Review Summary: 18 minutes of near-flawless in-your-face grind
Subtlety has never quite been a given fact for grindcore bands, and the Singapore grind act Wormrot is certainly not an exception to this rule. With their 2009 effort
Abuse they have already proven themselves to be capable of creating a stir with their flawless in-your-face grind. Now they have released a new effort,
Dirge, and one thing is for sure: they are not planning to cease their relentless assaults any time soon.
Opener 'No One Gives A ***' does a smooth job at intriguing the listener, opening up with a soft (by hardcore standards) and melodic guitar line. You might even forget that this is a grind record, until the song suddenly explodes with a menacing scream, of course. The following tracks 'Compulsive Disposition' and 'All Go No Emo' display how well the band can strike balance between pure aggression and the few melodic elements they have managed to sneak into this record. They manage pull this off perfectly, thanks to the wonderful vocal performance, which is shown in its full growling and screaming glory on the shredding 'Overpowered Violence', a name which completely covers the, well, overpowered load. However, this does not mean that the rest of the band aren't doing a fantastic job, because they are of course the main force behind this album. And by God they are playing their asses off. The amazing in-your-face musicianship keeps the album interesting all the way through, even though it's not all that original. The general feeling of the instrumentation, and the album as a whole for that matter, can best be described by the band themselves: as a 'Meteor To The Face'.
Dirge is a pretty standard grindcore album. You can easily spot it by its savvy titles like 'Destruct The Bastards' and the fantastic 'Spot A Pathetic'. But more importantly,
Dirge is a standard grindcore album in terms of track length, with '***ing Fierce So What' being the shortest track on the album, clocking off at merely 4 seconds. Of course, the band know damn well how to play around with this, and they show that they are more than capable of creating killer tracks even within such short periods of time. It doesn't matter how short the tracks may be, Wormrot have reached a certain form of perfection when it comes to dividing their seemingly endless rage into smaller, easily digestible doses. Wormrot somehow manage to maintain an execution that is just as enjoyable as it is precise and aggressive for the course of the whole record. It's admirable that the band manages to keep up such a devastating pace for the duration of the whole album, while the closer, which has a very fitting title, 'The Final Insult' does a perfect job of bringing you back to reality. It's actually pretty amazing how they manage to close off in such a fashion that it actually feels finished without slowing down their pace all that much.
'Dirge' is everything you could have expected to come from Wormrot after 'Abuse' and so much more. The vocals are wild and haunting, the musicianship is top notch, and the songs will keep you stuck in a permanent adrenaline rush for the whole 18 minutes. The adrenaline rush fades away, and you reach out to press that replay button once again...
