Review Summary: A combination of abysmal vocals, repetitive blast beats, and an extreme lack of anything memorable, makes this just a plain and boring grind album.
By the time the 00’s came around, it is arguable that the grind scene has come to a close. The addition of more equipment in the studio to better the sound of your recordings has completely taken away from the traditional noisy, crusty sound grind up until this point had been known for. On top of this, the composure of most grind albums has been simplified to a typical chug-chug-blast beat-finish formula. Nothing about these modern albums possessed the same extreme qualities that fueled the underground musical fans’ ever expanding thirst for all things relating to straight up noise. Now granted, a few bands still manage to hold true to their late 80’s/early 90’s roots as best as they can, but nothing still compares to the ear-grinding mess that used to be grindcore. Afgrund’s 2009 sophomore effort,
Vid Helvetets Grindar is one of the plainest examples of how grind has become a stale genre, with absolutely nothing to offer in the same vein as the classics from the mid-to-late 80’s.
Vid Helvetets Grindar takes its first plunge into obscurity the second that the instruments start to kick in. The guitar work here is monotonous to say the least. It is essentially an onslaught of seemingly nonstop 0-0-0-0-1-0-0 riffs. For at least the first 1/3 of this album, the guitars would work like this, and rarely delve into anything more substantial. However, a slight praise to the album’s musical worth can be found in the latter half of the album, where Andreas Baier finally seems to come to his senses, and forms more creative riff structures and chord progressions; most especially in “The Great Cover Up Apocalypse”, which is easily the best song on the album, as well as the longest. But it’s still dragged down to basically nothing by one of the most obnoxious factors of the album; the vocals.
Between Andreas Baier and Enrico Marchiori’s vocals, they produce a sound that simply does not fit together, and even by themselves they probably wouldn’t do so well. It’s hard to find anyplace on the album where the vocals actually do work because Andreas doesn’t possess any more talent with grind vocals than a person who is completely unfamiliar with the genre trying to do it himself, and is constantly sticking his voice into Enrico’s halfway decent vocals. Andreas is the forerunner for this album, and his low-pitch vocals are the worst thing to find in this album. They really do sound like they’re out of some metalcore/dubstep hybrid band, and in songs like “Noone Gives a *** Anymore”, with the combination of the guitar and Andreas’ vocals, you could swear you were listening to a deathcore album. Enrico’s high-pitch vocals on the other hand actually aren’t too bad. Fans of Nasum and Rotten Sound will probably be able to find something they like about this man’s voice, but that’s the only thing he contributes to this album. As the bassist for this band, he either follows in the same step as the guitar, or the production simply doesn’t allow for his instrument to be heard at all.
The lyrical subjects here are also horrible. Like many of the “brutal” bands coming about in this album’s time, the feel for this album is straight up brutality, and the only way to push the boundaries of loud and obnoxious is to swear as much as possible, as well toss in random samples of one guy, or many people growling and screaming and swearing to no end. But really, the samples add absolutely nothing to this album, and it’s unfortunate to say that they do line this album in nearly its entirety. Outside of the incessant swearing, you can’t really tell what they’re rambling on about, but like most grind albums, it really doesn’t matter.
The album just lacks coherence. The vocals are all over the place, the guitar work is lazy, and the drums are beyond repetitive. Even if you could consider this a band that just puts together random albums for the fun of being in a band, it’s still hard to ignore just how jumbled this album really is. There is no rhythm here. Whatever time signature the drummer attempts to keep, he loses it quickly, the guitar chugs on regardless of what the rest of the band is doing, and both vocalists simply cannot work with one another. The album only has one halfway decent full-length track, and a couple other small tracks in the last half of the album that contain more creative riffs, but the blast beats still kick out everything, and the vocals burn out their worth. Enrico as a vocalist still needs work, but he does do well (for what the album is worth) to keep the vocal part of the album in check, so long as Andreas just stays out. Overall, this is only for people who dig primarily the modern day version of grind. Most veterans of the original style of grindcore will probably have the same problems with how clean the sound has become, and how overly useless the lyrics are if they really are attached to that old school, raw, and unmistakable sound of grindcore at its roots.
