Archagathus / Haggus - Split Tape

Haggus are easily one of my favourite bands right now, simply for having the perfect blend of dank mincegore nailed down to a fucking tee. I love goregrind that you can dance to that also doesn't have songs about penises and bondage. Each to their own, and I do like a lot of groovy goregrind stuff, but it is currently over-saturated to fuck with a legion of shit bands. Haggus is brutal, yet with that mince/crust approach that brings with it the reality of death; the stench of gore! Fucking hanging!

Archagathus are now at the forefront of their particular niche of mincecore/goregrind, pushing that slightly restrictive variant of grind forward with a whole farmyard of bizarre vocals, not to mention perplexing and deeply, satisfyingly weird grind.

Out on cassette, and thanks to Grindfather for throwing a copy in when I bought a shirt a few months ago.

Halitosis - Decline Of Neural Development

Oh man this is some sick shit! Welcome to the world of dental-based Hungarian mincing goregrind, friends. Imagine the drill has slipped, and now it is just boring into your gums at full pelt, all the while the dentist is blasting some Agathocles on the stereo in the background; hopefully that will give you some idea of what we are dealing with here. We played/caught two shows with these guys on the Dzhumagaliev tour; once in Slovenia and then in their home-country of Hungary. Keepin' my eyes peeled for more of their shit - this is fuckin' class.

Couple Skate - Ice Skate Lobotomy

Man, this shit is dank - it sounds just like Paucities smashed into early Regurgitate; dirgy, muddy, demo-quality grinding mush with bottomfeeder sludgy shifted vokills. I love all this "new" American-wave goregrind shit that has all this mincecore edge to it - it's fucking class, and Couple Skate is easily one of the best of the bunch (gotta give props to Haggus and Hyperemesis for coming joint first too).

The demo / EP is only six tracks long (one of which, perhaps expectedly, is a Regurgitate cover) but who gives a shit when the stuff is this tasty? Time to hunt down some more Couple Skate stuff, I think...

Agathocles - This Is Not A Threat... It's A Promise!

(I found this review after salvaging a HDD from an old laptop. It was originally written in 2013)

Ahh, the simpler things in life...the laptop open browsing the world wide web, a beer next to my right hand (and several more chilling in a washing up bowl full of ice), and my latest Agathocles LP purchase spinning on the platter. I've said it before, but you really don't need to fix what is broken. Agathocles have been peddling the same unique brand of grind for a good while now, and This Is Not A Threat.... is one of the more recent long-playing offerings in mincing chaos. 

I think that the band definitely lost their way through the late 90s, but came full circle back into the perfect grinding sound of mincecore fury. This "perfected" AGx sound is what the band pretty much use as a template for everything these days, and This Is Not A Threat... is no exception. Expect the usual blasting grind assault from Belgian's finest purveyors of the art form. And like I said above, why expect anything else?

Haggus - Mince The Meat Monger

 Something tells me that the members of Haggus may possibly be vegetarians, or even vegans. I'm not sure what it is; I really can't put my finger on it...

Anyways, sarcasm aside, this is some top notch mincecore. Like, seriously good shit. Like, better than 95% of the shit out there. Better than 95% of Agathocles splits. I love the new wave of gory mincecore/grind/whatever coming from America and Canada, and this fits perfectly into that new wave, joining Archagathus and Hyperemesis as some of the sickest shit ever.

The vocals on this are phenomenally watery and gooey, and the bass sounds like an industrial-sized cabbage grinder, leading this gargling mess over the precipice into a mincing oblivion of stomping beats, 2-steps and blasting explosions. This only appears to have ever been available on cassette, released on a co-op between Fuck Your Life and Mullet Death Records, but as always, someone has uploaded it to YouTube, so check it out. It's awesome.

Dead Infection / Malignant Tumour - Split 7"

This is classic Dead Infection shit right here. I've heard this before on one of the collection / compilation CDs, and I absolutely love the mix of growls and pitchshifters - usually when vocals contrast to shifted stuff it's gonna be yelled, screeched, shouted or screamed, but not here. Growls not brutal enough? Well, top that off with some pitchshifted gurgles! Lo-Fi blasting grinding madness, but with enough finger-wagging classic riffs for the crusties to mosh to. A genre staple!

Malignant Tumour have such a strange back catalogue of stuff; tracing their development as a band is extremely entertaining, although I must confess to enjoying the older incarnation of the band more than the rock'n'roll style stuff (however they are always great fun live). Catching them on this 7" marks their transition from goregrind out into a more politically motivated, almost mincecore approach. There is an Agathocles cover, which says it all, to be honest. This stuff is class, but Dead Infection's material on this takes the win for me.

