Assück (USA) - Misery Index (1997)

Tracklist:
1. QED
2. Salt Mine
3. Corners
4. Dataclast
5. Blight Of Element
6. Talon Of Dominion
7. Unrequited Blood
8. Wartorn
9. Sum And Substance
10. Riven
11. Reversing Denial
12. Lithographs
13. Intravenous
14. A Monument To Failure
Total running time 15:10

Assück is a band that pushed grind where it hadn't been, to places it didn't know how to reach, no matter how incredible it may seem today that people in the 90s didn't really comprehend that relentless blastbeating could get you, well, anywhere! The trademark thing about Assücking is - the groove? the rhythm? - the organically tight mass of sound that it spews, owing very much to Proctor's (who also played for Discordance Axis when Witte wasn't around) all-out drumming, clockwork snare fills & dissonant, sludgy sing-a-longs, which is why one of the often irreplaceable grind rules shows as clearly as possible without dabbling into noisecore: always the whole album before individual songs. But really, song-lengths considered, that certainly ought to be goddamn obvious from the start - irrelevant to Assück's perplexing yet bulletproof songwriting wrapped in a Morrisound sound (being more or less intertwined with the unmistakable Florida death metal scene) akin to a collapsing skyscraper - and I can't help but feel a general dislike to all the writers, reviewers, whatever, complaining about songs in grindcore being too short and destructive. I mean, go listen to kitschy rock'n'roll; quod erat demonstrandum (eh). The lyrics are cold, untouchable monuments to the machine-aspect of humanity that is civilization: desperate, existentially bleak, yet existing because of an irrational tinge of hope in the first place, the absurd, Sisyphal power of conscious Being, or, more likely, the last bit of animalism left in man - the will to live. Is the daily grind not the reason why we have such great grind albums?

Economics aside, this album is where the Misery Index from Baltimore took their name from, a band that I kind of like, but not really, 'cause I can't comprehend how ultimately generic metal without innovation, without destruction, with guitar solos, came to be under the influence of a band like Assück, the latter often given the already predictable, pretty vapid description of "hardcore kids playing death metal". For fuck's sake, they're not playing hardcore or death metal - they're playing GRIND, a genre with potential much too intense to be infinitely tangential to its mom & dad genres. Is it not obvious, even natural, that a violent uprooting of oneself happens toward emancipation? Assück, here, is one of these progressions.

"Only one sunrise will tell." (Mediafire)

You know, Plutocracy have a song titled "Suckass", possibly poking fun at their Assücking palls. Also, today my age counts twenty according to the Gregorian calendar, but to hell with time and all that shit. Along with general blastbeat enthusiasm, a few Cephscope staff releases will be posted before New Year's Eve, while the annual year-in-retrospect post might be expected a bit later (from me, at least).