Agents of Abhorrence: Earth. Water. Sun.
Numerical Thief (2008)
Too often people overlook the fact that as a genre, Grind (or Grindcore) is so fucking over the top that it’s actually hilarious. It’s ridiculously extreme, almost a hyper-parody of its own genre, like a Rodriguez movie or Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The blast beats are stupidly fast and the guitars are a blunt force trauma to the ears, a crazed and atonal mess of sound. Vocals buried deep in the mix and generally just another smudge in the blur. Grind can be so OTT that it crashes through the boundary between music and the idea of noise.
Take Agents of Abhorrence, which continues my trilogy of My Disco related posts by being yet another Ben Andrews side project. Again vastly different to any of his other work, Earth.Water.Sun blasts through 13 tracks in ten minutes. It takes the stinging shriek of Andrews’ My Disco guitar licks and mulches them into a relentless explosion of….well…noise. The drums are typically spastic and the screaming vocals could almost pass as another guitar. There’s no bass player but this is still heavy as fuck because it’s so goddamn angular and horrific. Like Merzbow, Kevin Drumm or even Wolf Eyes at their crunchiest and most brutal but this has been made with actual, traditional instruments.
And when it finishes abruptly after ten minutes, an incredible weight lifts off your shoulders.
Agents of Abhorrence aren’t your run of the mill ‘I’m going to stab you in the face and cut your vagina out’ Grind band either. There’s something distinctly Arty going on here; from the album’s title (yes, they refer to it as an album) which has to be a piss take of the music itself; the lush image of a flower that adorns the cover, right through to lyrics like “This is our love in song, we are deeply rooted by a timeless movement.”
Read into it all what you will. Whatever the case Agents of Abhorrence are a blast to listen to, and I’m telling you Grind is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Evol Kween: The Musical 