Review Summary: Wormrot rules again.
Wormrot fucking
rules. I mean, this year they’ve already released
Dirge, an absolutely ferocious, and amazing LP, and here they are following it up with an excellent EP. I would infer that this band is a bunch of kind, generous gentlemen for giving us loving fans such a large amount of amazing music, if it wasn’t for their vile, violent brand of grindcore that convinced me otherwise.
In short, the
Noise EP is essentially a shorter version of
Dirge with a few notable sonic differences. It’s insanely fast, insanely heavy, and just like the songs on
Dirge, insanely well-written. Wormrot are masters at making their short bursts of metallic-grindcore fury seem like complete
journeys, by constantly switching things up, making things faster when the song calls for it, and slowing things down, too. The riffs in each of these minute-long quests are diverse, and the quests are
coherent, too; riffs and patterns are given time to be repeated in order to keep the songs together, and it’s awesome when those slower, thrashy riffs are the ones that are repeated, because those are really a special treat.
But don’t be fooled, this isn’t just a pointless re-hashing of
Dirge, for
Noise actually possesses a few traits that are seldom, if at all found on Wormrot’s most recent album. The main one is that the band has begun to play with feedback. Oh, what a glorious decision that was. The chords at the beginning of “Loathsome Delusions” are laced with feedback, making the riff almost resemble the intro to an epic post-metal song. It’s also seen in a riff in the middle of “Outburst of Annoyance,” and is peppered throughout the EP’s closer, “Perpetual Extinction.” Not only does the open, slower-paced feedback provide a nice (yes, short, but nice) break from the technical, palm-muted insanity of the rest of the riffs, but it also gives the songs a twisted, sinister edge that Wormrot hasn’t really experimented a lot with before.
Unfortunately,
Noise is only an EP, so it doesn’t have that large amount of epic, revolutionary staying power, but a full-length that contains all the same awesome traits as this, but fully developed and drawn out longer, certainly would. The riffs hit hard, the dynamics are never dull, and all the songs have that almost
scary amount of ferocity, a sound that Wormrot has now, very successfully, made themselves known for.
