There comes a certain point after which being extreme for its own sake stops becoming interesting, and you have to actually be creative. This was the problem I had with Masonna, and why I lost interest with them in favor of Merzbow: the former was pure overkill to the point of redundancy, while the latter was (and is) more artful and adventurous. In the same vein, that’s probably why grindcore bands like Carcass and Napalm Death, despite being completely over-the-top, managed to remain interesting — they tried to be at least somewhat evolutionary instead of just beating the same dead (rotting, bloated, stinking) horse.
Which brings me to Agoraphobic Nosebleed, brainchild of Scott Hull, founder of the far more maliciously creative X-core band Pig Destroyer. Over the course of the two CDs and 136 (!) tracks of Bestial Machinery, there’s almost no evolution or refinement to speak of save for minor changes in production style or levels of sound quality. And I think that’s probably the idea: ANb isn’t out to evolve, just to survive and succeed, Klingon-style, and from the sound of it also take out as much of the competition as possible along the way. If grindcore is the music you play to clear a room, this is the music you play to clear a room of grindcore fans … or maybe to make them into new ANb fans.
The ANb concept is as simple as it gets — take the grindcore aesthetic of playing ridiculously loud and fast, swap out the human drummer with a drum machine, turn up the BPM dial as far as it’ll go, spit out a list of vulgar / sarcastic song titles (“The Executioner vs. the Sodomite”, “Sex on the Flag” and “Gorrendously Mutilated” are some of the milder ones), bellow night-incoherent electronically-processed Cookie Monster vocals on top, and kill everything within earshot. Machinery culls everything from the band before their first long-form releases, which consisted of appearing on compilations like the wonderfully-named Bllleeeeaaauuurrrrgghhh!. There they were in fine company with bands like 7 Minutes of Nausea and Japanese Torture Comedy Hour (another Scott Hull outfit), all doing their own variations on the same pummel-it-to-pulp-in-ten-seconds theme.
But, again, there’s only so many ways you can go over the top before there are no longer any tops worth going over. This also goes for being that much more offensive and “edgy”, even in today’s blasé musical scene. To that end, you can add Bestial Machinery to your collection and feel confident that as far as these guys go, you’ve touched all the bases they could ever have. Knock yourself out, if that’s your pleasure.
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After listening to Terrifyer and Prowler in the Yard (both of which have numerous thrilling and genuinely uneasy moments) I was chomping at the bit to hear Scott Hull's other major project, and I was disappointed in ANb, especially considering the raves the band got from Aquarius Records (which, btw, has a wonderful website to browse through even if you have no intention of buying anything from them).
Yes, the band was crazier than Pig Destroyer, but in a very superficial, self-defeating sort of way. I found them to be fun in 15-minute bursts, or as something to play briefly in the company of friends for a bit of amusement, but the veneer of adolescent rebelliousness wears off pretty quickly when you realize that there is no overarching theme or purpose. Ironically, this self-consciously cult group ended up being far more conservative than the supposedly more mainstream Pig Destroyer.
Having said all of that, you should really give their newest album, Agorapocalypse, a shot. I listened to it after hearing that the group had undergone a pretty drastic evolution, and I was pleased to find that most of the issues I had with their earlier material had been resolved. It even holds together as a coherence half-hour of music, rather than a scatter-shot collection of odds and ends. Since we seemed to have a similar take on their previous works, I thought I should recommend this album to you.
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