(written by Islander)
The Norwegian band Beaten To Death don’t play by anyone else’s rules. In the most rudimentary of terms their music is grindcore, but it’s so infiltrated by unorthodox ideas that it rarely sounds quite like the work of any other band in that rebellious genre. This excerpt from recent press materials makes the point very well:
Sixteen years in, Beaten To Death remain allergic to formulas, trends, and sensible decision-making. Since crashing into the grindcore scene in 2011, the Oslo-based outfit have made a career out of twisting the genre into strange, melodic, chaotic, and frequently ridiculous shapes, while somehow earning acclaim for doing everything wrong in exactly the right way.
What we currently have in mind in sharing these words is a new Beaten To Death album, one they named Vntrve, because of course they did. We can’t resist quoting another excerpt from the same clever press release quoted above:
On Vntrve, the band once again assemble a collection of songs that refuses to sit still. In an apparent attempt to widen their target audience, Beaten To Death spice things up with psychedelic tales of ponies, demons, computer games, and the endless hilarity of metaldom. Whether this is a commercial strategy or simply another act of sonic vandalism remains unclear….
As always, the result is grindcore only in the loosest, most dangerous sense of the word. Fast, weird, abrasive, catchy, stupidly clever, and far too much fun, Vntrve stands as another testament to a band that keeps failing to follow the rulebook, which, come to think of it, might have been the point of grindcore all along.
Oh hell, we should also share Beaten To Death’s own words about the album, shouldn’t we?
We have tried avoiding negotiation or coming to terms before. This is unwise as it often leads to being paid less than our worth or feeling unfulfilled at the end of the day. That’s why we have decided to stay VNTRVE and do what pays the bills. This album therefore introduces elements that may appeal to a wider audience, makes us more FOLKELIG, as we say in Norwegian. It’s still grindcore, but now with elements of hiphop, jazz, scandirock and Moroccan folk music. This is VNTRVE.
The foregoing quotations should be enough to lure you into our premiere stream of the entire new album below, even if you’ve never heard one of the band’s preceding releases. And of course, you should feel free to slip into it right away, but we can’t resist offering some thoughts of our own.
The album includes 13 songs and presents them over the course of about half an hour, so you can deduce they are mostly short. The second longest of the songs, “The Tolerator“, was the album’s second single, following “Sunburnt Satanist“. “The Tolerator” happened to be the first song I heard off the album not long after its premiere at Decibel, and I wasted little time spewing about it here.
It includes a saxophone performance — eventually. But before the sax rears its head Beaten To Death feverishly stitch and brutally bludgeon, insidiously squirm and brazenly howl, mechanistically hammer and insanely screech. They yield the floor to the rhythm section for a quick-and-cool bass-and-drum groove, and then add to that with strangled screams and a dose of strangely slithering riffage.
When the sax arrives it goes wild, and more wildness of different kinds ensues in the final phase of this madcap romp.
You might think that “The Tolerator” was the album’s second single because it was considered too unconventional to be the lead single. You would be wrong, because the lead single “Sunburnt Satanist” is also off the rails. It hurls a cavalcade of brazen and blaring riffage at listeners under the propulsion of remarkably deft but still unhinged drumming and then suddenly slows, moans, creeps, and clatters.
It gets jazzy and narcotic too, and the drumming is a non-stop marvel of wild inventiveness. The vocals are gargoyle-ugly, but they change too, erupting at the end in a chorus of crazed yells
The third single was “Fuck the Moon“. As the drummer frantically hammers on a trash can lid (or so it sounds), the music brings to mind visions of carnivorous insects greedily feeding on a fresh corpse but it also includes eerily pealing and nervously screaming tones as well as low-frequency surges that resemble a big tunnel-boring machine chewing through bedrock.
It’s a nerve-racking experience, and the range of berserk and belligerent vocals don’t make it any easier.
That’s only three songs out of 13. If we continued taking them one at a time this write-up would reach novella length. But we do want to mention three more, beginning with the title song that closes the album, which is also the album’s longest song by a fair margin.
“Vntrve” sizzles and slugs, pulsates and hammers, and brutally pounds as it slows. For a time, it locks into a pile-driving groove augmented by bursts of miserably braying guitar. It also includes another attention-seizing and thoroughly deranged saxophone performance that boils listeners’ minds above a massively heaving undercurrent of sound.
The sax is doubled and screeches across the channels, convulsing and contorting for the bulk of the song’s duration while the drumming eventually kicks up a riot. Whatever tortures were inflicted upon the sax would violate the Geneva Conventions if the instrument were alive. Perhaps the performer should consider psychiatric therapy. But as listeners we are grateful for such explosive mayhem.
On the other end of the album, as the opener, is the next song we’ll mention before stepping aside (at last). Its name is “Slosspit“. This is the one that Beaten To Death presumably had in mind when they said the album includes hip hop and Moroccan folk music, because the vocals include rap (joined by barking growls), but not conventional American or European rap.
That song may leave you wondering what the hell is going on, but the next one, “Fear Of Being Included“, won’t give you any time to ponder the question. It violently blasts away any attempt at rational thought, and the vocals eject both horrid roars and hair-on-fire screams, while the riffing goes on lunatic frolics in the midst of raging and ripping.
Five more songs to go, but now we’ll leave you to discover them yourselves. More head-spinning surprises await you. Prepare for an enormously entertaining experience from beginning to end.
BEATEN TO DEATH are:
Anders Bakke (She Said Destroy) – Vocals
Martin Rygge (Insense, Grant the Sun) – Guitar/Backing Vocals
Tommy Hjelm (Insense) – Guitar/Backing Vocals
Christian “Bartender” Svendsen (Tsjuder, The Cumshots) – Drums
Vntrve will be released by Mas-Kina Recordings on October 23rd. For more info about it, including how to get it, visit the locations linked below.
https://linktr.ee/beatentodeath
https://beatentodeath.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.facebook.com/beatentodeath
https://www.mas-kinarecordings.com
https://www.facebook.com/maskinarecordings/