Review Summary: Dizzying, disgusting, and surprisingly dynamic, Dirge's only fault is its room for improvement.
Wormrot’s
Dirge is pretty much everything one would want a grindcore album to be. It’s fast, it’s heavy, and it’s pretty fucking insane. Its pummeling blast beats, crushing riffs, and disgustingly great vocal performance are all executed at a breakneck speed, practically never relenting throughout its entire duration.
Dirge doesn’t give a fuck about you. It doesn’t care if you don’t get any time to breathe, it simply wants to obliterate both your speakers and your ears until both are nothing but piles of defeated ash and dust. (It’s the album’s epic closer, “The Final Insult,” [a fitting title] in which the album pisses on said ashes). While the album could technically be improved by adding things that it doesn’t have, what it does have is pretty much perfect. To be honest, it’s
so good that I feel a bit selfish for wanting more. It’s a greed for which
Dirge will punish me thoroughly, and I’ll enjoy every minute of it (all 18 of them).
Possibly the most impressive aspect of
Dirge, and definitely what makes it hit so hard, is the dynamics and the amounts of subtle transformations the album’s songs contain, despite their a-lot-less-than-average length. Six out of the 25 tracks are a minute or longer, (the longest still being under two minutes), and yet the vast majority of them are still able to find time in their busy schedules to slow down into a nice, thrashy riff for a few seconds, or make the fast riff even faster, or put in a drum fill, or take out the drums and let the guitars and the vocals go by themselves for a bit. All of these subtle, but noticeable variations make each song distinct and memorable in its own right. I mean, really, who could forget the awesome drum intro to “All Go No Emo,” or the breakdown in “Spot A Pathetic” that leads into the intro to “Evolved Into Nothing,” followed by “Butt Krieg Is Showing,” (which has a pretty epic part of its own)? Who could have trouble remembering the sheer awesomeness of the razor-sharp riffs of opener “No One Gives A Shit,” the six-second blast of probable Napalm Death shout-out “You Suffer But Why Is It My Problem,” or the slow-burning but sinister riffs of penultimate track “A Dead Issue,” and the aforementioned “The Final Insult”? Every song has something to offer, which with this album, is extremely arduous, considering the short periods of time the songs give themselves to create their unique attributes.
Of course, if you’re not paying attention, and merely have the album playing as background music to your annual Fuck Shit Up party or some other shin-dig you have going on, the album may seem like 25 fast, relentless tracks of the same formula running together, creating an entertaining, but ultimately unmemorable grindcore hurricane. It’s when you open your ears up a bit wider that you hear the seemingly inconspicuous nuances that each remarkable track on this album contains.
The main reason I think the album even has the possibility of becoming an unremarkable whirlwind of riffs, screams, and growls, leaving some listeners winded, rather than satisfied, is because the album, quite literally, does not give the listener any breaks. There’s not even a pause, a second of silence, a
breather, between tracks. Each song leads directly and seamlessly into the next, melding on and on to the incessant chain of riffs. This is mostly a good thing, but at times (depending on the listener and the time of listening), it can get to be a little much. And while the songs’ structures are extremely varied and never predictable, I think the album could’ve been even stronger if the band put a little more variation on the actual sounds being used. One example of this is the not quite clean, but not quite distorted effect on the guitar during the first couple seconds of “Principle of Puppet Warfare,” but other than this, every song consists of the same instruments with the same effects on them. The album’s formulas and sounds never really get dull, not in the slightest actually, I’m just saying the album could’ve been even
better with, say, a couple clean guitar passages, or a tongue-in-cheek acoustic piece, or maybe a song that’s entirely just drums and vocals, or bass and vocals, or bass and guitar, etc.
Dirge destroys everything in its path, but as much as I hate to admit it, it does leave some room for possible improvement.
The piercing shrieks, the deep, guttural growls, and the ball-busting riffs of every single one of the 25 tracks on Wormrot’s
Dirge are nasty, pissed off, and absolutely merciless. The listener is consistently spun around and pounded deep into the ground with every fast riff that breaks down, every fast riff that gets faster, every ferocious growl and thundering blast beat, and with every variation in song structure that’s constantly throwing the listener for loop after loop after loop. Even though some extra add-ons wouldn’t hurt the album in any way, it still annihilates just fine the way it is. I have a hunch Wormrot doesn’t give that many shits about what people think of their music anyway.
