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Review: 'Grinding Fear'
'Distorted Dreams'   


-  Genre: 'Thrash Metal' -  Release Date: '12th August 2021'

Our Rating:
It’s taken four years since their demo tape, ‘Reaper’s Disease’ for this Helsinki act to assemble their debut album. They describe themselves as a ‘crossover’ act, and it’s fair to say that despite the moniker, they’re by no means a straight grindcore act. But they are, at heart, a grindcore / thrash act, with dashes of black metal and crust mangled together to forge a dingy guitar-driven mess, with gargled, grunty, guttural vocal snarls pitched against a thrum and chug guitar assault and a relentless attack of thunderous blastbeats.


‘Distorted Dreams’ is ten tracks all played fast and furious, full-throttle and full tilt, and it’s not pretty, it’s not subtle, and it’s not especially innovative either. It’ doesn’t have to be, and isn’t intend to be: it’s an album that follows the hard, headbanging metal tradition.


‘Obeyed Ignorance’ stands out by virtue of its furious thrashing tempo and sheer density, and it’s also a strong indicator of the band’s agenda – again typical of the genre – anti-authority, anti-everything. But mostly, for all the nihilism, they hate government and hate humanity in general, and their music provides a cathartic release for all the frustration and angst and anguish.



‘Reaper’s Disease’, reappearing here in full studio form is dense, dark, and a blizzard of fretwork and pummelling skins, and it’s fucking brutal. It may lack the rawness of the tinnitus-inducing version of the EP version, but it sits well with the murky riffery of the album. ‘Verge of Decay’, which appeared on their 2017 demo, here appears in a longer version by fully twenty seconds, and they take the opportunity to really slug it home

It’s gnarly and dingy, and their hitting a studio has done nothing to diminish the DIY ethic espoused in their previous releases. ‘Cleaner’ is all relative, right? Because ‘Distorted Dreams’ is by no means a clean-sounding record, and in fact, it’s an unrepentantly nasty mess – which is precisely the noise they were going for.




  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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