(Andy Synn heads into the slaughterhouse once again with Aussie antagonists To The Grave)
Sweet zombie jesus… this is a heavy fucking album.
And, to be quite honest, I could probably leave this review right there and end with a quick exhortation to “go listen to the damn thing if you don’t believe me” and call it a day.
But, considering the fact that I know the real reason you all come here is to imbibe my unique brand of trenchant insight and critical analysis… I suppose I’d better better drop at least a few more paragraphs about the absolutely monstrous new record from Down-Under Deathcore heavyweights To The Grave.
Of course, the fact that Liberation Front is such a disgustingly heavy release shouldn’t really surprise anyone with even an ounce of familiarity with the band’s previous works (and if you’re not familiar with them, just think early Whitchapel, circa-This Is Exile, meets Harvest Floor-era Cattle Decapitation and you’ll be in the right sort of headspace), as they’ve been spitting out some of the nastiest riffs, blastiest drums, and most brutish breakdowns ever to come out of the Southern Hemisphere for over a decade now.
But whereas their last couple of releases found the band toying with some new flavours and features – to mixed results and an equally mixed response – their sixth album finds them refoccusing more on pure aggression and almost-unrelenting audio violence to deliver what is easily the band’s best (and, again, heaviest) album in years.
This renewed all-killer, no-filler, take-no-prisoners approach doesn’t just extend to the bolt-gun-to-the-brain style guitars and immense, industrial-scale breakdowns designed to crush your body into a fine slurry and force it through a mesh grating during songs like obnoxiously heavy opener “Meat the Humans” (which immediately sets the bar, and the tone, for the rest of the album) and body-in-a-blender brutality of early highlight “Torture Porn”, but also to the vocals as well, which have pared back the high-ranged screams in order to place even more of an emphasis on the guttural, gut-churning fury brewing in the bowels of vocalist Dane Evans.
It’s sure to be a divisive choice for at least some of the band’s fanbase, particularly those for whom flashy vocal acrobatics have become a core (pun intended) feature of the genre, but for me it’s one that works well in both the band and the album’s favour, allowing Evans to focus on expelling and expressing his rage at the ugliest and most self-serving parts of human nature rather than trying to show off his range, while also making those moments he does cut loose with some absolutely venomous shrieks (as he does at key moments during the utterly pulverising “Life Among the Septics”) to have even more impact.
Speaking of impact… while the general sense of Liberation Front is of everything, guitars, drums, vocals, emotions, cranked all the way up to 11 (the catastrophically heavy, down-tuned devastation of “Calf Slicer” in particular feels like someone force-fed Impending Doom a regime of gamma-infused growth hormones), that doesn’t preclude To The Grave from playing around with the dynamic a little here and there, with the occasional injections of some some moody, mechanised ambience (most notably during the clanking, claustrophobic “Limb from Lamb” and the doomy, dramatic slow-burn of “Terrorfire”) being something I’d be more than happy to see/hear them expand on in the future.
That being said, I wouldn’t want them to compromise the sheer misanthropic intensity of their sound – after all, Liberation Front‘s greatest strength, though I’m sure some will see it as a weakness, is that it just does not let up – but considering the way they still manage to weave an almost Cattle Decap-esque melodic undercurrent into face-ripping final track “The World Is A Slughterhouse” without lessening the song’s stunning impact I dont think we need to worry about To The Grave going soft, or selling out, any time soon.