Review Summary: Bleeps, bloops, blast beats.
Okay so I’m going to be totally honest with you, I’ve never really vibed with the whole electronica meets grind thing. I tried to get into Genghis Tron when I was a teenager but it just never really clicked with me. I guess I couldn’t appreciate the contrast of the synthesizers, keys and dance oriented sections against the wall of noise and insanity.
Then I innocently chanced upon
DEATH AWAITS, the sophomore album from James McHenry’s solo project turned three piece band, Blind Equation, and while I still had some difficulty really getting into it, I have to admit that this album is actually pretty damned fun.
I’ll start with the fact that the album predominantly feels like a grind album. There isn’t much of an attempt to clash dance beats against grindcore—the backbone of the songwriting is grindcore. The songs are short, the shrilly screams are nearly indecipherable, the drum patterns practically never stop, etc. From that base, the electronica elements are stacked on top, mainly through the use of specific synth lines (played by a keytar live) to replace what would be an electric guitar. My point here though is that it never feels like the album can’t decide or doesn’t know what it is, and the album flows as a result. That doesn’t mean there aren’t dancey segments or passages, but they are used sparingly and in their own context. While the last stretch of the album starts to lean into this sort of sound more heavily, it never strays from being utterly bonkers in the best way.
Of course, the focus on a specific sounds lends to the album sort of blending together a lot, especially in the top half, which causes
DEATH AWAITS to become uninteresting after some time. Again, that’s not to say it isn’t a good time, it’s just that the album sort of mushes together after about ten minutes, which left me wondering when it began and where it would end.
Fortunately
DEATH AWAITS has more than enough positives to outweigh this factor, and while it may not be your album of the year, it’s definitely worth a trip.
