Gathering of Cultures (The Atrocity Exhibit, Damned and Blasted 2010)

OK so right off the bat I'm going to admit that I know the guys in this band, and be assured that does indeed compromise whatever objectivity I may have had. To compensate for this egregious transgression I am only going to say that this band are awesome once: "This band are awesome once" (yeah you like what I did)

What I'm going to blather on about for the rest of this post are the myriad reasons WHY I would think such a thing, and those would also be reasons for anyone who is reading this to check them out.

Reasons to be Grindful are Three:

One: Their tunes are proper. You know, proper like when you listen to Insect Warfare and think "This is really great, and their songs are proper". Like that.

TAE have deemed that well-balanced song writing and nicely flowing tracks are, for them, more important than continually shredding you up with top-of-range tempi.

This is a good thing. Their recent CD (which I still haven't paid them for, fuck you the band) develops over the course of the album, offering up memorable tracks that have bits of Grind, Crust, Doom (and other tasty stuff) all over the place but are also consistent, it feels like the same band.

Two: Their drummer is proper: This happy chap can blast, but knows when it's time to just smash the crash and let the other instruments thunder. Do you see the theme developing here? A theme that not only has words like 'grind' 'blast' 'owns' but also 'taste' 'thought' and 'appropriate'. It works, supplies the modern-slick-double-kick whilst reminding us how good it was when some shitty punk bands decide they were just going to hit that junk as fast as they could loose teeth and cash giros.

ABOVE: They look like this, mind.

Three: The guitars SOUND proper (sick of this proper thing yet?). All the string takes on Damned and Blasted have real weight to them, like at a gig where valve amps are really shoving the air about. It's a great thing precisely because it ISN'T the usual hyper-gain Death Metal sound, it's dirty with heft and chunk. It means that when the band slow down a bit (which they do especially well on album closer track "The gathering of vultures") one gets to appreciate these choice riffs in all their meatsome countenance. Same goes for the Bass guitar; solid sounding. In these days of many bass-less grinders it's nice to hear a four-guy grind group in full grunt.

So there are my three reasons for my opinion that this band are awesome (once) and I encourage you all to INTERNETS THE HELL outta this.

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