SkullShitter’s press materials declares that “Goat Claw is a fully realized Satanic grindcore experience.”
Well, now… That certainly sounds like fun…
Starting strong with a quote from the 1987 cult-classic The Gate (which celebrated its 35th birthday nine days after this album was released), “Angel Of Decay” lays out all the building blocks for the chaos to come: Sean Walsh’s biting guitar, Ryan Kunimura’s blown-out distorted bass, and Robert Nelson’s tightly wound drum-pummeling, all overlaid with those growls and grunts. Starting out at a blasting pace, “Angel” incorporates a midsong shift to one of SkullShitter’s swaggering doom moments, before the punkish “Mind Power” kicks proceedings back up to blistering. With a second sample from “The Gate,” the album’s somewhat title track “In The Grip Of The Goat Claw” is an early highlight, with an insistent groove and some huge riffing that serves as a small respite from the blastbeat maelstrom around it, although it’s no less carving.
From there, it’s a rollicking half-hour of hella-hooky deathly grinding, split in half by the brief synth interlude “Axis Mundi” (an electronic instrumental that could’ve easily featured on the soundtrack to any one of a dozen Gate-esque horror films). Immediately after “Axis Mundi,” Goat Claw gets caught in that Autopsy mire for two of its strongest tracks, albeit also two of its least outrightly grinding ones. These are twin scummy takes on oozing and cruising death / doom, “Ramlord” and “The Beast,” dueling mid-album high points proving that SkullShitter’s slower gear can be equally as devastating as its full-tilt cacophony.
Towards Goat Claw’s farthest reach, pinned between the spiraling riffage and concrete-smashing drive of “Doing Drugs With The Devil” and the album-closing twofer crush of “Morbid Tomb” and “Locus Of Death,” “Smoke Break” is another brief instrumental interlude of tribal drums, a walking bass line, and clean guitar arpeggios that stands as perhaps the most outrightly obvious “psychedelic” moment onhand. After that second short break and the brief menacing blast of “Bone Own”, that one-two punch hammers the final nails home, relentless energy and slicing riff, even when the tempo trudges.
My experience with psychedelic drugs is admittedly incredibly limited. I would think, if I were tripping (given what I imagine it’s like), that vicious and doomy death / grind wouldn’t necessarily be the first thing I’d choose to listen to, but to each their own. However, since I’m not tripping, and it’s relatively early on a boring weekday morning as I listen now, that same gutchurning (goatchurning, perhaps?) grotesquery is certainly a welcome deviation. Classic-sounding death/grind is classic for a reason, so get your goat on. Hallucinogens not required.
