Nails Unsilent Death Review

At fourteen minutes in length, NailsUnsilent Death is a blitzkrieg of brutality patterned after grindcore classics like From Enslavement to Obliteration and Horrified. With a sound forged from equal measures of jackhammer blasting and sledge hammer grooves, with no pretensions to melody or subtlety, Nails simply gets in, destroys everything in sight and gets out before the corpses cool.

Most of the tracks on Unsilent Death range in length from thirty to ninety seconds. With such short songs, it’s nearly impossible for them not to all run together. However, in spite of such draconian musical economy, Nails usually manages to fit at least one memorable musical idea into each song. This phenomenon is due in no small part to Nails’ judicious use of the blast bleat as a compositional tool, rather than a compositional crutch. Unsilent Death is not without numerous moments of glorious hyper-speed chaos, but the band spends equal time developing actual riffs.

Unsilent Death does feature two tracks of more conventional length and structure, though both are certainly still brief. Serving as the album’s centerpiece, the title track is built from a bruising mid-paced riff that sits somewhere between the brutal trudge of Scum-era Napalm Death and the death n’ roll swagger of Entombed’s Wolverine Blues. The album’s closer, “Depths”, plays like a requiem for the victims of the preceding slaughter, as Nails marches away from the smoking ruins to the beat of the track’s trudging coda.

Nails are obviously not out to re-write the book on grindcore; they are just out destroy, and in this, they succeed in spades.  Unsilent Death is fourteen minutes of pure, uncompromising brutality that would make a fine addition to any grindcore fan’s collection.

Posted by Jeremy Morse

Riffs or GTFO.

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