So far, grinders are having a good 2015.
Between Kill Them…All and Napalm Death’s death-grind monster Apex Predator, the blasting and bashing has been brilliantly brokered in the first month of the new year.
Conveniently, Australia’s The Kill takes their name from a Napalm Death song, one of Scum’s more famous tracks, and there’s some comparable thread between the two bands. The Kill’s particular brand of anger isn’t as rudimentary or raw as Scum, though it’s much more pure grind than what Napalm has done in decades. It’s some combination of the straightforward fury of the former with the skill of the latter. More important, however, is that it’s as pissed off as both.
Like 2012’s Make Them Suffer and the earlier compilation, The Hate Sessions, Kill Them is grindcore with noticeable hints of thrash influence, all delivered with the appropriate level of over-the-top violence and a slightly silly sense of humor. Hate Sessions was raw and furious, a band in the early stages; Suffer was better, a blasting and raging good time that polished up the attack. And Kill Them trumps both by a marked measure, partly because it sounds better and partly because the band is simply better now. It improves upon The Kill’s formula, further tightening their irreverent fury, refining the killing into a sharper, stouter savagery.
From the album-opening “Insults,” Kill Them starts with all guns blazing, erupting from a short maniacal laugh into tightly wound chaos, the sound of a controlled explosion. The drumming is relentless, the tempos ratcheted up to punishing intensity as the guitar rips thrash riffs to pieces, and the whole thing devolves into a sluggish decrescendo beneath a barely intelligible string of verbal abuse. Immediately thereafter, “Instant Fighter” hits fast and hard, like Joe Frazier on a methamphetamine binge, and from it onward, there’s very little respite from the madness through seventeen further songs in a total of twenty-seven minutes. Only during that ending to “Insults” and in the silly intro to “Burn Craigieburn, Burn” does The Kill let up, and then, it’s just for a few seconds.
The album title is clearly a nod to classic thrash, and there’s an almost unrecognizable reworking of Anthrax’s “Metal Thrashing Mad” as a further shout-out. Many of Kill Them’s best riffs are clearly thrash-based, but they’re then pushed well past that style’s highest speeds and served up like artillery shells in one-and-a-half minute volleys of violence. Thrash colors some corners, adds some nuance, but it’s just a shading tool – make no mistake that The Kill came here to grind.
The difference between a noisy mess and good grindcore is the ability to make moments in the maelstrom. Virtually anyone can scream and bash, but as with any music of any kind, some tenets apply: The more the riffs reach out, the more the lyrics linger on (what you can make out of them), the more the whole of the chaos coalesces into a certain madness that the listener can enjoy and remember, then the better the song, the better the album, the better the band. Even as The Kill operates at full speed and at full volume, there’s enough quality riffing and subtle variation to both keep the heart rate up and also keep the ear interested.
The Kill has long held promise. With Kill Them…All, they absolutely deliver.
