Dysangelium

Thrash -- Cryptic Slaughter, DRI, COC, et al -- died a hard death in the late 1980s. Grindcore brought some of the power back, but quickly got too much like punk. Then there's bands like Blood, who are almost indescribable except to say that they're basically grindcore with overtones of death metal. Specifically, their song structures are non-linear like death metal, although short like thrash, and while they use grindcore riffs each one has a matching, longer death metal riff. The result is short blasts of darkened metal crossover that does not fall into the "salad of styles" of metalcore, but keeps the darkness of death metal, and matches this thematically with Jungian symbolism borrowed from mass culture and news of horrific events. They associate images from our world with psychological quagmires in our minds, and the result is poetic in the same way the lyrics are of Dead Infection, Repulsion, Carcass or Impetigo -- and a far cry from the literal political interpretation that bands like Siege, Napalm Death and Brutal Truth.

Most of these songs match one powerful riff with a theme, and then develop the song structure so that it presents that vital riff after you have some idea what's going on, and repeats it until it dominates the atmosphere. This riff will be supported by a number of budget riffs which advance the song, and these are like grindcore or Ildjarn, a chord or two with rhythm work to give it form. As these songs rotate into full view and you see the context of their most powerful riff, they then break and a counterpart to that riff -- as if a spectre from The Other Side -- which reduces the conflict of the song to a linear drive, at which point a blast beat usually comes into play. Songs are short, 1-3 minutes and sometimes shorter, and the lack of fat on them means that the impact rings in your ears longer than the song does, which is why it's fortunate some have introductions borrowed from movies and news clips. While this technique was old already when Discharge did it in 1982, it breaks up what's otherwise an unending hybrid of dirge and blast that becomes a drone of misanthropic noise.

While this music is simple, and clearly offhand in how it is written and played, these musicians are far from inexpert. They know their riffology, and during the course of this CD you will hear citations from sources both expected (within death metal and grind) and completely unexpected, but no direct lifts -- Blood remains an original, even on their seventh album. Vocals are deep-voiced gutturals that bark, chortle, gurgle, rasp and retch to highlight the rhythms of riffs, but remain mostly in monotone. Drumming is the most grindcore aspect, sounding very much like the sharply accentuated work on the first Napalm Death and Carcass releases. No one overplays; no one underplays, either, which is why this CD endures in the player long after most grindcore bands, awash in cliche randomness masquerading as originality which actually disguises a hypothetical and irrelevant outlook, fade away into the used bin. For those who love the raw power of the riff, and the ugly poetry of subconscious horror, "Dysangelium" delivers in the style Blood made classic on their 1993 opus "O Agios Pethane."