Friday Is A Good Day For Grind...

ASSÜCK - MISERY INDEX (1996)




PRESTO? - ODIO PURO CONCENTRADO (2002)




I thought I'd switch things up a bit and give you a double dose on top. Seeing as how A) I missed last weeks crucial death metal post and B) both of these records together are just over 30 minutes long, then it behooves me to drop two whole tons of furious political grindcore on your unsuspecting heads.

Being that Grindcore shares many things in common with Death Metal it doesnt seem too far a stretch that these are served up to you today. In fact, Grindcore is the monogloid inbred cousin of both Death Metal and Hardcore. You all know this.

Lets dig into the goods. Assück. First of all, Umlauts... or just one in this case. Can anyone make the correlation? That's right. Motley Crüe. If the Crüe were to meet up with Assück in an alley, it would be a blood bath, with hair flying everywhere, torn pleather and lipstick smears all over the concrete. Assück can literally liquify the entrails of lesser metal bands.

What sticks out to me about this release is the amount of catchy riffs that exist within the one minute framework of brain blasting grind elegance. Sure they drop the blast beats like Dresden circa 1945, but they lock into some serious grooves that could almost have you genuflecting to the mighty Riff if you werent literally (or metaphorically) stomping every innocent thing in your path. The cookie monster vocals are in full effect for maximum misanthropy with all the intelligible lyrics spouting angry anti-capitalist agendas... When all is said and done a breakdown sounds a million times more powerful when book ended with spastic bursts of hellish noise and thus revolution sounds that much closer to realization.

Presto? are something similar yet also quite different. For the sake of putting two things together for the sheer fun of the image in my mind, Presto? sounds like the bastardized child of Los Crudos and Eyehategod, or maybe some of the doomier Enewetak, seeing as how the longest song on this album is 1:11. They use a far lower end of the spectrum to bludgeon their point right into your head. You may get hives from listening to this record

Zen friend and one time contributor Destroyer dropped this on me a ways back and it is a "go to" for pure grind on grind action. Presto? are a Brazillian band who sing in Portuguese. Despite the language barrier, if this doesnt want to make you overthrow governments, and I mean plural, like, all of them, then youre just not getting it or youre in the wrong building altogether. Presto? drops ridiculous riffs within a 30 second period, going from full on blast beats to awesome punk hardcore and then unleashing an atonal doom riff that makes your spleen pump 12 times more blood. If you made it through Assück then youre adrenaline is already maxed and your heart is straining to put up with the extra stress. By the time you get to Presto? your heart is actually doing a circle pit inside your chest.

The title means Pure Concentrated Hate and that is pretty much what you get here. Its nothing but smiles for these guys as they generously start off the record with dirt caked bass riff that is slowed down. Its a land speed record of grinding atonality from there on out. One amazing highlight is Potencial Pra Nada which starts off like a Crudos song veering into absurd blast beats and choppy breakdowns before shearing off all sense of hope and light with stupendous riff that would make many doom bands want to put down the bong and start writing doomy grind core. There are many of these moments on this record.

Many people know of the mighty Assück. Fewer people know of Presto? I strongly urge you to check out both of them. If you like one then you are guaranteed (a one time Zen and the Art of Face Punching Guarantee!!) to like the other. Listen to them back to back and try not to hurt anyone in the general vicinity.

Also, Happy Birthday to Nick over at Damn Those Bloodsuckers. He posted the other two Assück records, Anticapital and Blindspot, so you should make sure to go get those and wish him a Happy B-day.

That is all. Play nice.