Review Summary: Napalm Nathrakh
I almost went with "Anaal Death" just for the sheer novelty of it, but alas.
This is a 12-track EP that barely tops fifteen minutes, so this won't be a terribly long review. Besides, the music on Infinite Mirror... isn't all grand and sweeping to begin with, and long paragraphs would be pointless. Born to Murder the World is a collab between the one of the dudes behind Anaal Nathrakh and Shane Embury, the longest-running member of Napalm Death. While both of these bands have an penchant for high speed brutality, the former is fond of long industrial-leaning tracks while the latter keeps things much shorter. The end result is a project of grind-length tracks built like Anaal Nathrakh's black/grind/wtf madness.
What really works about this pairing is how it takes the strength of each approach. AN's songs can sometimes go overlong and place too much emphasis on the electronic elements (to say nothing of their frequently brickwalled-to-absurdity production), while ND's style of grind doesn't have the same blistering intensity, and so what we've got here are a dozen and then some tracks that land like a goddam asteroid without collapsing under their own weight or being kneecapped by poor mastering. Every instrument is clear, nothing is clipping, it all sounds heavy as hell. There aren't any dynamics to speak of, but that's not a bad thing.
That said, it's the Nathrakh half that clearly has the lion's share of composition, as these songs generally hold truer to the balls-out blackness than anything resembling groove or even a hint of hardcore. To my ears this isn't a bad thing at all, with Embury's influence functioning more to restrain Kenney to make sure every single one of these songs maintains the intensity without running out of steam. Picking a highlight is difficult because the tracks aren't terribly different from one another, but I'll admit that the longer tracks (Genesis Misconception, Negativity Plague) stand out because they have just a bit more time to breathe.
Again, it's a short album. Fifteen minutes of insanity without a single shred of fat bloating the project. Would I have liked more? Of course, but that's not a bad thing. An album that leaves you wishing it were longer is infinitely preferable to one that should have been trimmed down. You can start it, play it through to the end, then do it again. And again. And again.