Some saint amongst men (and women, and everything in between) kindly uploaded the whole thing to YouTube for our listening pleasure.

Rot - Nowhere

Nowhere is one of the latest releases from long running Brazilian grindcore mentalists Rot. Released 25 years after their formation, it shows that the band have absolutely no intention of slowing down their pace - blasting your face with 12 grinding hymns, which isn't exactly bad going for a 7" release. Rot take elements of mincecore and hardcore punk and mash it head on into the classic style of blasting grindcore.

There's honestly not a single bad track here - the whole thing is totally relentless from start to finish and has the impact that a proper 7" release should. When you think that some bands struggle to keep one side of a split 7" interesting, it really hits home just how awesome bands like this are. It only really slows down for the closer "Falling Apart", but even then, it doesn't really slow down....

Agathocles - Fascination Of Mutilation

There's a whole ton of crap Agathocles out there so it's always enormously refreshing to come across the band's absolute golden material, especially on the 7" format. With the full lengths you kinda know where you are, but it is so easy to get lost in the group's endless reams of releases. Fascination Of Mutilation was a flexi released in 1990 on Rigid Records, so it's an early one in the band's life. General rule of thumb is - early Agathocles can't go far wrong. In my opinion, at least.

Fascination Of Mutilation is super short at only 5 minutes in length (being only on one side of a flexi, not like the fancy two sided flexis we get these days) but contains so many awesome recordings of Agathocles classics that its ironic quality-over-quantity approach more than makes up for it. "Threshold To Senility", "Gorgonized Dorks" and "Lay Off Me' all go down as well as the first beer at a summer festival. Cannot fault it. 

Unholy Grave - Angry Raw Grinder

You simply can’t beat Unholy Grave at their game. Okay, so they kinda fall into the same trap as Agathocles with releasing billions of EPs every week (slight overstatement maybe) but at least with Unholy Grave they have much a higher ratio of original-to-rehashed material than Agathocles. But if it’s raw, uncompromising grindcore that you are looking for then you don’t have to go much further than Unholy Grave.

 

This 2007 release doesn’t exactly break new ground but then again it doesn’t really need to; it’s Unholy Grave through and through and doesn’t necessarily need to be too forward thinking. We all know what they do and they do it very, very well. This type of attitude would kill other bands (or genres – just look at the underground black metal scene) but somehow, and I don’t know how, Unholy Grave keep managing to spew out endless reams of chaotic noisy grindcore.

 

With the recent passing of their drummer not tripping up the band at all- despite the magnitude of the loss - we can see the conviction and dedication of Unholy Grave to their brand of music is as hard as concrete and as strong as it was in 1993.

 

Unholy Grave / Rotten Sound - Split CD

Two grind legends head to head on one split - that's all it takes for me! I'm sold!

Rotten Sound's polished uber-super-grind has gotten more and more streamlined and refined as albums have come and gone, so it's refreshing to hear some old stuff from them now and then and remember what sounds they used to make 'back in the day'. Mixing Napalm Death-brand grindcore ferocity with tinges of death metal, Rotten Sound plough through two originals and a Unholy Grave cover with "Nanking Atrocity", which is actually really cool.

Unholy Grave on the other hand play their usual mash up of noisecore and old school grindcore, only with a better quality production sound than most splits. My favourite tracks here are opener "Horror" and "Social Rinse", which is also the longest track from UG. The "Outro" track is frankly, pointless as fuck, but this is some great shit from Unholy Grave, as per. Grindbastards unite!

Gabara - 20,000 Tons Of Mince

This is a super short demo tape from mincing goregrind outfit Gabara. It's barely a few minutes in length but it sounds so fuckin' good that I just had to share it with you guys. Basically it takes everything that is good about early Agathocles and mashes in a bit of goregrind sound. Slap some weirdly-fitting Godzilla-looking artwork on the cover and you can just conjure up visions of this beast smashing cities to bits with this tape playing as the soundtrack.

I can't really say more because it's so short so I'll just leave a link to stream this motherfucker right here for you, and be on my merry way. See you tomorrow, freaks.

Reekorrhoea / Urologist - Split Tape

I recently did another Reekorrhoea review (for the band's demo tape) but I can't get enough of this crusty mincecore-meets-goregrind crossover sound that's going on here. Mr. Andy is a goregrind genius, and whilst this doesn't exactly sound a million miles away from his Hyperemesis shit, it doesn't really fucking matter at all, because this shit fucking rules. Reekorrhoea's part of this split also includes a Dismembered Fetus cover, but I'm not familiar with that band to compare it to the original.

A creepy sample later, Urologist are pulverizing my eardrums like the Mortician of badly-recorded drum machine goregrind. The vokills are fucking mankin' (to quote a Welsh chav on the subject), as is the fuzzy guitar tone. The cheaper-than-krokodil drum machine does get on my nerves a bit, but hey, what are you gonna do?

