Skin graft at 1.000 miles an hour

Dead In The Dirt - Fear
2011, Southern Lord

Dead In The Dirt's latest effort, simply titled Fear, offers up ten brief tracks of heavy as shit hardcore that mixes straight up 90's hardcore with elements of grind, d-beat and gritty death metal. None of the tracks move beyond the two minute mark, so it's all over in a flash. The brevity isn't really a problem; it only whets your appetite for repeated spins. The recording is extremely heavy and feels really dense, but in a good way. There's a gritty texture to the guitars and the drums sound great and are tight as hell. There's depth in the sound even though it's really really heavy, so even the basslines are clearly audible, which is a huge plus. I really dig the multiple vocal attacks and the way the songs are structured; they never become tedious, mainly because they're too short to become boring, but also because there's a shitload of stuff going on in every song. It's not spastic in that often enervating mathy sense, but more like something honed and stripped down to it's bare bones. There's no redundancy here. I can't and won't make any comparisons to other bands, except to say that DITD moves in the same, somewhat murky, territory as bands such as Nails, Defeatist, Naysayer and Full Of Hell.