Suffering Quota – Collide Review

I don’t know how, with all the time I spend trolling about Bandcamp and blogs and Discogs and wherever else I can in order to feed this insatiable urge for blastbeats, but… somehow, I managed to completely miss out on Suffering Quota until now. These Dutch fellows have been around for well over a decade at this point, with two previous full-lengths and three splits to their credit, the last of those being a three-way with Polish powerhouses Herida Profunda and Psychoneurosis. And yet… right over my head and under my radar they went. I feel like a failure.

I’m caught up now, though. And what a fun little journey it’s been.

On paper – or in deference to modernity, “in type on a screen” – the combination of grindcore, death metal, crust, and d-beat-driven hardcore doesn’t feel particularly novel, but however limited several of those styles may be, there are still spaces in their overlap where a band can find a niche that both harks back to their forebears and comes across as somewhat distinct. More important than any stylistic originality by any band, however, is this: If there’s an alley running off the intersection of all those tangentially related styles, that alley would be My Alley, and Suffering Quota’s crusty death/grind would go right up it. (We’ll get off this metaphor now – it’s getting a little… uncomfortable for everyone, I would imagine.)

Opening with the dissonant stabbing riffage of “Out,” Collide hits the ground blasting, those angular chords punctuating a quick and savage attack atop a bass tone so gnarled and beautifully distorted that it barely qualifies as a tone at all, more like the clanking of broken machinery in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. The vocals are perfectly gruff, throat-shredding bouts of screaming; the guitars are open, airy, not just palm-muted chunks of blunt-force trauma. Eleven more bursts of pure rage follow that first one, some shorter, some a bit longer, but each as destructive as the last. Tremolo-picked melodies emerge in “Side,” as Suffering Quota slows down to a lumbering trudge in the midsection, that bass tone clanking away on the low end, the rolling treads on the tank as it crushes everything beneath. Coming off the hardcore smashing of “Grow,” “Pig” settles into a swaggering tempo, the guitars alternating between choppy chords and a slower tremolo pattern, the whole of it resolving into more punked-out aggression. Further dissonant chords jut forth from “False,” leading into the album-closing “epic” (at four minutes), “Scorn,” an exploration of the crustier hardcore side of Suffering Quota’s sonic assault, d-beats and blasting balanced against a world-crushing mid-song breakdown, devolving almost instrument by instrument into the sound of rain and… done. Twelve songs, twenty minutes.

Compared to Life In Disgust or the self-titled (a comparison I can make, now that I’m aware of their existence), Collide feels a little sharper, a little cleaner, the production here scraping away some of the crusty muck of those earlier efforts and allowing the songs a little more room to breathe, and mostly allowing those dissonant flourishes in the riffing further space to stick out. Like Life, this one was recorded live in the studio, and the band is undeniably tight and fiery, the performances electrified. Collide is a killer collision of all those styles listed above, the death and the grindcore in primary position, with notable nods to the other two, and all of it wrapped up in rapid-fire bursts of rage and fury, just as the gods intended.

So now that I’ve righted my wrongs – or at least, as far as my ignorance of one more worthy grindcore band is concerned – everyone else can do the same. Collide kicks ass.

Don’t skip out on the Suffering.