After their Great Debut release, the Croatian Grindcore Masters return with their 2nd Blast. Terrorizer -like Grindcore that has already crossed the European borders and has gotten the attention of Grindcore freaks Worldwide.
Blistering Speed and Crushing Heaviness are the rule here.
Dual roaring/growl & manic vocal attacks, Lightning fast Razor-like guitars and superb musician skills just complete this Grind entity, making this release a monstrous masterpiece from one of the most prolific and dedicated Grind acts in the current European scene. Expect more from these masters of the Extreme. True Grindcore in the fundamental essence of the word !!!
To me they are unknown, but they hail from Croatia and my colleague Mat-Core has witnessed their performance at the Obscene Extreme festival this year. But when I checked out their tracks on their MySpace I heard something I liked…
And that was a comparison with acts like Nasum , Terrorizer and of course Napalm Death . Only with mostly foreign language (I think) and a bigger contribution to the music coming from death metal. And a little less groove, unfortunately. But there's still enough to keep the variation of the music from getting drowned in all the mayhem.
I think the strongest asset of this band lies within the vocals. Not only do they have a great vocalist that sounds like old-skool Nasum to me, but the rest of the band also contributes to the screams and grunts. Thus making the vocal department a varying and very busy one, and fortunately it sounds like they put some time into getting some decent vocal lines done, instead of the standard blaah and bluuh.
Should I mention that all members have been active before in other death/grind acts of which one is called Screaming Vagina ? Or do you and me suspect that they wont be as good as Bolesno Grinje has proven to be. I reckon the latter.
Well to conclude this, Od Nesvijesti Do Grinda is a very entertaining disc with some quality riffs and nice enough production for me to give it some additional spins in the future. Their future sure does look promising with a release like this.
I could only find their pic on their label site, so I am flying utterly blind, here, but I think what we have is some vicious South American grind so close to its roots it can almost go any of those three ways. It's played with pure punk abandon and immediacy, recorded with a massive wall of guitar sound that denotes the best old deathgrind, and written with enough actual melody to hint at the blackness. One thing you can normally count on from our South American friends is that they play their shit close to the bone. No fucking around, very little pretense, just looking for the spurting blood and the rending tissue. And Bolesno Grinje is a band that rips, tears and plays so well you forget about genre, origin and really anything but whether all the gore they cover you in will cause an infection.
The songwriting is somewhere between the first Brutal Truth and a touch of Pig Destroyer . These are not 45 second blasts by any means, but fleshed out and fully realized compositions. They don't rely on blasting much, instead going for the stepped up speed metal tempo of a Napalm Death . And this really works for the band, as their slashing guitars have room to breath and the melody gets a chance to get into your neck. The singer is a full roarer, and the band gangs without ever resorting to hardcore cliché'. The musicianship is not spectacular, but this is not technical music, so it's appropriate.
The recording is a wall of sound, but not thick like Nasum . It's a natural sounding record which lends an extra immediacy to the experience. Combined with the fleshed out writing this is how the band gets a little blackness in the mix. It's a distorted, relentless sound that lets the group get the blood racing. But it's mastered so that you can hear everything you need to. A paradoxically nifty trick.
The bottom line is that this is a record that spins through you like a shiruken thrown by the six million dollar man. It keeps your interest with varied songwriting and instantaneous performance. It doesn't pander, it doesn't pretend. It just kills shit. I don't know what the hell else you can ask of a grind record.
Now how is this for a clash of cultures? A Croatian Grind band on a Mexican record label being reviewed in a Suffolk village by a long haired lout from Norf London!
Od Nesvijesti Do Grinda (From Unconsciousness to the Grind) is the sophomore effort from Croatia's Bolesno Grinje. What you get lasered onto the shiny silver disc is 15 tracks of punky grind. Now I must be careful here as I am not a Grind aficionado and I know just how passionately Grinders feel about their favoured music flavour. I could not begin to compare this to other grind bands as my tastes in Grindage do not waver much from Agoraphobic Nosebleed, early Napalm Death and Carcass and Rotten Sound. So don't expect any “well the middle 8 sounds just like - insert underground grind legend here”. That being said, to these ears this album puts the emphasis on the core of Grindcore with the vocals reminding me in places of Ratos de Parao. Then they will hit a blast and Grind that Aborted would be proud of (shit I am starting to compare to other genre bands instead).
These guys seem to enjoy what they do with song titles which translate into Singer Gone to Paraguay, I Wanna Fuck and Urban Sanitation Riot. As well as those heady topics the lads also find time to wax lyrical about the police, pollution and mental illness.
This is tight well constructed Grind punk which I must say has grown on me after the first listen. The curse of being an English speaker causes aural prejudice when listening to music sung in a different tongue - especially one so alien to me as Croatian. However, taking George Michael's advice and listening without prejudice I have unearthed a little dirty gem of an album.
