Spawn of the ever-rolling abyss

Defeatist - Tyranny Of Decay
2011, Nerve Altar

I won't even try to pigeon-hole these guys into a genre. Is it grind? Yeah, sort of, but ... no not really. Hardcore? Umm, yeah well, yes but also no. Metal then? Yeah that too, but kind of not. In the end the only thing that counts is if it's any good. And Defeatist are good. Really good. They write catchy as hell riffs and saturate them with little twists and turns and semi-progressive flurries and huge helpings of blast beats. I love how they move flawlessly from fast bouncy punk riffs to menacing black metal-snarling melodies in no time at all and then without missing a beat crank up the blast beats. This is some really intense shit, but it's also very technical in a way that I rarely hear in bands like Defeatist, with breakneck turns and stops and weird time-signatures. There's a real sense of melody here, in the middle of all the sonic mayhem, that often reminds me of more progressive, jazzier, artists like Nomeansno and Converge (even though they in turn have basically nothing in common, besides being fucking amazing bands) and also a sense of off-beat dissonance in both riffing and melody. The vocal patterns and the vocals themselves give off a really dirty d-beat/black metal vibe, which, strangely, works really well with the music. These guys are something of a stand out within this weird anything-goes genre. They're both messier and more progressive than most of their peers. Two manically flailing thumbs up for Defeatist.

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.