Beaten To Death – Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis Review

Cover art by William Hay

To the great wonder of people who know me, I’ve never been beaten to death. Lord knows I’ve pushed some limits. If it ever does come to that, I hope there’s a bitchin soundtrack. Like the scene from Office Space, except instead of a printer it’s me and instead of Geto Boys it’s True Norwegian Melodic Grindcore pioneers Beaten To Death blasting their sixth album, Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis.

Opening track, “Dalbane,” makes a quick and pointy point of it with serrated riffs jabbing and stabbing between bludgeons from a rhythm section that plainly and proudly identifies as a battery. Anders’ vocals rip the air and what’s in it like a tornado of knives and smashed glass. There’s a 15 second boot-stompin breakdown about halfway through and a few furious seconds of weedly-deedly guitar lead poking eyes like Ip Man with the Chef’s kiss.

That just sounds like grind, right? But Beaten To Death isn’t just grind any more than Gary Oldman is just Commissioner Gordon. They’re kind of known for it, actually, lacing face-value grind with riffs and chords and pedal settings you might otherwise expect from songs comprising the soundtracks to movies like Garden State and 500 Days of Summer.

“Minus Och Minus Blir Minus Och Minus” opens with a ringing bass line and clean guitar melody that might conjure images of a teenage girl leaned back in the passenger seat of an old compact car, window down, hand in the wind, cruising through a pastel Wes Anderson suburb. It’s a grind song, though, so it gets there, all distorted and blastbeaten, but so naturally that of course those indie sounds belong. And that’s the great strength of Beaten To Death, really, where unique takes on sound and texture are more than ornament, but rather thoughtfully integrated at the level of songwriting so that pieces that don’t belong in grindcore at all somehow become pieces that belong in this grindcore.

I certainly don’t mean to give the impression that Beaten To Death is a band of pretentious dingdongs with designs on lifting grindcore into some enlightened stratum of new millennial art. Grind has always had a grounded sense of itself and these guys embrace it with humor and puns, as is the way. They love to twist the titles of classic songs that are based on already well-known phrases, for example, “Dying The Dream,” “Life But How To Leave It,” and “We’re Not Gonna Make It,” each alluding to the relentless hammer of time as if to say, “Nice cultural icon you got there. Be a shame if someone took a big ol’ cynical old man shit on it.”

That’s a pretty amazing display of creativity and versatility that does everything great grind is supposed to do and then douses it all in a wash of 80s anthemic nostalgia that they call “music in the style of Def Leppard,” but that gets about all those synth-heavy hard rock neurons firing at once. It’s really fun but you’re not supposed to be able to do that, right? It shouldn’t work.

“Mosh For Mika (Waddle Waddle)” is another great example. Super deep and distorted guttural growls barking out real melody. What? It’s a trip, especially alongside a crystal clear guitar pattern that gets all soft and warm and bubbly and that would feel right at home on the soundtrack of some whimsical and brightly colored JRPG.

It’s a tricky thing getting all that fun and silliness across without losing your edge, but these guys have been doing it reliably for nearly a decade and half and keep it up on album number six. Sunrise is savage to its bones, despite its penchant for sunny positive vibes. The riffs, as frequently as they shine, are just as often caustic; always righteous either way. The drums and bass are absolutely devastating all the way through. And all of it together, blasted at top volume, highlights a wonderful production job that puts the listener right there in the tiny space where they recorded the album live, all hot and sweaty, bumping slippery shoulders with the band. Gross.

Beaten To Death have told us they’ve aged horribly and that Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis is about coming to terms with death by blithely avoiding the subject entirely through bad jokes, worse puns, good beer, and great grindcore. And, well, there are certainly worse ways to pretend you’re not dying.

Posted by Lone Watie

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