Saturday 17 August 2013

Grindcore for Beginners Part 6 - Intelligent Aggression

Cephalic Carnage
Conforming to Abnormality
US; 1998

The debate over whether grindcore is more metal or punk has been going on since the genre was invented, and will still be going as long as it exists. As the ‘90s wore on, however, it was clear that the balance was shifting to the metal side. Napalm Death – hitherto the exemplars of grind’s punk roots – released their controversial, death-inflected album Harmony Corruption, Carcass went full-on death metal with Heartwork, and bands like Cattle Decapitation headed a new wave of grinders who wore their metal influences on their sleeves. This new influx of musically and lyrically complex bands breathed new life into the genre with their unusual time signatures and lyrics that were considerably more nuanced than the standard political sloganeering. No band better exemplifies this intelligent aggression than Cephalic Carnage.
            CC, along with fellow grinders Brutal Truth, threw out the stale punk clichés that threatened to choke the life out of the genre, and replaced them with jazzy experimentation and a new, metallic edge brought in by larger production values. Thanks to them, grindcore did not stagnate; instead, it branched out into new realms, and began to become a genre in its own right, rather than just another branch on the punk family tree.

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