One day I was on the train home, when my train somehow ended up taking me to Narnia, and whilst asking the locals of Narnia for directions back to reality, I spotted a man dressed up in a full suit of armour, thinking he also was a local I decided he may very well know the route home, as the other locals seemed intent on finding their way to Mordor for some reason, and knew not of the fair city of London, but said it may lye between the realms of Atlantis and New Vegas. Mustering up enough courage to ask the foreboding man I approached him and asked "Excuse me kind sir, noweth thee, the route one may take to reach the city of Londinium" To which he replied "Fuck knows! I was on my way their also, to go to an art convention, I was supposed to showcase my work in the Museum of fine arts (as us Londoners like to call it "the building which contains overpriced pieces of paper"). Having realised we were both looking for the same destination, we decided to trek together and hope to finally find a path to London. Along our arduous journey I learnt many a thing of this masked stranger, finding further that we shared many a thing in common, from our mutual disdain for dolphins and 8 sided shapes, to our shared passion of Grindcore and Haribo. As we proggressed he delved further telling me of his band Atomck, and he wished to create the greatest pokemon tribute band the western hemisphere had ever heard via the medium of Grindcore.
As it transpired the land we thought to be Narnia, turned out to be Bracknell, and as was southern Railway custom; all passengers are given suits of armour to protect themselves from the drug fiend locals, who have tendency to stab at anything that broadly reminds them of Jeremy Kyle.
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| Luke's own Artwork |
The identity of this masked stranger, is non other than fellow grindcore zealot, and grindtodeathian Luke Oram. Who contrary to their self styled pokemon outlook on grind, play a blend of chop and change grindcore and psychedelic electronica with a pulsating vein of progressive guitar work. I feel I have best described Atomck via twitter, as a crow attacking a vinyl player. The crow being a metaphor for the unnaturally high heinous shrills screeched out at ear drum blistering proportions, who surprisingly hasn't wreaked his vocal chords enough, to allow him to juxtapose the highs with a bellowing booming of equal ear torturing proportions.
Having pestered Luke in many of a conversation, I am well aware of his love of progressive rock, which shines throughout offering a really fresh injection of new blood to the heaving mass that is grindcore. They have for the purposes of this split and future releases, brought a human drummer to their traditional drum machine operated percussion, bringing a human element to their abstract quasi-death/grind/electronica/prog which in all honesty is a mindfuck to even begin to unravel. Having just spent the better part of the last two weeks at uni stressing the importance of independent judicial review, I feel somewhat of a nepotist hypocrite stating on this site that I really do enjoy listening to Atomck. I feel by well and far you will have a hard time finding a band who are equally as idiosyncratic and enjoyable as Atomck
Taking the remaining 2 songs on the split, we have Chicago's self-styled Repulsion grinders Paucities. Starting off with the traditional gore ethic as established by Impetigo, of sampling b-list horror flicks, we then are introduced to lo-fi high reverb buzzing drumming and guitaring in a manner akin to early grind days cassette days mums basement recordings. Although I do admit I like the general direction the music goes in, I can't say its repulsionesque in any form, the recording quality really does make this half of the split irritable to listen to. Being a child of the 90's I may lack the appreciation of lofi basement grind, that I am sure many a reader here once partook in, but for me the audio quality resembles that of one cassette player recording the output from another cassette player which fails to bring any hope of hearing the finer points of their musicianship.
Another critique is that the vocals really are awful, half the time they sound like an angry Alsatian who demands his dinner, and at other times, sounds like the scenes from The Exorcist played on a dusty VCR through a 1950's television.
Committing to purchase splits on the basis of one half being amazing and the other not so credible, on the advice given by a stranger is a risky grindcore related investment, well luckily for you fair lads and lassess of the realm, this release is 100% free so fuck off and download it and make your own opinions for a change (Just Kidding please come back! You guys are my only friends!)
