Wretch - The Senseless Violence
It’s bad enough that pretty much every animal endemic to Australia is on a direct mission from Satan himself to be as inhospitable to mankind as possible (come on even their birds can kill people, and I am not talking about Salmonella from some under cooked chicken on the barbie) yet this hostility seems to have seeped through and taken some stranglehold amongst the people too, evidenced by the lengthy list of cranial crushing acts to come from an area which will in due course be home to the coolest of post-apocalyptic environments. Thedowngoing coerced the forces of noise and chaos to taint their musical apocalypse, Warsore throw acid in your face with their punk bile, and now upstart spawn Wretch reforge and twist a death metal arsenal to a spewing grindcore grotesquery.
The Senseless Violence Ep is downright squalid, rolling in its own filth only to thrive from its own misery, a continuum of brutality that lambastes the listener’s aural activity with sounds from the most repulsive hideaways of the musical sphere. If anthrax would ever be assigned a soundtrack, the Senseless Violence Ep would be a contender for the title amongst a handful of other decaying diseases. The riffs are choice cuts, nothing but the foulest of the foul, yet still submissive to the rolling and churning of head bang worthy riffs of which plenty are on offer. Full on viscous grind isn’t really present but nor is it necessary, opting to deny the explosive hardcore tantrums of grind for a dank and noxious blooming of bloodlust and stepped up brutality. Final track control clocks things back a few gears, being their dying pestilent breath and bringing a douse of melancholy into the mix; a peachy stylistic variety that plays out well, yet others may perceive as weak.
Its more fleshed out than we expect from EP, doing a lap on what passes for an LP these days, fleshing it out with festered and sore ridden death metal tangents to their deathgrind decay. Good production values give it a nice lift, suiting the play style. Although I personally thoroughly enjoyed it I wouldn’t say it’s one that all can enjoy, given its leniency to death metal mechanisms of demise it may be alienating to thos who like their classical vibes in grind: short, loud and fast. Yet those who enjoy such fusion will certainly find plenty to chew through and enjoy in dark hearted fashion.
