ottusity, though they’re steeped in the blood-spurting gorecore aesthetic, the thematic bent they take is less Zombie Holocaust and more social realism. From Palermo, Sicily, the requisite intra-song soundbytes are samples of local villains going about their nefarious work. And the lyrics? My friend, there are no lyrics, just brute shrieks and groans. Much like the great Obituary. Highly recommended for fans of the vile things in life. And music.
Devil Doll Records: http://www.devildollrecords.com
