Look into the Silence

In the mid to late 90's, the country of Czechia was really starting to heat up when it came to violent grindcore/death metal. Just off the top of my head I can think of acts such as Isacaarum, Cerebral Turbulency, Ingrowing and Perversist. A gang of ruffians who were also pretty early in on the game were Agony Conscience, who released a demo, an EP, and this full length, "Look into the Silence".

This is pretty suffocating stuff to say the least. Their music is a rough mixture of Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse meeting with early Sinister type of death metal, spliced with grindcore, influenced by bands such as Agathocles and Regurgitate. The emphasis is for most part on blasting velocity, alternating with brutal stomping slower sections, creating a pulsing concoction of murky down-tuned brutality, brought to the listener devoid of subtle nuance and frivolous melody. As you might expect, the bow tied around a musical butchering like this comes in the form of a blubbering, guttural death grunt, completing this picture of grindcore infected death metal brutality. All the bigger is the surprise when in tracks like "Imaginary Menace" and "Determine for Forget", we get some blazing guitar leads thrown into our faces. Safe to say that this stuff hits damn hard, and if your taste goes beyond the sound of a gassy fat man chainsawing a pig in half, there is not much to find here for you, I'm afraid.

The production fits this nasty piece of offal perfectly. The balance between the instruments is a good way off, with the percussion and the gutturals shoving both guitar and bass to the back, with the overall sound being like someone stirring a pot of thick soup. Despite the uneven soundmix, that sounds brutally murky, this adds a lot of unhinged power to the explosive cocktail on show. The unpolished production is an excellent fit for a band that sounds equally as brazen. This is music strictly for underground consumption only, the way I like it best.

However good the music is, there is something that sucks out some of the fun for me. The different tracks are fused together by noisy sound collages, which would've worked if only they had kept it shorter. Now we get these annoying soundscapes that often last for minutes at a time, and they bug the hell out of me. If they would've dropped this soundscape nonsense, this cd would've been 10 to 15 minutes shorter, I think. It's the same gripe I have as with spoken samples, most of the time they simply clutter up the works, adding nothing except a growing headache in the back of my head. Apart from that, banging stuff.

This is one of those albums that deliver remorseless brutality galore, while keeping it staunchly underground all the way through. I wouldn't have minded a couple more songs in place of that sound collage bullshit, but it is what it is, I guess. Recommended for all into 90's brutality like old Mortician, Horror of Horrors, Torture Krypt and Agonia, as well as the bands mentioned above.