CEPHALOCHROMOSCOPE

Deterioration (USA) - Paranoia & Violence (2024)

Payback Time This album starts off with a minute-long audio soundbite from the 1987 film, Predator , in which a group of machine gun toting commandos level a Guatemalan rainforest. One particular character exhausts the entire ammo reserve of a handheld M134 Minigun nicknamed, "Old Painless." I can't think of a better way to describe Deterioration —loud, incessant, brutal, devastating. Deterioration is the band that you recommend to your annoying normy coworker when the subject of music comes up and you don'…

TSUBO (Italy) - Capitale Umano (2023)

Teoria Del Complotto My first introduction to Italy's TSUBO was a blind purchase of the band's 2012 release, . ..Con Cognizione Di Causa , through Give Praise Records' old distro. I didn't have any real expectations other than the promise of some form of a grindcore experience. With its stringent vocals and wailing guitars, the twenty track death-grind release made for a sufficient entry to both the band's then fledgling discography and to the T -section of my alphabetized CD media shelf. It would be anothe…

Woundflower (USA) - Misery (2024)

Salt The Wound Before I can tell you the story of Woundflower and their debut full-length, Misery , we will have to first talk about the band Bled To Submission . Blog alumns and friends to The House of Grindcore , Nashville's Bled To Submission released their third and final major release, Bury Them in the Graves They Dug For You , on Nerve Altar Records back in 2021. After a musical career spanning some five years, the band ultimately chose to bury themselves in the grave that they dug by calling it quits soon after the rel…

Blue Holocaust (France) - 13 Flies on Bloodstained Velvet (2024)

We talk a lot about music subgenre around here. Grindcore, powerviolence, noisegrind, goregrind, fastcore, mincecore... Infinite gradations between the basic constituent parts of metal, punk and noise music. Recontextualized through time, location, means, intent, etc. to create differences that wholly change the finished work. Film subgenres work in the same way. First, grabbing pieces from several different larger genres. Then filtering them through context (time period, country, politics, popular culture, film trends, budget, artistic inte…

Suppression (USA) - Spiritual Sepsis (2024)

The bass guitar is the black sheep of the standard rock band configuration. It’s a well-worn saw among rock musicians that the bass exists simply to fill in the audible frequencies not covered by the rest of the band. Bass is considered simple enough that anyone with a shred of musical acumen can pick it up in a pinch. However, some musicians take its black sheep status as a challenge. Groups like Primus invert the usual bass/electric guitar dynamic, with Les Claypool’s lead bass augmented by Larry LaLonde’s adventurous guitar work. In extre…