Four bands, 37 tracks, 55+ minutes of Japanese madness. Senseless Apocalypse begins with a whopping 14 tracks of frantic yet succinct grind with plenty of speed, lots of blasting beats, and a solid mix of tremolo picking and crunchy chords. The scathing vocal screams can be a bit much, but I do enjoy the fast vocal patterns. Every now and then they'll drop a rhythm that has more of a punk feel to it, and such instances are welcomed additions to the band's repertoire. "Smell Out" is slightly longer and more tangible, shifting from discordant arpeggios to blazing grindcore with more tempo variation and overall diversity than their other songs herein. The recording is pretty good, but the drums are a little loud, specifically some of the cymbals that sort of hover above everything else. I love the guitar tone because it's got a lot of texture to it and it works out great with the bass. It's rough, but in a good way. I can definitely live with it. Overall I find Senseless Apocalypse to be potentially awesome, but resting on the tedious side, so I'm not blown away, but I am interested. Muga follows with an incredibly impressive five tracks of brutal hardcore/punk with tons of dissonance and a killer dual male/female vocal attack. I'd definitely say that this band is coming from the His Hero is Gone type of style, but their spin on it is one of the more original that I've come across, not only because of the vocals, but also because their writing is really curious. Sometimes they even make use of acoustic guitars and such. There's a lot of energy and tasteful melody involved too, with "Memory" reminding me quite a bit of Tragedy. This shit is fucking amazing. I can't believe I've never heard this band before! The recording is pretty damn good, too. It's heavy, it's clear, the vocals sound incredible, etc. I'd like to hear more texture to the guitar distortion, but everything else sounds great. This band rules and I need to hear more! Up next is Realized with 13 short tracks of killer material not unlike a mixture of early Carcass and classic Swedish death metal with some Discharge thrown in for good measure. There are a lot of grinding speeds and plenty of low growling vocals or high screams, but then some of the riffs have a more hardcore/punk vibe, and the brief lead bursts definitely have that whole Discharge thing going on. The classic Swedish sound comes in with the recording, as the guitar tone definitely bears resemblances to early work from Entombed. I really like their production. Everything is dense and well textured, and it's fairly clean without losing its rough bite. Another solid band that I'd like to hear more form down the road. This is the kind of stuff that I could imagine being right at home on Razorback Records. Swarrrm closes with four tracks of very unusual blackened hardcore math grind rock with obscure chord phrasings and time changes that are a little confusing and honestly can't be categorized. The bassist is a god damn maniac, but the recording is sadly a bit too thin to do them justice, as the guitars are way too flimsy and the vocal screams are lightly distorted and only add to the confusion. But their songwriting is obscenely diverse, covering every possible genre of metal/hardcore, and were the recording smoother/fuller I would be very interested in hearing the results. I mean, any band that can go from sounding like twisted primal black metal to flowing melodic jazz within the span of a few minutes is generally going to get my attention, so Swarrrm is on my radar from here on out. The artwork breaks the previously set look and feel of this series by being done all in black and white with plenty of metallic silver ink, and everything looks very consistent. Despite the fact that, cover art aside, all of the imagery is rather typical bondage imagery that sort of cheapens the appearance, it still looks pretty good. I wish they had used something a bit less generic as far as any "extreme" field is concerned, but at least they've handled the imagery well. There's not a great deal of text, only on the tracklist and inside the booklet for succinct contact information. When it all comes down to it I think this is probably the best release Relapse has put together for this series thus far. None of these bands are bad, and it's honestly worth it for the Muga and Realized material alone, so... thus far Japan is running the show in that field.
[Relapse]
Running time - 55:25, Tracks: 37
[Notable tracks: Emotional Jerryfish, Smell Out, Pain in the Ass, all five of Muga's songs, The World of Complete Black, Tokyo Butterfly, Mental Blue Suicide, Weakness, Vanish]
Relapse Records - http://www.relapse.com
