I’m about six months behind on writing this one, and at one point, I figured I’d just end up consigning Rising Terror to some kind of “great albums we missed” write-up yet to come, but damned if it didn’t just keep finding its way back into my rotation. It’s got legs, this one, and fangs.
And I suppose I shouldn’t make any apologizes for being a few months late when it took Captain Cleanoff seven years to follow up their last one, 2008’s killer Symphonies Of Slackness. (Although I guess they did warn us that they were slackers, if you want to read into it.) Like that record, this one’s a full-on grinder, with a heavy influence from the old school and from classic thrash, and like that record, Rising Terror gets the job done brilliantly thanks to the time-honored grindcore formula.
Rising Terror hits the ground running with a quick drum fill that opens into the blast attack of “Rage Of Odour.” From that initial two-minute blast, it’s clear that Rising Terror is sharper than Symphonies, tighter, more refined. The production is clearer, shinier, not as classic-grind fuzzy as the earlier effort, and the whole approach is simply honed to a finer edge. And in most ways that’s an improvement, because while Symphonies was a brilliant bludgeoning, now, in Rising Terror’s twenty-one-minute, sixteen-track explosion, Captain Cleanoff has taken their next step in violence.
As you can likely surmise from the running time, most of Rising Terror’s tracks come in around the one-minute mark, but as with the best of grindcore, they pack maximum carnage in the near minimum span. And as with Symphonies, where they really stand out is in those great thrash riffs – the intro to “Flavour Of The Weak,” the killer crossover of “Never Learn” or “Terminal,” the Slayer-ish swagger of “System Collapse” or “Turmoil.” The nearly five-minute closer “Threads” breaks from the previous sixteen minutes, a slower and sludgier trudge through feedback-laden non-grind. And it’s all well and good, of course, but really, it’s the first fifteen that make the disc a grand grinding blast. “Threads” is an interesting diversion, but it comes far too late to salvage your ears or your neck, an easier way out after the damage is already done…
Throughout Terror, vocalist Ben Parson favors more his higher screech than his death growl, although both are featured, and that small but important shift is another difference between this and Symphonies’ classic Terrorizer-indebted style. It’s a slight change, but it helps to push Rising Terror further into more a modern grind battleground, a step away from pure old-school homage, and it also helps to put Parson’s screaming a closer to equal footing with Rohan’s riffing and Murray Ruse’s insistent and blistering blasting.
When it comes to grind, Blastasfuk is golden these days – witness January’s release of The Kill’s stellar Kill Them…All, and Rising Terror following a few months later. I let this one lie around too long before digging in, so don’t make the same mistake I did.
Get to it, turn it up, and blast your brains out.
