Artist: Chairmaker
Title: Leviathan Carcass
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Vinyl
Grind? Really? Yep. I’m picky about my grind intake, it took me a long time to even grasp the concept but when Discordance Axis produced the jaw dropping classic ‘The Inalienable Dreamless’ I finally, at long last, got it. And there’s a cool little link here as well, a literary one. Discordance Axis did the song Use Of Weapons, a title from the book by Iain M Banks. And Chairmaker? Well it’s from the same book and if you know the novel then, well, there’s only one chair that will come to mind….
And that suits this project by multi instrumentalist Neil Erskine perfectly. Twelve tracks, around a quarter of an hour…
‘Ratlicker’. An absolute belter of attack and shift and attack in forty eight seconds. Then ‘Powdered Nostlagia’. It’s pure grind but this is so distinct from the opener; the riff lower, the lightning tempo shifts that never let up the assault. The wrenched vocals. ‘Making Nails’ drills down and even manages a slow pulsing bass part, a slower beatdown…in forty eight seconds again.
‘Leviathan Carcass’ really does have a nod to DA in the tone and stop start riff. The sample coming in amidst the brutal vocal flailing somehow makes it hit harder and the heavy machine gun delivery is just fantastic. There’s a real clarity to Chairmaker, a feel that is difficult to achieve whilst keeping the violent assault at peak levels and it is utterly glorious. Everything stops and starts on a pinhead but nothing feels mecahnical or technical, more a fluid machine trahsing and grinding through the rubble in bright sunlight.
‘Dead Optimists’ is the epic track here as nearly two and a half minutes. Rumbling fast riff, mixed samples, ultra chug pounding the last of your brains out. Magnificent.
We speed through ‘Pigfucker’, ‘Micron Thick Skin’, ‘Good Art By Shit People’, ‘Hagiographers’ and the perfect for our times title of ‘Loud, Confident And Wrong’ before pounding into the final strecth with ‘Other’s Interests’ and the disturbingly titled ‘Half A Puppy’.
Grind at its best is kind of extreme music’s haiku poetry. It crushed the intent down into the smallest space, the shortest delivery bereft of waste whilst losing none of the message. At its worse it is a noise, a wall that is impenetrable. At its best it slams you through the wall and the marks it leaves are brutal and beautiful. It showcases control despite the savage, whirling lightspeed assault. If death metal is the barbarian, grindcore is the assassin.
Chairmaker’s debut is pure destruction grind. For me this is the best exhibition of grindcore I have heard since No One Knows What The Dead Think and can stand proudly with Discordance Axis and Nasum whilst casting its own shadow.
Frankly borderline brilliant.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 