ALBUM REVIEW: Ecocide – Slugcrust

There’ll be no prizes for guessing what style of music you’ll be getting from South Carolina’s SLUGCRUST. This is first and foremost no-holds-barred, unabashed grindcore, but brings with it a veritable feast of wider influence, with elements of hardcore, crust punk and doom all thrown in for good measure. The result is an atomic blast of vitriolic vocals and catastrophic cacophonies that rips by in a brisk 22 minutes.

With 12 tracks to blaze through in such little time, SLUGCRUST waste no time in launching into the stratosphere. Opener Demise Promise is neck deep in fury before you even realise what is happening, and the pace continues through the likes of Drag Me To Agony and Buzzard Czar. Just a look at the song titles should give you a clue as to how furious this record really is, but hearing it in practice is something else entirely. It’s as if you’ve chucked Henry Rollins and a hornet’s nest into a room with SLIPKNOT’s People = Shit playing at full blast.

The whole band provides a swirling mass of constant noise and the album itself is essentially one long track wearing the mask of many. There is no respite because even as the drums and vocals cease, there remains a bed of squealing, torturous feedback. But lead vocalist Jesse Cole in particular gives a breathless, unyielding performance throughout Ecocide, punctuating his throat-shredding barks, with these sort of deep fried roars (such as on Arachno-Mariticide), and an all encompassing howl that feels like you’ve been chucked into a wind tunnel (No Heirs / Dead Souls). On a record that insists on nailing, super-gluing and laminating its balls to the wall (ouch) it’s these vocals where SLUGCRUST are able to work in any semblance of texture and differentiation. 

Shout outs too to some of the lyricism on display here. Based on a core mission of bringing political issues to light to galvanise activism and action, there are nuggets of nihilistic prose littered throughout. Echoless ends with a repeated cry of “Oblivion cannot be oblivion without us“, while Demise Promise contains a chorus of “Watch me die, over and over / Rip the spine from me, over and over“. Barbed, anguished and downtrodden lines like this give the listener something to cling onto amidst the maelstrom and means you won’t be forgetting this record as you answer the call to mobilise.

And then Event Horizon happens. You can listen to this five, 10, 20 times and you’ll still struggle to comprehend the disgustingly heavy depths this plunges to. Featuring one of the thickest, gnarliest tones you’re likely to hear all year, SLUGCRUST suddenly step out of the grindcore genre to follow more in the footsteps of PRIMITIVE MAN. An utterly ungodly scene of sonic devastation, the rumbles of this closing track will be felt throughout the aether of time and space.

And so ends 12 tracks of uncompromising brutality and restless ferocity. SLUGCRUST hit top speed from the outset and keep the pedal to the floor throughout, but the result is something that feels somewhat two dimensional. Sure it’ll rip your face off and chop up the discarded flesh, but it’s doing it with a rusty four-inch blade held together by tape, because who wants to have to clean some decorative ceremonial armament after a mindless slaughter? Not this lot.

Rating: 7/10

Ecocide is set for release on September 9th via Prosthetic Records.

Like SLUGCRUST on Facebook.