Jebemise (I Wanna Fuck) with its crossover style intro laced with mad dog howling (well impressions of it anyhow) is two and a half minutes of unadulterated fun and energy, something I don't often put hand in hand with Grindcore. If you are a fan of Crust, Grind, Crossover or old skool HC (or just wanna impress ya mates by buying a CD by an underground band with a “funny” name - how Kvlt!) then get yourself a copy of this.
I know I sound irritating when I repeat myself, and I know there is surely a load of grammatical errors in my reviews as well, since I never double check them and my English is surely not transcendent, but why, exactly, don't labels supervise the layout work and act on correcting the lyrics before they go to the printer? Why I do have to read lines like “I am must fuck”? Sarcofago were justified by the time and place they were born, but a band can't make thus kind of mistakes in 2006. The lyrics are not hugely advanced, half about fun things like fuck frenzy, holidays in Paraguay and drinking oneself out at the local pub, while the other half is about fucking the police, daily routine (“Walking Corpse”, anyone?), fucking the national radio broadcast etc. The layout and artwork are both nice, on super glossy paper, with a microscope caption of a flea on the cover which must be Bolesno Grinje's lucky charm (looks like the same flea that resides in the logo). Bolesno Grinje play forceful grind/crust with a huge groove, not much dissimilar to Neuropathia in the approach, but with a rough, bleary sound that would make the Dark Throne of “Transylvanian Hunger” envious. The energy level is constant, even during the slam dance riffs chock full of sing along choruses. The guitar riffs are razor sharp and full of punkish vigour, the vocals sounds a bit like old Extreme Noise Terror, coarse and drunk as fuck, a mix or orc blood and nicotine, the drums pounding unerringly from start to finish, again this is a band which is surely a big fun to watch on stage or to play at full volume on a beer festival. All the attention here is pointed at the fun element, even if I probably prefer Birdflesh if we talk about purely crusty mosh-grind. I especially like the double vocals, they add much breadth to the mix. I am not much into fun grind, but this is a band which is a must have for those into powerful rocking and rolling groovy grindcore. Let's crack on!
This is the second time this year that I get a record from Bolesno Grinje. The first one was recorded in 2002 and this one in 2003. I don't know why their stuff are released so late after that they've been recorded and I won't start guessing either, but stick to what I know. So what do I know then? I know this Croatian band play relentless grindcore with sharp guitars, a rapid firing squad usually referred to as drums, and with a growling maniac chewing on the mic. As usual when it comes to Eastern European grindcore they deliver quality - in both songwriting and the recording. I find it to be a bit to repetitive for my taste though but still better than many other bands in the genre, and I will never assert that tracks like "Jebemise", "Pobuna G.C.", and "Nerv" are bad ones. A total of fifteen tracks in about thirty minutes that should please any grind freak, especially the ones who like Repulsion and Terrorizer. [Krogh, July 2006]
Here are back Croatian Grind fuckers from BOLESNO GRINJE with their 2nd full length album! I've been really into the hateful Grind Core of their first album entitled “Pobjeda je nasa”, and now they're back with 15 new tracks with this new album!! 15 tracks of hateful Grind Core in the really logical continuation of the band! Think about TERRORIZER, CRIPPLE BASTARDS, UNHOLY GRAVE, old NAPALM DEATH, the whole stuff with Crust and even Punk touches here and there. To compare with their previous album, I'd say this new one get a more important Grind atmosphere, with less Punk / Crust touches, and a bit of modern sounding in the vein of NASUM. But globally, BOLESNO GRINJE is still into old and dirty Grind Core!!! The sound is less raw than on “Pobjeda je nasa”, and the whole production gives an energic side to this already energic and intense Grind fucking Core!!! BUY OR DIE!! I'm already looking forward to listen about a 3rd full length release!!
To begin with let me first get things nice and sparkling clear, I discovered this band's discography backwards, the first album I heard from them was "Nitko Nas Ne Vidi…"a really incredible album actually, then I tried this and finally their debut full-length in "EBM records", so it's more difficult to achieve "objective" views when you already know where the band is heading right? And it's also quite obvious that if the band is good enough they'll progress into being better not worse if you know what I mean.
This, their second full-length album, it's actually not that different from "Nitko Nas Ne Vidi…" it's only rawer and less complex that's all. Bolesno Grinje creates a really aggressive kind of grind in this album and exploits to the max their execution abilities to show they can be as brutal as any other Grindcore act nowadays. The entire album comes wrapped with a tightened kind of Grind with Punk undertones that add "settling" lines to the speedy scheme of the songs while the catchy structures covert a noisy tune into a really catchy piece.
This is an unpolished way to hear this band; the music is really good and the hostility inside will suit perfectly in most Grindcore shelves of the community. Too bad the production and songwriting in this album is still crude and doesn't fits quite as good as their latest album, though the band's fanatics and even some Grindcore completionists will surely praise this album as it has enough violence to put many of the modern bands to shame.
