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ALBUM REVIEW: Goodpaster – She

It’s fun how you can mix death metal and hardcore and come out with such diverse results. Sometimes it’s deathcore, sometimes it’s grindcore, and sometimes it just lands in a much less neatly summed up but often particularly wonderful middle ground currently occupied by the likes of BURNER, FUMING MOUTH, XIBALBA, and the band we’re here to talk about today: SHE. Formed in 2008, the Alaska-based four-piece have been pretty sporadic over the past decade or so, but having built momentum with the release of last year’s Shame Is The Most Effective Tool In The Human Arsenal EP, they’ve teamed up with the ideal producer for this sort of thing in Taylor Young for their sophomore LP Goodpaster.

As you might expect then, this album goes seriously hard. It’s got fast D-beaty parts, it’s got some super crushing death metal riffs, and it does have a few grindy elements too. Mostly as well it squeezes all this into perfectly tight packages – some under 60 seconds even, and many others well inside the two-minute mark at least – and of course Young has everything sounding exactly as it needs to with crusty HM-2-caked guitars, thick scuzzy bass, and Justin Rodda’s pinging snare all finding a comfortable place in the mix. Admittedly these may be reasonably standard requirements for entry in music of this nature, but you still have to hand it to SHE for nailing them so emphatically here.

Kicking things off with a trickle of water and some moody guitar work in the opening title track, Goodpaster soon launches into the raging fare that it most easily identified by. Second track The Knee I Know Naught comes in hard with jagged riffs and rolling toms only to somehow find room to hit with even more force in the final quarter of its two-minute runtime; Old Souls Show Age and Lop Off The Thumbs clock in at 55 and 58 seconds respectively and yet both manage to land multiple blows within such tight spaces; and New Ceilings boasts one of the filthiest grooves of the entire record amid plenty of stiff competition. Of course, these are just a few examples among many; drop the needle anywhere on Goodpaster and you’ll find a riff, blast beat or breakdown that’s as ready to take your head off as any other.

Also, even though at 27 minutes Goodpaster is hardly a long record, SHE have the good sense to introduce a few extra bits towards the end just to make sure nobody gets too comfortable. The obvious examples are the two four-minute tracks – Peace Tax and Headwaters Off… – both likely to catch the eye before you’ve even got there due to their length alone. Neither opportunity is wasted either, the former taking a detour towards psychedelic noise rock as vocalist Andrew Sims channels something of the unhinged intensity of Tim Singer of DEADGUY, and the latter introducing clean vocals to add to the sense of drama and climax at the record’s close. Even between those two there’s Whilst Thy Breast Yet Heaves and Dyed In The Wool which throw some panic chords into the mix almost as if to provide a little extra treat within this particularly stellar final third.

So really Goodpaster does everything you could ask of it and then some; it sounds perfect for this kind of genre, it hits hard at every turn, and crucially it doesn’t peter out towards the end as it saves some of its strongest material for the last few tracks. A total rager worthy of the keen and regular attention of fans of hardcore, death metal and whatever you want to call the special stuff that lands somewhere in the middle.

Rating: 8/10

Goodpaster - She

Goodpaster is set for release on June 16th via self-release.

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