Under·Grind

I have no idea why I bought this. Neither do the guys I hired to research why I bought this. Was it just a really unfortunate lapse in judgment from the time between when I got on Rotten Roll Rex's website to the time when I was at the checkout? I mean, come on, it was in the clearance bin of a goregrind distro, I knew what I was going to think of it only seconds after buying it, and it turns out I was basically right.

Under·grind is a lot more friendly towards "normal" metalheads than you'd expect a release fucking called "Under·grind" to be, but then again a truly "underground" goregrind band probably would have just called their demo "Haematological Coagulation Under Septicaemic Criteria" or something else you'd get from a quick game of "let's flip through the medical dictionary and choose words at random". This isn't venomous, evil goregrind like Catasexual Urge Motivation or uncompromising gorenoise like Last Days of Humanity, it's just goofy and cheesy light-hearted shit with a fair helping of influence from all the non-threatening aspects of death metal you can think of. I've only heard maybe one Razorback Records band, but this seems like it'd musically fit the bill of their dumb cheesy, fun, splatter film aesthetic more than I'm personally comfortable with.

The songs are all memorable, but only in the same way that trying to stop a spinning weed-whacker string with your penis is probably a rather memorable experience. They're obviously very catchy and stick with you pretty well, but I'd honestly rather they didn't; everything here is based on mid-paced, overly simple and barely thought-out goregrind grooves designed for fairies and falses mixed with a fair bit of death metal influence. Occasionally a blast beat or two will get thrown into the mix, but fuck, they just sound out-of-place here like a slam in the middle of a Type O Negative song. Vocals aren't much better - most of them are wet and sloppy shrieks that sound like an annoying chihuahua, or boring moist inhales, but even worse are the pig squeals which clip like crazy to the point where they mostly just sound like a wall of noise whenever they're used.

The band's sense of humor isn't very funny, as it seems to basically amount to: "Intro song is made up of fart samples! Interlude song has band members making fart noises and burping! Crunch delights! LOL!" Furthermore, unless this is some sort of Engrish misinterpretation, they seem convinced that their song "Country Gore" is made up of actual country music, which just leads me to believe that the average Brazilian has never heard country music in their life. The band's idea of "country"? A six-note lick with a fair amount of groove that sounds like a sped-up Pantera riff. I mean, really?

Crunch Delights are basically the goregrind equivalent of nu-metal: they take the style, simultaneously water it down and make it more boring, but steal the label and milk it to exploit the ignorance or poor taste of dumbfucks who aren't experienced enough in the original genre to know better. This shit is pretty moronic as far as goregrind goes, especially when you take into account that it's trying to be FUN!! and SELF-AWARE!! I can think of a lot of things that are worse than this demo but I'd be hard-pressed to think of something that's more uniformly composed of unabated lameness.