Review Summary: The grandmother from Paranormal Activity 3, if you were wondering. Or perhaps the old lady from Legion, as it were. Actually it's just First Lady Mamie Eisenhower.
Another reason to love Bandcamp down to the very code, Grandmother are a self-tagged "sludge violence" band from Perth, WA, Australia. The adjunct selection of evil words chained together at the bottom of their page sums up their intent nicely, although does little justice to the actual content.
À la
Boris on
Pink, Grandmother separates burbling angry songs with the occasional staticky droning crevasse of a track, the opening title track included. These interludes aren't the brick-heavy drop-a-chord drone one would expect from
Sunn O))), but forays into mucky swamps of black noise. I say black noise, of course, as a play on white noise, and not a pathetic attempt to categorize the frosty racket
WOLD spews forth.
Amidst the nasty feedback-laden lies the most feedback-laden noise-punk sludge-grind ever to emerge from down under. Grandmother's amalgam of dirty drone and catchy crud-riffs comes off as either an exhausted
Melvins fronted by an asthmatic Matt Pike, or a stoned, middle-aged and bearded
Converge flailing groggily about in an alleyway. One might think such rage would have production value like the inside of a mudskipper womb, but the sound, despite being filthy, is actually quite clear. Seems a paradox, but the punxy riffs are distinguished and the barrel-throated vocals audible if not lucid, saving Grandmother from becoming another slimy amorphous mass.
The abyssal drone has introspective qualities, narrowly avoiding crashing into the slimy brick wall of stagnance, while the riffs are hookier than the rusty contents of an old toolshed. It's grind! It's punk! it's sludge! It's noise! Nay, it's Grandmother! And
Family Time is a blend of all things putrid, but squeegied off just enough to be palatable.
Note: Grandmother is partially the product of Sputniker rasputin.
