By Dr. Abner Mality
CHAIRMAKER has nothing to do with furniture. Instead this one man outfit dishes out septum-smashing grindcore like nobody’s business on their debut “Leviathan Carcass”. This one gets in and out of business with great rapidity. I wouldn’t call a disk that lasts 15 minutes an “album” if it was any other genre than grindcore. For that particular brand of mayhem, 15 minutes makes sense.
CHAIRMAKER don’t bring anything new or particularly interesting to the grind game, but they manage to blow your innards apart with speed, piss and vinegar on “Leviathan Carcass”. The band is the property of one Neil Erskine, who has a history with bands like CHRONOCIDE. Here we have 12 songs with a duration of about 15 minutes and no song reaching the three minute mark. Song titles are a good indication of where a band is at; titles here including “Good Art By Shit People”, “Half A Puppy”, “Pigfucker” and “Making Nails”. It’s all super high speed, with few excursions into slower “skank” riffs. I feel the album could have used some more of those, as they add to memorability and relentlessly fast grind rarely stays in the brain for long.
Speaking for myself, “Dead Optimists”, “Good Art By Shit People” and “Loud, Confident & Wrong” are the best of what CHAIRMAKER has to offer. They have a bit more of that groove I spoke of earlier. But there’s no down time on this album. It’s damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead all the way.