ROTTEN SOUND
ROTTEN SOUND "Apocalypse"
By Dr. Abner Mality
One of the terrorist's most brutal weapons is a simple bomb that's basically a pressure cooker filled with nails and shrapnel that's primed to blow. The musical equivalent of that pressure cooker bomb is "Apocalypse". On album number 8, fearsome Finns ROTTEN SOUND deliver their most caustic blast of grindcore yet.
This is a record that's more felt than heard. First two cuts "Pacify" and "Equality" are holocausts of explosive grind that are almost riffless. The drums are percussive blasts. In the past, the band has included a lot of death metal elements in their songwriting. Not much of that this time around. When the longest song on the album is 1:57 in length. compositional nuance is not something you should look for. Now and then, slightly slower and more discrete riffs pop up...on the title track and "Ownership", for example...but most of this blows by like the wind from a North Korean nuke test. 18 tracks and none reach the 2 minute mark. Many are less than a minute.
This is grind in its most stripped down form, along the lines of early NASUM. If this lasted a half hour or more, it wouldn't be worth as much, but this short, sharp stab in the chest lives up to its title.