Opiate Conquest

I became familiar with Jarhead Fertilizer through their debut album Product of my Environment. I was expecting something more along the lines of Full of Hell's more death metal leaning albums, but instead I got some absolutely troglodytic knuckle dragging brutal death metal with some razor-sharp grind sections for good measure. While I was glad that Jarhead Fertilizer weren't just Full of Hell by another name (given that most members have played in both), their brutal death metal wasn't as distinct as I hope. Don't get me wrong, they did a great job at capturing that caveman vibe, but it's not like that's something many other bands are also doing well. Opiate Conquest is a bit more along the lines of what I expected Jarhead Fertilizer to sound like. It's unmistakably powerviolence, but it doesn't really sound like Full of Hell 2: Electric Boogaloo. Full of Hell are personally my favourite modern powerviolence band going, and they definitely sound modern for the genre. Opiate Conquest does bring in some death metal, but what really separates it from Full of Hell is the old school kick it has. Opiate Conquest sounds like it could easily been recorded a decade earlier.

The band sounds straight out of the 90s with their frenetic riffing and lo-fi production. Their powerviolence sits at a nice intersection between hardcore and grindcore, but there's definitely a strong punk ethos to their approach. They pull in some brief sludgy dirges for when they want to really drive things into the mud, and death metal fills out a lot of the more mid-paced sections. While it's a short release that often flies by a mile-a-minute, the band definitely has dynamics. The sound is as filthy as the cover art, and the EP sounds like it was recorded at a practice space strewn with graffiti and stray half-drunken beer bottles. Like all good powerviolence, a talented drummer tethers the chaos. Two vocal approaches are employed, a guttural bark and a more frantic high paced scream. This is an approach often used with bands that have sludge and grindcore in the mix and it works well.

I've mentioned in my review of their album how much of Jarhead Fertilizer's aesthetic is indebted to the sludge/crust legends Dystopia. Their name and logo are both direct tributes to the band. Opiate Conquest takes it one step further with the photo collage showing degradation and human misery - if you swapped the logo, told me Dystopia had reformed and this was their new album cover, I'd totally believe you. While Opiate Conquest isn't a good indication of where the band would be going with their debut album, it's probably the better release. I also have to say how it's impressive that members of Full of Hell could form a new band in the same genre but sound totally distinct. Well done, lads.