Friendship – Hatred Review

Don’t believe them – they’re not your friends.

Unless your friends come over and break your belongings, beat you half senseless, scream into the night with all the rage of a thousand suns, and generally lay waste to whatever’s around. If that’s the case, then you might need new friends.

But then again, if you’re looking for those kinds of friends, then Friendship is actually just the friend for you.

This Japanese hardcore outfit is certainly a vicious lot, pushing their noisy and chaotic ‘core well into grinding territory, tempering it with the stark rawness of powerviolence, and pushing it with the full-force fury of all of that combined into one sonic whirlwind of maximum volume and violence.  Hatred is the caustic cacophony of Corrupted crossed with the frenzied chaos of early S.O.B., the uncompromising tar-coated rawness of Su19b run headlong into the unrelenting aggression of 324. It’s bleak and it’s crushing, and it’s ugly, noisy, dark, and it’s filled with blasting and screaming and squalling feedback, and damned if it isn’t anything at all besides friendly…

The grind-to-groove shift of “Rejected”? Absolutely smashing, but not friendly. The noisy weirdness that closes “Regicide”? Fun as hell, but not friendly. The sludgy riffs of “Corrupt”?  Maybe something of a paean to their countrymen, and one of Hatred’s greatest moments, but not particularly friendly, either way… Those perfectly off-kilter ugly moments of “Compton”? As characteristically unfriendly as the city that shares the name. The swaggering, staggering crush of “Blue Berry”? Markedly less friendly than you’d think a song with that title would be…

And there’s more, and it’s all harsh, all vicious, all killer, no filler. Hatred doesn’t necessarily re-write any books – its lineage is clearly defined, in hardcore, in grindcore, in powerviolence – but it encapsulates the ugliness of each in one 25-minute blast of sheer unmitigated anger. The guitars are stout, thick, heavy as bricks; the drums are live, raw, unpolished; the vocals are furnace-bellow screams. Hatred is the sound of breaking things, the feeling of beating you half senseless, the echo of screaming into the night with all the rage of a thousand suns… And then, again, if you’re looking for those kinds of things, then Friendship is absolutely for you, and it’s a wonderful bout of destruction, as pitch black as its cover and the pointed and pummeling antithesis of friendship…

Friend, foe, whatever they may be: They definitely do not come in peace.