Review Summary: Botch Up and Die
Mathcore is a genre exemplified by sharp twists, turns, stops and starts, and a generally complex approach to metalcore’s foundation of chug-chug-wah-wah. Breakcore is a genre exemplified by complex and intricate breakbeats skittering about at breakneck speeds. Put them together and you have
Grist. You could describe it as something like, drumcore perhaps. I don't know. Just an idea. Anyway, the specific recipe for
Grist is as follows: take liberal handfuls of mathcore luminaries (eg. Botch, Cave in, Converge and Curl Up and Die) and whisk them up (quickly) with breaks and glitches galore. Warp some choice riffs into static echoes, then cut-up and jump-start your beats into howls of grinding cyber-noise until they're scraping like a pipe along a grate accelerating at warp speed into one abrasive blurry note.
It's a heady concoction that has been brewed surprisingly few times (although Vein.fm did recently seem to discover that slapping breakbeats onto nu-metalcore works quite well) and is for the most part completely one-note. There is no subtlety of flavour here, no careful balancing of ingredients.
Grist is balls to the wall
cybergrindbreakglitchcore with no spaces or full stops, the sound of mathcore falling apart and being put back together. It's completely devoid of any meaning or emotion, and if I was a smarter man I'd probably pull out some continental philosophy a la Baudrillard (of The Matrix fame) and say something about signs replicating themselves, simulacra and copies of copies, but I've never read Baudrillard so I can't. I've seen The Matrix though, and it was highly stylised spectacular nonsense.
