From the moment you press play on this album, your ass is handed to you, over and over again. There is not time to prepare, no time to catch your breath, before the onslaught begins. It is dissonant at times, it is heavy and brutal always, and it is magnificent.
Grindcore is definitely not something I gravitate to, so I wasn’t sure how I would react to this release. There are enough touches of death mixed in here, though, that I was just floored by this music. This album has been a long time in the works and is most assuredly worth the wait.
The music is violent sounding. I can totally imagine putting this on after a particularly shitty day and just letting it all go by the time you’ve listened through all 12 tracks. Or if you need to go to the gym and just push yourself to exhaustion, put this on your music player of choice and you’ll be wiped in about 30 minutes. Seriously, this sounds like what you’d hear and feel if you stood in the middle of a head on collision between to semis barreling down the freeway. I really wanted to just punch my cat, for no good reason other than I had just listened to this.
Most of the tracks are in the nice, sweet spot in length of between 2 and 3 minutes, perfect for this style of metal. The album is sequenced so there is not even a moment of silence between tracks. Again, unrelenting and unforgiving. The music itself takes small pauses, such as during “Compelled By Mediocrity”. But it doesn’t happen often. Album closer “Resultados” clocks in at over 6 minutes, so obviously the grind slows down a little, but it is still just absolutely brutal.
“The Next Life” also stretches out to three and a half minutes, apparently to show off the fact that these guys can write a mid-paced bruiser of a song as well. It really doesn’t matter though. You know what this music is supposed to sound like, how it supposed to make you feel, what a release it can give you. Murder Construct have crafted an absolute gem of an album, a masterful showing of how very brutal music is supposed to sound. Hell, I’m pretty happy with my life right now and I still just want to listen to this over and over again. My favorite tracks are the aforementioned “Compelled By Mediocrity”, “Feign Ignorance”, and “Dead Hope”. But they are all killer tracks. Just grind it.
- ODIN
