Wormrot - Abuse
Earache Records
Grind
23 songs (21:48)
Release year: 2010
Official Myspace, Earache Records
Reviewed by Charles
How appropriate this album title is, given that listening to Wormrot’s debut album Abuse is like being aggressively ranted at for twenty minutes (yes, it is that short) by a smelly drunkard. Unlike that, though, this is kind of enjoyable!

Grind is this; 23 micro-tracks that blend seamlessly together into one continuous tirade of obscenity. This is a long way from the clever, artsy take on the style employed by bands like Antigama, and the attraction here is certainly not to be found in the avant-garde contortions of the riffs. In fact, the closest this comes to smartness is their misplaced cover of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s Rich. At least, it would be misplaced if it wasn’t crammed into forty seconds, and mutilated into a scuzzy, thrashily chaotic grind track, like absolutely everything else here. Everything here is about speed, obnoxiousness and pumping energy. It kind of has a sense of humour, as well, in the puerile way you expect and hope for from this kind of thing, with song titles like Fuck… I’m Drunk presumably taking the piss out of (or paying homage to) Australian noisemakers Fuck… I’m Dead. As the word-switch might suggest, this is less about violent battery and more about good times (in fact, there’s even a song called that, as well).

So the best thing about it are the riffs, of which there are plenty, each one piling in and then getting squashed under the next flabby monster that flops down on top of it. So in the aforementioned Good Times, you get 57 seconds of hard grooving, heavy metal riffing, with sharp and vicious drum fills, which do battle with the unholy blasting racket that never goes away. Freedom to Act follows, and its sheer noisy adrenaline is just the kind of thing that elevates grind from niche offshoot to cathartic performance art.

It’s partly the running time, and partly grind as a genre, but the first couple of times I played this through it felt pointless- short blasts of noise, right? Nothing new. But Wormrot’s Napalm Deathly deathgrind careers from infectious riff to infectious riff, benefitting immensely from, say the almost bluesy, almost sludgy Soilent Green-isms that overpower the chaotic, vomit covered grinding of Fuck... I'm Drunk or, the spasming, pulverising enthusiasm of Blasphemy My Ass. All of this gives it a catchiness and presence that elevates it way beyond what it could have been. Excellent!

Killing Songs :
Rich, Good Times, Fuck... I'm Drunk
Charles quoted 85 / 100
Other albums by Wormrot that we have reviewed:
Wormrot - Dirge reviewed by Charles and quoted 80 / 100
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