Who Shares the Guilt? / Blind World

Agathocles start with a long sample of a woman screaming with some background noise. According to the insert, it's the sound of her being butchered, much like thousands of animals are butchered every day because we eat meat. There's a long rant about how people in third-world countries starve because the plants they could be eating are sold to first-world countries as cattle feed so we can eat steak. I think they put more effort into the insert than the music. It's a wonderful waste of a minute and a half when their only other track occupies the other four minutes of their side.

Their only song is a live track. It alternates between mid-paced punkish grind and a slow, boring death metal section. Three minutes in there's finally a blast beat, then it quickly returns to the stagnant start. The guitars are fuzzy and while audible have little clarity, playing slowly most of the time, not even grinding like you might expect from Agathocles. The vocals are sparse, they're low grunts spitting out short lines every once in a while. This side is a waste of time.

Nasum begin with a sound clip from the film "Flesh for Frankenstein", a dialogue about the laboratory assistants, which ends with the line from which took the name "Nasum". Their side also ends with another piece of the clip, also ending in "what we really need now is the perfect... Nasum", which is mixed in nicely with the last 30 seconds of music. It's a pretty cool way to bookend the music. They also used this clip as an intro to their farewell tour this year.

Nasum's music is low-tuned grindcore that finds plenty of time to groove between bursts of grind. There's a fair amount of death metal feel here - the intro to "Think" and the break in the middle of the song both contrast very well against the high-speed blasting grind. The strength of the band is in their ability to groove - while there are the blurring blasts, they often manage to fit a melodic groove in to the tremolo riffs. The slower riffs are reminiscent of classic Swedish death metal too, finding a nice death metal groove to fit into each song.

While the music is strong and shows the framework of Nasum for years to come, the lyrics and the message aren't fully developed. The lyrics aim to the same points on society and corporatism, but they don't yet have the cohesive rage that bundles the lyrics and the message with the full sound of each song. The driving force of Nasum was how they made each song into a message, and this portion had not yet fully matured.

Despite the lyrics being prior to their prime, this is really a great introduction to the band, and while they fine-tuned and expanded their sound over the years, the core of Nasum's music has been solid from the start.