As originality is something I do cherish I fancied an original title, and the only one that sprang to mind was "earworm" defined as being: A tune that is stuck in one's head, obviously being reference to the name of the band. However much to my dismay I discovered that I must of picked up the title from Grind and Punishment. After several minutes of thinking I remembered that from my German A-Level days learning that in fact Earworm is a loan word from the german Ohrwurm, hence the title. For those of you not so well versed in Anglo-Saxon or Germanic Languages Ohrwurm: Grind aus Singapur translates to Earworm: Grind from Singapore. Feeling now that I have the linguistic high ground I shall commence with the review.
There is only one word to describe your first listen of this album, it does not involve any colourful language nor does it have technical musical term, the term quite simply is "wow!", with an exclamation mark on the exclamation mark. The first track starts of with a distressed man screaming about the Patriot Act , and the song just breaks into a grindcore tune, with quite provocative lyrics, amazing multi tonal vocals, fantastic drumming and guitaring; what an awesome start, and all this in 1m19s. The barrage of amazing songs doesn't stop there , for a total of 22 minutes spanning 23 tracks and if quick arithmetic serves me right that is an average song length of 56/57 seconds. To those of you new to Grind, I will point out this is normal to have short songs, but back to the review.
The Album art itself is awesome, I do love amazing album arts and many a time have just got the album based on the cover and not of that of recommendation. The Font for the logo is brilliant aswell, the merging of eastern Asian calligraphy with that of our Roman alphabet is a interesting feature, like said in many films and people its all the little things which contribute the most to the overall effect, and this is certainly true with Wormrot. For a band to come from Singapore and produce this sort of amazing quality material is just beyond me, to think this band has created all this, where it is harder at every single level to acquire, produce, organise and promote Grindcore then this has been a true testament to the skill of Wormrot.
Intense is another good word to describe this album, the musicianship is just intense from the blast beats to the gruff and occasional husky vocals, to the guitaring and without the traditional bass player this trio have achieved an amazing sound, in the vein of older grindcore bands, yet in our day. This has led me to believe that Wormrot are infact part of a much sinister plot, perhaps the aforementioned German scientists do exist and kidnapped all of the Grind Legends from the "old school" and brought them to Singapore, committed tests and experiments on them, and after much work created a sinister creature known as Wormrot, and released them in 2007 to feed and to fine tune their skills, and by 2009 they released the Raw co-ordinated Grinding Sounds that we now call their album Abuse.
Like many stories this one has a very happy ending, my favourite record label Earache have picked up the band after listening to their songs from I believe on Invisible Oranges , although I cant be bothered to confirm if this is true or not. The band are now doing or have done 2 splits one with I Abhor and the other with Joe Pesci (the band not the actor) and have also stated that they intend to release another album (source), and also are going on a tour more can be seen on their myspace. Well this is enough for one review although I could go on for hours.
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/wormrotgrind
Last FM: http://www.last.fm/music/Wormrot
Encyclopedia Metallum http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=3540285169
