ALBUM REVIEW: Grind ‘Til Death – Remains
Chances are most of us will go into an album called Grind ‘Til Death with some pretty solid expectations. The debut full-length from Australian deathgrinders REMAINS doesn’t exactly scream nuance, but it’s also nowhere near as one-note as its name might lead you to expect. This is a potent, powerful concoction of brutality that actually manages to get an awful lot done in 35 minutes. Its constituent parts should be quite familiar to most listeners, but pulled together in this way they rarely fail to impress, and in the process end up delivering one of the stronger most straight-up ‘extreme’ releases of the year so far.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, it’s worth emphasising that REMAINS are still definitely a deathgrind band. Grind ‘Til Death comprises 18 songs and only four of them stretch past the two-minute mark. It also features tracks with titles like Body In The Bin and Bludgeoned To Death, and if you’re looking for blast beats and gutturals you won’t leave disappointed at all. The essential elements are all very much present and correct, it’s just that the band don’t quite stop there.
For starters, and admittedly not a huge eyebrow-raiser in the days of the likes of FULL OF HELL and KNOLL, Grind ‘Til Death often comes with a pretty blackened aura – that slightly icier bite to some of the blasty tremolo combos heard on tracks like Bloodthirst and Human Brodo, for example. Perhaps more interesting however is that Grind ‘Til Death also often grooves way harder than it has any right to. A comparison to latter-era PIG DESTROYER would be easy and accurate here, but at times it even seems reasonable to extend this to the mid-00s swagger and heft of bands like LAMB OF GOD and KILLSWITCH ENGAGE. Don’t believe us? Listen to the likes of Shot Dead, Lords Of Grind and Remains and then see how you feel.
Picking up on the ‘death’ side of the deathgrind equation, even that feels quite broad in REMAINS’ hands. There are actually a fair few points where they even seem to borrow from melodeath and the iconic Gothenburg scene, including not least in the back-to-back early pairing of You’re On Fire and Intercorpse. Again, it’s not the furthest leap away from the other elements in REMAINS’ musical melting pot, but it does just keep things feeling fresh and varied enough in a genre that can so often stick rigidly to a single lane. It’s all woven together wonderfully too, always feeling like the work of a single cohesive unit and avoiding any overly sharp left turns to maintain a constant sense of momentum.
Perhaps as a result of this, and this is a minor and somewhat expected nit-pick, Grind ‘Til Death might just start to wash over its listeners towards the end. The songs themselves don’t get any weaker, but for all the band’s ability to throw a fair few styles into the mix, they do miss an opportunity for what could’ve been a welcome shade of dynamic variation as the record wears on. It’s not the end of the world however; the runtime is still plenty tight enough, the production is top-notch throughout, and vocalist Tony Forde stands out as a particularly savage focal point from start to finish. Boxes ticked all round.
Maybe we’re making too much of all this, but honestly it really doesn’t feel that way. Grind ‘Til Death might not shoot for the more demented experimentalism of the aforementioned likes of FULL OF HELL and KNOLL, but it is still a thoroughly refreshing slice of potent and varied deathgrind excellence. Perhaps none of that’s a surprise when one learns that the members of REMAINS all boast some hefty past experience in the Aussie scene, but even so, as a debut full-length for this particular project you couldn’t ask for much more of an emphatic opening statement.
Rating: 8/10
Grind ‘Til Death is set for release on July 15th via Spikerot Records.
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