Beyond Terror Beyond Grace - Our Ashes Built Mountains
Deepsend Records
Grindcore
20 songs (39:14)
Release year: 2010
Deepsend Records
Reviewed by Goat

Australian Grind is a slowly developing genre, but one moving in an interesting direction, the likes of Blood Duster, Fuck... I’m Dead and The Berzerker each putting their individual spin on the style. And now, you can add New South Wales’ Beyond Terror Beyond Grace to the list, a fourpiece playing the sort of violent chaotic grind made infamous by the likes of Rotten Sound and Nasum. As fans of the Swedes will be aware, this is about as intense as Grind gets, razor-sharp and metallic with carefully constructed riffs and drums capable of exploding into blasts at any second. Beyond Terror Beyond Grace are rather good at it, keeping their songs as distinctive as possible and varying styles from sheer runaway rage (Exposure) to groovy malevolence (Fugue). Although there are twenty songs here, they average at the minute-and-a-half mark, never getting into a predictive pattern or letting the listener sit easy. The riffs are pretty much uniform in their excellence, from the pounding Flightless to the walls of atmospheric noise in Coil. There are numerous little ambient interludes dotted here and there, breaking up the violence with moments of spooky emptiness – highly effective, and a good atmospheric foil to the combustive heaviness.

Highlights are frequent. Like mid-period Pig Destroyer, the band likes to throw a few longer tracks in with special diversions of their own – the three-minute Ashes being the sonic equivalent of bursting into flame and rolling desperately on the ground to put it out, a section towards the middle of the track approaching Black Metal in sheer blasting fury, before slowing and turning sludgy. The seven-minute-plus Murakami, meanwhile, starts with acoustic strums (pretty rare for grindcore) before building up rather epically with samples of a passing train giving atmospheric oomph. You can tell that Beyond Terror Beyond Grace are capable songwriters as the shorter tracks in general are as good as, if not better than, these longer ones. In particular, you’ll forget all about Murakami when the final pulverising Bias out-epics it despite being barely over two minutes long and full of riffs.

Writing distinctive things about various different Grindcore bands is generally a struggle for us poor wordsmiths, but it’s a mark in Beyond Terror Beyond Grace’s favour that they’re enough from the crowd, and have plenty to say. The one thing I would change is their daft name – the band have struck grindcore gold here in spite of it, and deserve the ears of all fans of the genre.

MySpace
Killing Songs :
Amnesia, Tumour, Exposure, Fugue, Flightless, Coil, Ashes, Murakami, Bias
Goat quoted 82 / 100
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