Organ Dealer – The Weight Of Being Review

Eight years removed from their first, this latest full-length from Jersey-bred grinders Organ Dealer was a long time coming, begun in 2021 and delayed by everything from the global pandemic to an apartment fire. I would imagine it’s been a frustrating process, but, hey… good thing frustration and anger are the perfect emotions for creating quality grindcore, right?

So if you’re looking for the sum of this review, there it is: Like 2015’s Visceral Infection, The Weight Of Being is straight-up grindcore, and quality grindcore it is. It’s savage, pissed-off, built of sharp-edged riffing and blast-driven rhythms and throat-rending screams, twenty-one songs in twenty-three minutes of furious flailing. Jeff Knoblauch’s guitars slash and burn atop Trevor Graham’s clanking bass, with the latter given an early moment to shine, roiling through a broken-down midsection in opening track “Expiration.” These riffs pull from the usual suspects – hardcore, death metal, classic grinding, all mixed up and mashed up, sharpened into blades and slicing through bone with ease. Exhumed / Noisem guitarist Sebastian Phillips makes a guest appearance on “Endless Despondence,” alongside his Noisem bandmate Ben Anft on vocals, ripping out Weight‘s sole solo, a shreddy Slayer-y cacophony of hammer-ons and whammy dives.

And even as each of these riffs is strong, tremolo-picked turns and chunky power chords giving shape to the formless aggression that fuels Organ Dealer’s fury, the true weight of this Being comes from drummer Erc Schnee, formerly of oft-overlooked pre-Gridlink Jersey-meets-Japan outfit Haiyano Daisuki. Schnee’s propulsive pummeling is the engine that powers Organ Dealer’s destruction, pushing everything forward at a white-knuckle pace, operating almost exclusively at two speeds: fast and faster. Blastbeats abound, bouncing off bits of a thrashier gait, occasionally punkish but never sloppy, never anything but tightly wound and totally destructive.

Atop it all, Scot Moriarty’s fire-breathing screaming adds the final colors, mostly red and black, anger and darkness, augmented by guest spots from Sunrot vocalist Lex Nihilum on early standout track “Solitude Is Death” and by Birdflesh bashers Joakim Svensson and Elis Markskog on “Stagnant Reality,” their voices combining into something like a grindcore choir (grindchoir?) for the second half of that short but potent blast. (For those seeking a direct and less verbose comparative description of Organ Dealer’s brand of mayhem, the carving crush of their Everlasting Spew labelmates and friends Birdflesh is an apt one, although Organ Dealer eschews that band’s goofball sense of humor in favor of more traditional grindcore rage.)

Since 2018’s three-way split with Nerve Grind and Invertebrate, Organ Dealer lost one of their guitarists, but that didn’t slow them down any, and though it was a long and arduous process in the making, The Weight Of Being holds its own against earlier Organ Dealer deals quite handily. To make matters further complicated, Moriarty has already departed, in the space between the album’s recording and release, replaced by Chris Ward of Lunar Blood. Here’s hoping that all the turmoil keeps pushing Organ Dealer forward, because they’re a worthy band of bruisers, with a hell of a record here to show for it. Twenty-three minutes of full-on razor-sharp fury: what more could a grinder need?