Forced Starvation – Forced Starvation Review

Aotearoa New Zealand grindcore outfit Forced Starvation call the world’s southernmost capital city, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (aka Wellington), home. As a fellow Wellingtonian, I can tell you that things are not exactly peachy in Forced Starvation’s neck of the woods. Offshore, the prevailing myth is that New Zealand is some kind of safe harbour (for bunker-buying billionaires, mostly), but that’s what the kids call fake news.

In reality, New Zealand enjoys many of the same zeitgeisty issues you enjoy: divisive political figures spouting inane rhetoric (you betcha!); distressing levels of homelessness coupled with a nationwide addiction crisis (yes, sir!); spiralling unemployment and an entirely unchecked mental health epidemic (fuk yea!). The point is, the vibe down under is undeniably bleak at times.

Of course, all of that gloom and doom is lyrical grist – and a significant creative motivator – for a punk-fuelled outfit like Forced Starvation. Musically, Forced Starvation’s self-titled debut is indebted to ’90s grindcore, with a comparable aural harshness and a similarly belligerent tenor. Bands like Excruciating Terror and Infest are obvious inspirations, but you can sprinkle Unholy Grave, Assück, and P.L.F. into the mix, too. Forced Starvation’s music is stripped of the hyper-technical gymnastics or roid-rage peacocking amplified on some grindcore releases. Instead, the band foreground a few old-school essentials: abject filth, bulldozing ferocity, and zero listener-friendly compromises.

Admittedly, ‘old-school’ can also mean tired and dated. But the 14 über-intense bangers on Forced Starvation’s debut are the antithesis of that. Skin-stripping abrasiveness and equal amounts of nihilistic ordnance are crammed into every song here. A concussive track like “Shit Giving Exacerbation” will pound you into fucking gravel, while remorseless cacophonies like “Circling the Drain” or “Bathed in Blackwater” are skull-crushing free-for-alls.

It’s been suggested you’ll hear “subtle hints of fastcore and brutal death” on Forced Starvation’s debut. In one sense, that’s entirely true; the band utilise a broad spectrum of volatile ingredients. But I wouldn’t call those ingredients ‘subtle’. Forced Starvation’s music is about as subtle as a battery-acid enema, with the band’s ferocious blend of influences ingested and then regurgitated at breakneck speed. Nothing here is understated or hinted at. It’s full-on and all-in, all the time.

A lack of subtlety doesn’t mean there’s no nuance, though. For all Forced Starvation’s instinctive savagery, the band’s transitions between full-bore grind and red-raw death metal – or their mixing and matching of thrashcore and powerviolence – are deft and impressive. Tracks like “Cryptic Incursion”, “From My Rotting Body”, and “Crushed To Powder” are akin to rapid-fire bursts of hybrid sonic warfare; punk throttles gutter metal, and gutter metal garrottes punk, back and forth it goes, the filth-caked sub-genre’s locked in battle.

Elsewhere, nods to Forced Starvation’s punk rock roots appear on crustier tracks like “Faceless Acquaintance” or “Front Towards Enemys”. Ultimately, though, you’ll hear what you want to hear. It’s all a blizzard of bone-shattering bass and percussion, hideous vocals, and buzz-sawing riffs after all. Everything, from go to whoa, is as heavy as a collapsing building – absolute audio destruction.

None of Forced Starvation’s in-your-face assaultiveness will surprise hometown fans, given that all of the band’s members have played in similarly vicious (and often politically-charged) NZ outfits like Meth Drinker, Stress Ghetto, Piggery, Unruly, and Rogernomix. Some of those bands have also caught the ear of offshore fans, and all have shown a diehard commitment to making a deafening racket. Forced Starvation’s members clearly have abundant experience when it comes to crafting confrontational music. I doubt any of those members would use the word ‘expertise’ to define their various skill sets, but credit where credit’s due, it definitely requires a certain level of instrumental and compositional mastery to record music that sounds wild and uncontrollable and yet tight-as-fuck.

It’s always great to see southern hemisphere bands working with labels north of the equator, and German grindcore and powerviolence stalwart, RSRecs, have gotten behind Forced Starvation’s first musical endeavours. The band’s debut is very much in RSRecs’ wheelhouse of murderous/monstrous music-fests, too.

At this point, Forced Starvation’s moniker has a particularly chilling resonance, conjuring wretched imagery of present-day atrocities. I cannot imagine what it feels like to be the victim of appalling violence in physical terms, but witnessing staggering levels of inhumanity from afar does take a psychological toll. In the immortal words of one of grindcore’s kingpins, extreme conditions demand extreme responses, and in that sense, the extremity of Forced Starvation’s sound provides a much-needed emotional exorcism.

Plenty of musicians from NZ’s punk community have crafted ugly, crossover releases, and Forced Starvation’s debut is another prime example of that. The brutal onslaught here oozes as much squalid metal as it does angry punk, and the 17 (extremely unfriendly) minutes of obliterating grind is pretty much pitch-perfect for beer-swillers and glue-sniffers alike.

If you’re aching for sophistication or subtlety, look elsewhere. But if you’re searching for some visceral noise to sink your rotting incisors into, you’ll love gnawing on this filthy nugget. Top marks to Forced Starvation for unleashing such a barrage of obnoxious sonic sewage.

(PS: This is an edited version of a review I published on my own blog earlier in the year. I wanted to give Forced Starvation’s debut another nudge on a larger forum – it deserves it.)

Posted by Craig Hayes

Old man from Aotearoa New Zealand. I write about dadcrust for d-beat dorks, raw punk nerds, and metal dweebs.

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