January 24, 2012
#17: Wormrot - Dirge Singapore’s Wormrot are working with the stripped-down version of the power trio lineup (vocals, guitar, drums—no bass) that shows up quite regularly within their chosen genre of grindcore (Discordance Axis, Pig Destroyer, Magrudergrind, etc). Their second album, Dirge, is just as stripped-down, blazing through 25 songs in something like 15 minutes. These scathing noise blasts are ridiculously concise; none reach the two-minute mark, most are less than a minute long, and the shortest tune here is a mere five seconds long. However, they get their point across convincingly, despite extremely abbreviated duration. The guitar distortion is thick enough without the extra layer of thickness usually provided by a bass, and anyway they are generally playing so fast that the drummer’s staccato blastbeats take up any sonic space remaining in the arrangement. Overtop of it all, the singer emits deep, blurting growls and high-pitched screams, switching back and forth on a dime between these vocal techniques without ever making it sound contrived. Of course, you can’t understand what he’s singing, but since he could just as plausibly be singing in Malay as in English, it’s not really worth trying all that hard to figure out. What is enjoyable is a quick read through the album’s track listing: titles like “Semiconscious Godsize Dumbass,” “Fucking Fierce So What,” “Meteor To The Face,” and the Napalm Death-referencing “You Suffer But Why Is It My Problem” provide enough verbal entertainment to make up for any indecipherability where lyrics are concerned. Back in the late 90s, a lot of my favorite bands were playing music quite similar to Wormrot’s, and though I don’t listen to stuff that sounds like this on nearly as frequent a basis as I did 12 years ago, I still have a lot of fondness for the blurry, noisy, speedcore sound. When I hear albums that can hang with the best stuff I was into back in the late 90s, it still connects with me just as much as it would have then. I didn’t hear much grindcore this year, but of what I did hear, Wormrot stood out to me as a band delivering the goods at an elite level, which was definitely enough to keep me coming back to this album throughout the year.

#17: Wormrot - Dirge

Singapore’s Wormrot are working with the stripped-down version of the power trio lineup (vocals, guitar, drums—no bass) that shows up quite regularly within their chosen genre of grindcore (Discordance Axis, Pig Destroyer, Magrudergrind, etc). Their second album, Dirge, is just as stripped-down, blazing through 25 songs in something like 15 minutes. These scathing noise blasts are ridiculously concise; none reach the two-minute mark, most are less than a minute long, and the shortest tune here is a mere five seconds long. However, they get their point across convincingly, despite extremely abbreviated duration.

The guitar distortion is thick enough without the extra layer of thickness usually provided by a bass, and anyway they are generally playing so fast that the drummer’s staccato blastbeats take up any sonic space remaining in the arrangement. Overtop of it all, the singer emits deep, blurting growls and high-pitched screams, switching back and forth on a dime between these vocal techniques without ever making it sound contrived. Of course, you can’t understand what he’s singing, but since he could just as plausibly be singing in Malay as in English, it’s not really worth trying all that hard to figure out. What is enjoyable is a quick read through the album’s track listing: titles like “Semiconscious Godsize Dumbass,” “Fucking Fierce So What,” “Meteor To The Face,” and the Napalm Death-referencing “You Suffer But Why Is It My Problem” provide enough verbal entertainment to make up for any indecipherability where lyrics are concerned.

Back in the late 90s, a lot of my favorite bands were playing music quite similar to Wormrot’s, and though I don’t listen to stuff that sounds like this on nearly as frequent a basis as I did 12 years ago, I still have a lot of fondness for the blurry, noisy, speedcore sound. When I hear albums that can hang with the best stuff I was into back in the late 90s, it still connects with me just as much as it would have then. I didn’t hear much grindcore this year, but of what I did hear, Wormrot stood out to me as a band delivering the goods at an elite level, which was definitely enough to keep me coming back to this album throughout the year.

10:08am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-FUayFI1Eou
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: Top 20 of 2011 
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