V

(Santa meant to review this album last Christmas but.. y'know, he had homes to invade and food to steal. Better late than never?)

There's no better goal for a good ol' fashioned metal band than to get the audience's blood pumping, right? Whether through denim and leather, or fists being in the air and possibly even banging everywhere, the listener wants to be excited and challenged, to be defied and shocked. That's why I love a band that marries metal and hardcore; the two are natural allies, two friends from different neighborhoods that come together, time and time again, to play it loud and proud. Sticking middle fingers up in the air, shouting FUCK THE WORLD in a crowd filled with sweaty, hairy guys. If it's enough to make all the cute hipster girls listening to Iron and Wine ignore them for the entirety of high school, then it’s some honest-to-goodness heavy shit!

Enter Morser, a relatively oldschool German band from the mid 90s, when the cross-contamination of metal and hardcore was yielding some of its most fruitful bounties ever. Hardcore kids that just heard Seasons in the Abyss and Vulgar Display of Power were abandoning their Youth of Today records and pursuing music much darker, heavier, and more violent. Half the hardcore bands of the 90s were essentially just midpaced thrash metal mosh riffs in all but name and presentation, and this is readily apparent in European/H8000 bands like Liar, Congress, Vitality, Arkangel, etc.

I haven't heard any old Morser material, but if I'm correct in assuming they sounded like their Belgian friends to the west, they've matured an appropriate amount since 1996. Their latest album, V of the year MMXV, pretty much runs the gamut of every metalcore/grindcore style of the past 20 years. In particular, it reminds me of early 2000s proto-deathcore; the debut records of The Red Chord, Animosity and Despised Icon are all channeled here. Like those bands, V is manic and stressful, always violently blasting between unexpected moments, just technical enough for you to notice but violent enough to make you forget.

Yep, just like any good "metalcore"* band should, Morser delivers some truly some angry and hateful tunes here. The songs all feature a fairly similar structure: blastbeats pounding away in the background, acting as foundation to a variety of death metal/grind riffage punctuated by brief breakdowns. The breakdowns are plentiful but not emphasized, usually found in the form of a sludge riff or fast single-note/bass drum repetition followed by a morbid melody. If you hate super obvious 40 bpm mosh riffs with 3 seconds of silence between notes (the type announced by a single china cymbal ring), Morser won’t let you down. There’s some scant thrashiness to be found, like the fastpaced pit riffage in the middle of “Dead Run”, but nothing as overt as your typical chugging H8000, All Out War, or Earth Crisis record. The vocals are particularly great, though apparently there are three vocalists at work here. There’s a lot of low hoarse grunting that’s par for the course in this genre, but there’s also a great evil, howling rasp that befits modern black metal just as much the grind represented here.

At first listen the album feels really samey, but the band has a varied grasp of melody that helps some songs stand out. Tracks like “Absorbing” and “Dirt Crawler” have a noiser element, featuring semi-dissonant melodies repeated over and over, creating a chaotic and uncomfortable vibe that’s shattered by the mosh riffs. On the other hand, “Of Grenades” and “Patina Reminder” are basically full-on death metal, both featuring a riffing style reminiscent of Bolt Thrower’s best moments. The variety on the album is efficiently summed up by noting that the album opener “All to Suffer” has a uplifting sounding chorus that sounds more like late 80s/early 80s traditional hardcore punk, while the closer “Greatful Dad” is borderline melodic death metal. Fuck, the outro is basically a southern metalcore instrumental a la He is Legend or Maylene and the Sons of Disaster.

So when you get down to it, Morser covers all the basics and then some on V. It’s a great album that comfortably ticks off the “death metal” and “hardcore” boxes, then runs the gamut on nearly everything in between, and some stuff outside as well. The only reason I don’t rate it higher is that, at the end of the day, I’m more partial to emphatically dynamic metalcore (read: harder breakdowns) than well-crafted and artful grindcore. Fans of old The Red Chord and modern grindy stuff like Nails and Full of Hell are advised to pick up V ASAP.

* What’s in a word? Ask 10 people what metalcore is and you’ll get 11 different answers. Personally, I believe that hardcore is inherently metal-influenced, and therefore separate the genre into pre-Earth Crisis “hardcore punk” (YOT, Gorilla Biscuits) and post-Earth Crisis “hardcore” (Hatebreed, Strife), with stuff like Judge and Madball serving as the transition. I usually reserve the term metalcore for more modern bands: Killswitch Engage and all the Warped Tour bands that followed. I may be on the wrong side of history on this, but here I stand.