Review Summary: A great representative of everything that grindcore has been and more for our masochistic sides to love and adore.
Noisear might be the best band to represent the grindcore genre to rise in recent years. Inhuman vocals that switch from high pitched shrieks to low guttural growls? Check. Fierce guitar riffing that eats through your ear drums? Check. Groovy breakdowns that appear occasionally and make everything even heavier? Check. Thick distorted bass that hovers over the audio attack like a thick cloud? Check. Songs that can rape your last.fm play count? Check. Incredibly fast drumming filled with blast beats that would take Olympian stamina to produce? ***ing check mate.
I hate when people call "album of *insert year*" before the year ends but this truly could end up being the grindcore album of 2011, even surpassing the great
Rotten Sound thus far. You see, Noisear has it all. Most notable perhaps is the drumming that is even more jaw-dropping when seen (just head over to YouTube and watch a live video). Everywhere I go I see the band being compared to pretty much every legendary group from
Brutal Truth to
Insect Warfare to
Discordance Axis. While there are certainly aspects of each band Noisear still manages to separate themselves from copycat grind bands and produce something worthwhile with
Subvert the Dominant Paradigm. The album rips minute by minute song endlessly and the album reaches the feat that every grind album should: you find yourself lost in the noise-like (wonder where the name came from) invasion, attempting to move your feet and hands to the ridiculous speed, and move your head to the grooves that appear.
In addition to the grind standards the band adds in dissonant bits of shred and high pitched guitar licks, sometimes even brilliantly pushing the vocals aside and take the forefront, particularly in "The Rail" and "Slave." The band brings back the days when grindcore had speedy solos while evolving the sound at the same time in an almost perfect mixture of past, present, and future. The vocals? Insane. While the majority of grind vocalists do switch from the high pitched to the guttural most find themselves only talented at one or the other, Alex Lucero is excellent in simply everything he does and even the backup shrieks coming from guitar and bass players add to the numerous inhuman noises that is hard to believe to be healthy.
Subvert the Dominant Paradigm is another sonic attack to adore in your own masochistic ways. The production is perfect in that its clear and full, making me only wish that the bass was slightly more hearable. Versatility is prevalent in that the band touches nearly every (positive) corner of the genre while adding in their own touch. As a warning, the final song ("Noisearupterion", damn they're good at names) is a twenty minute droning of noise that bursts after an angry rant and does not relent the entire time. Maybe the guys listened to
Nadja or something and decided to attempt at creating something similar. While better and more enjoyable than some drone songs/bands, it just isn't bearable for the entire twenty minutes. Nonetheless it is a different take on finding a way to assault the ears. Perhaps this is the apocalyptic nuclear explosion as the result of a massive global war that the first nineteen songs represented (sonically). A sharp dissonance of static-like noise that is painful and intolerable like the radiation that could potentially kill us all in the future.
