Hey, listen. Do you ever think about, you know, aliens? Or more specifically, what aliens (ages from now, exhuming the wreckage and rubble of our long-devastated cities) would think if they happened upon a grindcore record like War, Hate, and Misery? Like, from a purely sociological standpoint, what does grindcore say about the state of our society, the dissatisfaction of humanity as a whole? Most importantly, would Bloody Pheonix pretty much be enough to instigate a telepathic, planet-wide “Let’s get the living fuck out of here” by said extraterrestrials were they to pop this thing in the mothership’s CD player? At this point I’m thinking yeah, probably. Because this is some crazy shit, indeed. I don’t even particularly like grindcore and I can admire the fact that this band is relentless, scary, and tight as hell. I mean, they’ve got all the requisites of a standard grindcore band—screaming guy, Cookie Monster guy, the fuzzed-out bass laying waste to the low end, all of it—but they’re doing it with such goddamn precision and insistence that I can’t help but tip an imaginary hat. Still, they’re yet another band that uses loaded imagery (dudes being hung, piles of skulls, stricken faces behind barbed wire) and has brutal song titles and then uses what could have been a pretty informative lyric sheet for a foldout poster and thanking their homies. But I’ve come to accept that nine times out of ten, that’s all you’re gonna get from a record of this ilk. So if you’re solely in it for the music, then you’ll be stoked. Play it loud and bring an extra pair of pants.
–keith (To Live A Lie)