(DGR reviews the new EP by multinational grindmongers Afgrund.)

Afgrund’s Corporatocracy EP comes from an interesting realm of music. Sparing the full grind history lesson, Afgrund have long been making noise as the part of grind that shares more DNA with death metal than it initially displayed. 2012’s The Age Of Dumb was a compact bit of fury born of absolute hatred and disgust. It displayed many older influences of modern grind’s roots as well, from the punk riffs to the political consciousness, in addition to the more modern aspects of death metal that have been slowly working their way into the genre – including the excellent hybrid that has become known as deathgrind.

Grind has oft been a difficult genre to define (and likewise, I could not even begin to purport to be an expert on it based on nothing more than the occasional cursory glance) because if you ask some, the very definition of what it is now is conflicted, without any understanding of what the “grind” actually was in the music. Some bands took to the rapid sense of speed. Other bands then brought in many punk influences and added it to the music (its short songwriting existing as an almost blatant Fuck You! to conventional songwriting) and began to incorporate activism as well.

Somewhere along the line, many bands eschewed the sort of social  consciousness that had long been part of grind, owing in part to its roots in punk music, not even forgetting the massive influence of bands like Napalm Death and Discharge in this scene. Instead, some bands became almost nihilistic – focusing on the fact that the world is a mess and being angry about how fucked up it is, offering no solution, instead surrendering what little aid the logical brain could offer and appealing entirely to emotion, the raw blast furnace of anger and rage giving birth to bite-sized bits of death metal drumming buried behind a wall of simplistic circle pit riffs and someone screaming at the top of their lungs. Continue reading »