Review Summary: misery.
Grindcore is a hard to swallow genre. It is purposefully rough, drastic, crushing and aggressive to a point even an anger management suffering patient will shrug. It seems as though grindcore in its (grind)core tries to drive the listener away with its menacing tones, dissonant production and often downright hateful themes, literally grinding into everyone’s ears the idea of utter chaos and desecration. Within such parameters every band needs to make a great deal of effort to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pile.
I don’t know why I’m leading you on like this, Hell to Pay is as distinct from other grindcore acts as a rotten apple is from anything else in the compost pile. It was apparent from their debut EP, where the band at least showed a strong sense of energy and enthusiasm, all brought to even fuller colour with hellish background effects of shrieks, slowed down instrumentation and monstrous growls. With their transition into the full-length, the production got noticeably clearer, although never to the point of being needlessly clean, and the song-writing turned from authentically slow to meticulously calculated and seemingly harmless.
It is an odd state to find a grindcore album in, but
bliss. just doesn’t have any real punch to it. Whereas most albums of the genre have the problem of being too tiring and never knowing when to stop, this record just swings by and all the disturbing soul-tearing hellishness you prepared yourselves to hear ends up unfulfilled. Take the track “Starve”, which indeed does strike with vocals bursting to shouts and growls and chaotic instrumentation, but has silly lyrics and rather forgettable song-writing. The preachy nature of the song does feel cringeworthy and the occasional instrumental shifts never work to the effect they so obviously try to convey. Wait, I was describing “Thrive”. Actually no, that was “Bleed to Me”. No hold on, I’m talking about “Static”. No, “Void”. Or was it “Second Seal” or “Smear”? You see the problem?
If any surprises are to be expected, they lie fully in the longer tracks. In that, the surprise is that there are tracks longer than two minutes. And surprise, they overstay their welcome. “Runaway” at first glance does come off rather dystopian and intriguing, but that is only in the initial context of the album. It is not a rapid-fire, decadent, but forgettable weirdness with arrangement and vocals each having their own separate developed level of bipolar disorder. This song actually flows with even bigger difficulty and intrigues with its shamanistic vibes and treacle-like song-writing. But it has no coming-back-to substance to it that would make sure you enjoy it on the second spin. There is no desire to continue listening to all five minutes of it on repeat. And that is not because of the aforementioned seeming necessity of grindcore acts to push the audience away; it is in fact due to the song’s flat and banal structure that doesn’t provide much of anything outside of a mere minimal change of pace.
Much worse are the things surrounding the album’s title track and closing monstrosity, which clocks at around nine minutes and presents a rather disappointing (even in the album’s whole context) picture. Starting off with the same drone-like tendencies of most other tracks here, then devolving into ghoulish blasts that last about as long as an average track on the album, and finally transforming into an overlong, directionless, confusing array of what appears to be random sounds and purposeless straps of muffled recording session background noise.
And that really describes the entire album. It is odd and shapeless; or rather, it has one definite shape, which is as miniscule as they can get. The album is not a typical grindcore affair that oversaturates its tracklist with harsh and devilish songs, even if those are often repeating themselves, nor is it a bold, creative array of musical talent that turns up impressive material, even if in a confusing manner. It’s just a middle-of-the-road hodgepodge of what someone believed to be an ambitious effort that still doesn’t exit the boundaries of raw grindcore. They succeeded at that, because it falls into every pit the genre can offer, but it never learns to look under its feet.
