Review Summary: Beloved grind act return: feed your whole family with breakneck riffs
Return of the G! GridLink are back, grindcore is safe (as it's ever been), and you should be damn well grateful regardless of whether you've heard of them before or generally enjoy grind. From the top? Uh, GridLink are renowned partially for their sickeningly talented core lineup of Jon Chang (vocals), Takafumi Matsubara (guitars) and Bryan Fajardo (drums), but also for their spotless three-album discography, and for Jon Chang's involvement with the legendary band Discordance Axis. It's hard to say how keenly
missed these guys have been since their 2014 breakup, as all have maintained an active profile in the grind scene: Chang started a new band (No One Knows What The Dead Think), Fajardo played across a slew of projects including Noisear, Cognizant and P.L.F., and Matsubara went on to win his battle with hand paralysis and drop a bruising solo record in 2019, but nonetheless their original run still casts one of the longest shadows of late '00s/early' 10s grindcore, along with Nails, Wormrot and (one supposes) Cattle Decapitation.
GridLink's return is very much welcome as such, not least because
Coronet Juniper is less a perfunctory reboot and more a direct sequel to their discography in both style and quality. For those unacquainted, the GridLink trademark is a melody-heavy hornets' nest of one frenzied banger after enough, technical on a level that would give any given peer act a run for its money, streamlined in a way that never misplaces chops for charm. Their first two records laid this down at its most blistering, while their erstwhile swansong
Longhena spread its wings over more expansive territories, a rare grind record with significant appeal beyond the genre's usual melts and masochists.
Although
Coronet Juniper has a credible claim to the same, it stands out within their discography for its – lacking a better word –
chunkiness (the nuances of which have a distinctly blockbuster bent to them). Many of these tracks toy with slightly more ideas than those of GridLink's initial run, almost all of which are explored significantly less fleetingly. Take the opener "Silk Ash Cascade", which kicks off with potentially the band's most user-friendly harmonised riff to date and makes damn sure that you recall it note-for-note by the time "Anhalter Bahnhof" swings in to kick your teeth out.
There's a similar sense of heavy foregrounding at play across "Ocean Vertigo"'s combination of ascending leads and relentless blasts (which is otherwise textbook GridLink), the climactic finale of closer "Revenant Orchard", and the scorched-earth bounce groove that rounds off the title-track. Frame it in terms of heaviness or tempo, and this is the same GridLink as ever, but there's something ambivalently
coherent, something expositional about the songwriting here that gestures ambiguously with one hand at the chaotic overload of previous records while slipping the other unobtrusively into the listener's own. The extent to which this ultimately sacrifices intensity and/or bolsters accessibility will very considerably from person to person, but there's definitely a palatability here that sets
Coronet Juniper apart from the band's past work, and the production, crisp to the point of sandpaper, only compounds this.
Evaluating the record in other respects is less murky work: the performances here are as ballistic as they've ever been, and plenty of these tracks give the band a chance to shine at their most unhinged. I personally prefer
Coronet Juniper for its moments of frenzy than for its epic centrepieces: my favourite track "Octave Serpent" is a one-minute barnstormer that could hold its own against any early GridLink song for sheer nastiness, while "Zygomatic", "Anhalter Bahnhof" and "Refrain" also have a lot to offer those who prefer their melody dialled down and their violence at the opposite extreme. Perhaps the most balanced song in this respect is "Pitch Black Resolve", which the band bookend with a generous measure of consonance but pepper the interim moments with scathing assaults and, for a deliciously unexpected surprise, a spongeified beatdown that would hardly sound out of place on a nu-metal track (though it offers a far preferable ratio of savagery:seethe). For the range of ideas it flexes and the relish the band so clearly take in firing on all however-many cosmic cylinders,
Coronet Juniper is a treat of a comeback. It scans as just a tad overbearing to recreate
Longhena's flash-in-a-pan operatic magic, but by any other standards this band still has whatever you could possibly want their
it to be. Great things hopefully lie ahead.
