(Our writers make their own decisions about what to review. Our editor tries to coordinate so that two people don’t review the same album. In this instance his wires got crossed, and so in this feature we have not one but two vivid reviews — by DGR and Chile — of Caustic Wound‘s new album, which is out now on Profound Lore Records.)
GRINDING MECHANISM OF TORMENT — A REVIEW BY DGR
Washington’s Caustic Wound was only ever built to travel this particular path. The sense of inevitability that comes with knowing the musicians involved with this group, and how much further down the path into the dankest corners of the pits of death metal with their grinding side project, is natural. The combination of parts – Motiferum, Fetid, Magrudergrind… – makes perfect sense; there was no way it wasn’t going to sound like this.
When Quill Onkko asks you “was it ever thus?” after seeing all possibilities laid out before him while you’re visiting the backroom of Cetus, it contains similar feelings evoked by all the possibilities that Caustic Wound could have sounded like, given the band members making up the roster here. It was only ever going to narrow down to this. Everything else was a smokescreen.
Based off of just name and album title alone, you could land in the ballpark of what Caustic Wound are doing here on their second full-length release. There was zero chance that Caustic Wound didn’t have a release like Grinding Mechanism Of Torment in them, especially emerging five years after their previous monster of a release in Death Posture. This is as grisly, gnarled, and mutated as death and grind combinations can get, and for a little under thirty minutes, Caustic Wound are willing to give you a head-ripping tour through every bit of it.
Grinding Mechanism Of Torment contains shades of its constituent member’s other projects, yielding a death and grind side project that is equally as scarred and sewage-dwelling as their main projects. The difference lies in Caustic Wound‘s approach: shorter songs, more violent songs, less atmosphere, more energy. It’s as suffocating as anything Mortiferum have forced together and as disgusting vocally as the Fetid crew have been before but the combination is more a sum of everything than parts that can be broken down individually.
2025 has us doing pretty well so far with this kind of heat wash fueled and disgusting combination of death metal and grindcore, with Caustic Wound making sure that reputation is well-earned. Lyrically, Grinding Mechanism Of Torment is focused heavily on death and dystopia, much of it provided by the mechanisms of war and a constantly surveilled state. It is the modern age of paranoia fused with the ever-present spectre of being killed randomly around every corner.
Every song on the album is obsessed with death and the pathways that lead to it, whether it be the impersonal/personal dissonance involved in killing for songs like “Sniper Nest” and “Drone Terror” or the outright apocalyptic for tracks like “Technologist Hell Future”, “Horrible Earth Death”, and “Infinite Onslaught”. It’s not as if Caustic Wound were ever going to be short for inspiration on that front – it’s usually the first ten minutes of any news broadcast and the final few pages of a science textbook. One doesn’t have to walk far for a nihilistic view of the world these days.
How do you represent that musically then? Caustic Wound‘s answer is simple: auditory destruction. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when you can stack multiple ones on top of each other and then crush people under the weight of them. Grinding Mechanism Of Torment is recorded as if the music is attempting to suffocate itself. It is clear enough to understand things – especially if you’re a ride-cymbal fan because the bell gets a nice workout a few times – but the segment of mud that has been smeared over the top of it makes it seem as if Grinding Mechanism Of Torment started out rotted and only got worse from there.
The titular “Grinding Mechanism Of Torment” starts off with bellows so low that they could rupture underground pipe work; you’d even be forgiven for thinking Caustic Wound had taken the Brutal Truth approach with its opening song by the sudden stop that starts this album off before it descends into chaos. On the other hand, “Human Shield” is a lightning strike of chaotic guitar riffs that fly in from all sorts of angles. It’d be easier to be inside of a barrel and have people shoot into it and chart where the bullets came from than some of the areas these guitar parts seem to crash in from.
Caustic Wound also show off a taste for screaming guitar solos that wind their way around much of Grinding Mechanism Of Torment. Songs that are of the chaotic storm of music style will suddenly have a guitar solo arrive, shrieking in while the band continue to bludgeon away behind it.
Special mention does need to be given to the song “…Into The Cold Dead Universe”, which is almost seven minutes in length and provides the reminder of the school of death metal that Caustic Wound attend outside of this current class. After the frenetic insanity that closes out “Sniper Nest”, “…Into The Cold Dead Universe” is a head-on doom epic. Driven mostly by feedback and some absolutely disgusting guitar tone, it’s the one “art piece” among a collective of musical grenades. You could even view it mostly as scene setting, something truly world-ending to close out Grinding Mechanism Of Torment, as if it were the final tour around a now completely annihilated landscape – one that the band themselves had been flattening into the ground for the last twenty-two minutes.