All in all a great split from both bands and I look forward to hearing more of both of these acts at some point. You can stream the entire split on the Necrotic Jejunostomy Productions (yes, that's a real name) Bandcamp page.

Reekorrhoea - Demo Tape

Reekorrhoea is a project of Hyperemesis' Andy Ringdahl, focussing more on old-school horror movie themes as subject matter rather than all-out gore. It's still mincecore-infused goregrind goodness, however, so I love it! Imagine LDOH meets Agathocles at a Tumour gig and you're along the right lines here. The five tracks aren't particularly long but they don't need to be, this shit gets in, fucking gets on with it, and then fucks off. 

The guitars are nasty as fuck but my favourites have gotta be the vocals and the drum programming. The snare is perfect, and those vocals are just top notch, like, innit. You can stream the entire thing from the Reekorrhoea Bandcamp page (I've linked the demo below) but there's also 75 copies available on tape, for the true crusty goregrinders. Word. 

Archagathus / No Thought - Split 7"

I’ve never encountered No Thought before, but I really enjoyed their mix of styles. Many bands do the whole doom-into-grind thing, but No Thought seem to pull it off rather seamlessly here, which is fuckin’ great. The production is thick and crunchy (mmmmm yummy) and based more in the low-end of the spectrum, and reminds me rather poetically of Rotten Sound mixed with early Brutal Truth. Well worth a listen, I’d wager, if you’re into both the fast and slow aspects of heavy music.

 

Archagathus seem to have a bigger line up here than usual? The over-all sound is much more polished as well, which is a first for me. I need to check the dates on these 7”s that I have; perhaps most of the Archagathus stuff I’ve heard is the older material, as this sounds fairly different to what I’ve gotten used to. Things are most definitely much tighter around the edges, and the production is not as harsh. The super-growly vokills are still evident, as is the group’s punky playing style, but everything seems to have been tidied up a bit. Still sounds fuckin’ cool though!

 

This 7” was released by the Uranium Overdose label.

Unholy Grave - Unholy Bastards EP

What we have here is a chunk of grinding wax from one of the scene's purest purveyors of mental blasting noise. Little to my previous knowledge, Unholy Bastards is a live EP (that ol' chestnut!) but this time, I haven't stumbled onto some sucky live recording that sounds like it was taken by a camera phone. Honestly, apart from the odd bass-rumbles that show it was recorded in a live environment, it doesn't sound too dissimilar to the type of noize that Unholy Grave spew out on a regular basis, so I'm down with this slab of living, grinding, festering mass.

 

What goes along with this 7" is a cool little tour diary by Takaho (the UG vocalist), which details the group's mini tour across Japan with the band Little Bastards. Not much else I can really say I'm afraid, but this is really cool. This EP was brought to you by Agromosh Records in the USA and is limited to 1000 copies, 300 being on red wax.

 

Agathocles / Partiya - Split CD

Up until now I've been avoiding Agathocles split CDs to lower my risk of obtaining duplicate material that may already be on a 7" that I own. Agathocles have a notorious back-catalogue of re-hashed shit (sorry, but it's true), and as a collector on a budget I have put barriers in place to lessen the blow of unknowingly buying something that I already have. This was all well and good, until during a trade with a Canadian chum, I was gifted with a AGx split CD that is actually really, really good (and as far as I can tell, all original material). So, this no-AGx CDs barrier is now broken. Fucking great.

I've never heard of Partiya before. Hardly suprising, what with them being a rather obscure Russian crust band. All the songs and lyrics (and even the original name and logo) are in Russian, but are kindly translated for us English-speaking folk in the booklet. Thanks a million for that, because otherwise I wouldn't even know what the name of this band was. I cannae write Russian on me keyboard! That would have been a pickle. Their material is fast and well-produced, and despite the language barrier and potential difficulty in obtaining their stuff I am now on the quest for more Partiya recordings!

Agathocles sound a bit dank in comparison the well-put-together Partiya, but it doesn't take long for me to adjust. The sound here is really similar to the Mincer sessions, if not a bit thinner. This band know what they are good at, and seem to have fallen into a well-working system over the last 8 years or so. Blast blast blast, growl growl growl. What more do you want?

This little CD was put out through a collaberation of labels, so put aside a few minutes and check 'em all out. They are (in no particular order): No Bread, Black Cardinal, Wee Corn, Resist Label & Distro, Ok Punk Rock Records, Raw Distro and 83 Records.

