Review Summary: God hates asshole!!!
I discovered Morbid Axe in 2007 when I was first getting into what I now refer to as scenegrind, which is a spastic, mathcore variant of grind (See You Next Tuesday, Me and Him Call It Us) which differs from original grind (Napalm Death, Nasum), but shares the same name. Having no knowledge at the time that these somewhat similar but also very different versions of grind were sharing the same genre name, I must have conducted a Youtube search of "grindcore" which led me to the rehearsal videos of Morbid Axe. Morbid Axe belongs to the original variant of grind which I wouldn't get into until much later, but despite this, I would still watch the band's live recordings because I thought they were hilarious. Song titles like
Hero of the Gay and
Metal God is Gay were the funniest thing to me in high school, and one of these videos had a cover of Napalm Death's famous song
You Suffer which I would ironically tell my friends was a musical masterpiece. But as I mentioned, it wouldn't be until several years later when I would start unironically listening to grind, which led me back to Morbid Axe's
Grind Up Your Ass, a very solid and under-looked album of the genre.
In typical grindcore fashion (in both versions of grindcore, actually),
Grind Up Your Ass is a seventeen minute album with fourteen songs, half of which run under a minute. The rapid riffing is non-stop, and although there are two guitarists, they use their instruments solely for harmonizing chords with one another. The bass is audible and clear, and is at all times matching the guitars note for note. The drummer, who I find to be the most impressive member of the band, is excellent at determining whether each riff is best suited with either a blastbeat, or a frantic off-beat snare pummeling. He also likes to make use of the bells of his cymbals as a way of both emphasizing certain notes of riffs, and as a way of not drowning out the guitars with incessant bow crashes. Both guitarists equally share vocal duties, with frequently alternating low growls and high yells, the latter of which are comical at some points (they still slay me in
Cattle Mutilation every time). Regrettably, no one has posted the lyrics to the album (which are no doubt gold) online, and my efforts to procure a physical copy of the album have been futile.
Morbid Axe is a Japanese band, and although this is a fact that I would normally put in the opening paragraph of a review – possibly even the first sentence – I feel that there is nothing distinctly Japanese about this band. Japanese music of almost every genre has subtle nuances that give away its country of origin (aside from if the lyrics are in Japanese, obviously), but Morbid Axe is a band that wears its Western grind influences on its sleeve. I do not consider any of these things to be faults though; rather, I wanted to mention in closing that I often subconsciously group all Japanese music into its own sector of my mind, a sector which Morbid Axe has sliced out of in favor of the "heavy ass grind" region.