Grinding Mechanism Of Torment ranks up there as one of the more terrifying releases to come out this year. Not because it is some atmospheric hellscape of frightening noise or infernal wailing but because Caustic Wound have created a death and grind hybrid so immense that it suffocates (there’s that word again). It is recognizably built to do so but, like mentioned above, this was the only pathway Caustic Wound were likely to follow.
Previous releases showed that there was already a massive spark to this now county-wide conflagration, and Grinding Mechanism Of Torment is a natural continuation of the Caustic Wound sound. There’s no such thing as massive evolutions in this regard but instead a sort of organic growth — and one that is as pus-filled and nightmare-inducing as its predecessor. Caustic Wound have unleashed a gigantic sounding low-end hammerer of an album, as gross as the subject matter that it tackles. This is a release singularly focused on one objective, and in Caustic Wound‘s case they had it nailed by this album’s fourth song.
GRINDING MECHANISM OF TORMENT — A REVIEW BY CHILE
Recently, I’ve read a headline somewhere asking a question, and I’m paraphrasing, why there aren’t more metal bands being angry about the state of the world. You know, bands shouting from the stages: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Stopping to think, certainly, metal music can be called many a thing and being angry is surely one of its main traits. It is practically a requisite on the extreme side of the metal spectrum.
Angry at the state of the world specifically, well, we do have Napalm Death and Cattle Decapitation for those sentiments. As luck would have it, there are plenty more bands out there both sharing that particular point of view and pushing the boundaries further trying to fight off that proverbial boot stamping on a human face – forever.
Our guests today are also angry, no doubt about it. Brought to us by three-quarters of the “tune low, play slow” death/doom monster Mortiferum accompanied by Casey Moore on drums and Clyle Lindstrom (of Fetid and the recently reviewed Corpus Offal) on vocals, Caustic Wound is their vessel through which they channel their death/grind leanings in a crushing display of brilliance showing that one can really be a master of all trades.
Hard to believe that five years have already passed from their fantastic debut Death Posture. The band returned with a follow-up on April 25th named Grinding Mechanism of Torment, again released by the superb Profound Lore Records. The mean and lean twenty-eight minutes running time of these sixteen tracks tells us all we need to know.
Anyway, grind-adjacent albums are relatively easy to review, because there is no chance in hell we’re going to go for a song by song preview. Take the opening title track for instance. After a short drum count, the vocalist and the guitars roar in with the line “Trapped against this wall called a life”, the deep, sabbathian rumble of the bass makes an entrance, and then the whole band just rips up at full force to the end. And this is just the first twenty-six seconds of the album.
The band is intent in packing as much devastation possible into these sixteen social commentaries ranging from the critique of child labor in rare-earth mining to atrocities of modern warfare and climate change with a hefty dose of nuclear aftermath thrown in for good measure. What really makes these songs hit so hard is precisely their actuality, a perfect example of “hell is empty and all the devils are here” state of the world.
One could say that there is a certain Carnivore (or Gravesend, if you prefer a newer example) mentality and imagery going on here, condensed into one and a half minute songs, just taking the matter at hand infinitely more serious. Like walking through a minefield, these songs will mess you up eventually, each one in its own, unique way.
Putrescently demolishing “Dead Dog” is a fantastic miniature of extreme metal, and “Endless Grave” rolls over you like a warplane carpet-bombing the jungle, while the beautifully deranged “Human Shield” builds up in such a frenzy that you can almost sense the anxiety and desperation of the victims.
Slayer-infused “The Bleed Rail” documents the suffering of slaughterhouses in an equally disturbing manner, and the one-two punch of “Atom Blast” and “Technologist Hell Future” turns up the bleakness even more through a series of destructive riffs that just melt your flesh away. Well, by now you get the picture.
Images conjured by the lyrics are another strongpoint of the album and go well hand in hand with Elle Taylor’s sculpture artwork used for the stunning cover art. In this day and age of computer-generated nonsense, using an actual physical piece of art is a feat in itself and adds greatly to the overall experience of this album.
Closing track “…Into Cold Deaf Universe” with its almost seven minutes certainly stretches the expectations set by the album’s previous fifteen tracks. Fueled by an ominously pulverizing riff, the band prepare us for the final conflict through a series of news snippets, before blasting us straight off the face of the world in agony.
In the end, Caustic Wound treats us with an album that acts, for all intents and purposes, as a mirror to the world. It is too easy to fall into the trap of political preachings, but the band easily eschews this by simply pointing out the failings of man through the medium of razor-sharp riffs and a devastatingly honest approach in the lyrics. This is it, the final product, a world in slow decay.