Six Brew Bantha / Archagathus - Split 7"

I've been on a Six Brew Bantha kick recently, after finally crawling out from underneath my rock and realizing just how fucking awesome they are. Their sound here is a bit lo-fi, but that's never stopped anyone before and Six Brew Bantha blast and thrash through some fucking livid grindcore! Man, what I would do to see these guys! Someone with a lot of money fly them to the UK already and take my fucking ticket money! Randomly they remind me of Spoonful of Vicodin on this recording, although I much prefer Six Brew to the former.

 

Archagathus are another band name that I have seen here and there and fucking everywhere for a long time. Finally getting around to hearing them I realize that I am missing out on yet another awesome fucking grindcore band (although Archagathus describe themselves here as "mince core" and "raw punk", which are pretty accurate tags). The sound is a bit clearer than the Six Brew side, but every bit just as amazing. Another fantastic band for me to obsess over on Discogs! This shit is getting rediculous! Ha ha!

 

This 7" was released as a collaborative effort between Bullshit Propaganda Records, Coffee Grinder Records and Black Raven Records. I don't know how many copies of this exist, but it's probably gonna be about 500. 

Agathocles - Mincer

This is one of my favourite things so far in my never-ending adventure into the discography of Belgium's Agathocles. I've seen it about for years, probably since it's release, but have just never got around to buying it. I finally picked it up (dirt cheap) at some stall at Obscene Extreme festival in the Czech Republic. I don't think the stall had a name but it was a gazebo being shared by two guys selling different records. One of them was the vocalist from Entrails Massacre, I remember that much.

 

If you are familiar with Agathocles then you already know what to expect from a full length such as this; fast and to-the-point "mince"core with gut-addling bass and shrieked or yelped vocals, dusted off with the odd helping of pitch-shifted lows to complete the grinding cocktail! Opening track "Dethrone The Tyrant" is an Agathocles instant classic, and even spawned an EP of the same name. "Yuppie Career Freak" and "Diary Of White Trash" are two more examples of Agathocles at their blasting brilliance, as are the title track "Mincer" and the hilarious "Pricks At Gigs". "Goredom - Boredom" again shows the band's endless disdain for goregrind, porngrind and the related imagery and lyrical themes present therein.

My copy is a fantastic deep transparent blue, which is great because I was expecting it to be black for some reason or other. This was released on Power It Up in Germany in 200? and is still really easy to find, so get a copy already!

Agathocles / VRV - UK Tour Split 7"

The VRV / AGx UK tour was one of the most entertaining live shows I've had the pleasure of witnessing. Catching the legendary Agathocles in an upstairs room in a pub in Leeds was the perfect atmosphere; a whole bunch of sweaty grinders moshing about comfortably on a carpet! When the two bands got together to release this 7" after the tour had ended, I knew I had to own it, no matter how shitty it would probably turn out to be (by now you should know my disdain for badly recorded grind 7"s).

I ended up getting this off Burt at Obscene Extreme fest for literally all the spare change I had in my pocket! I was drunk and he was even more so (ha ha) and I ended up getting it for just less of £2. A fucking steal, no doubt. I resisted the temptation to buy up all the AGx stuff he had with him, but Gumpy succumbed to the cheap prices and fell down the rabbit hole and purchased his first batch of AGx splits. There's no way back up that slippery slope now, son!!!

The split is however, as i suspected, just badly recorded live sessions from the two act's recent UK tour. The Agathocles stuff isn't actually that bad at all. It's raw, don't get me wrong, but it's a fairly enjoyable listen, with a good mix of material. VRV on the other hand....well I turned it off after about 30 seconds. I was bone-dry sober on the listen-through and had no patience for his unique display of pummeling noisecore annihilation.

These are pretty rare, so if you were at one of the UK shows, I'd definitely say pick it up as a little memento if you happen upon a copy, but it will (rather obviously) never be able to truly show how awesome both bands were in a live environment.

Agathocles - Semtex 10

Semtex 10 is a blast-happy, bombastic, fairly recent 3 song EP by unstoppable Belgian grindcore (sorry, mincecore) brigade Agathocles. As it contains more than just 4 different versions of "Trust? Not Me" it is totally worth picking up! As far as I can tell the songs seem to be original, which is what I'm all about. My only gripe is that there is no tracklisting or info whatsoever anywhere on the release. If you bought this at a gig or whilst browsing a distro you wouldn't even know what it's fucking called because there isn't even a title on this thing. Smart move, Sunship Records.

 

Anyway, I'm not here to judge people for their choice of included information, I'm here to listen to Agathocles, bitches. "Detonating Nitroglycerin" is a very typical but extremely enjoyable AGx track, but the title track is all kinds of weird. "Dormant Cell" on side B seems to strangely and surrealistically mix the previous two tracks together into a new concoction. 

This release is limited to 500 copies, 250 on black and 250 on purple.