Gridlink - Orphan

Myspace
Released: 2011
Label: Hydra Head Records

So now that every member of Chainsaw Justice has been rendered inactive one way or another, I suppose it falls on me as a second-semester high school senior to resuscitate this blog. Let me warn you though, I have a penchant for long-winded, self-indulgent monologue but write terse, short reviews. Hopefully the next few posts will see me writing/ranting more about the music than my personal life. We can only hope.

As mentioned, the next couple of reviews will be short and concise. I prefer to let the music speak for itself and the readers to use his/her own ears. Perhaps I'll offer deeper criticism when I've got more time to spare and when people are reading this blog again. In the meantime, my job here is to simply expose the audience to music they hopefully aren't familiar with and regenerate interest in this blog. That'll be all for now. As promised, here's the review.

+-+-+-+

Grindcore deity Jon Chang and fellow noise-pollutors from other genre greats such as Hayaino Daisuki, Kill the Client, and Discordance Axis are back with the follow-up to 2008's Amber Gray. Chang-boy brings back the death growls employed during his DA days to compliment his typical throat-shredding sceams. The addition of bassist Teddy Patterson III (Burnt by the Sun, Human Remains, Hayaino Daisuki) supposely adds the low end that was missing on Amber Gray, though it's hard to tell it's there at all. The presence of two-guitarists (Takafumi Matsubara and Takafumi Matsubara) only ups the trebly piano-wire strangulation-madness that they somehow manage to convert into riffs.

Gridlink (and pretty much any of Chang's bands) are notorious for taking an extremely long time to put out new releases and having a perfectionist streak. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Along the longest, most laborious distillation process can produce the the purest, strongest works that will stand the test of time. Those who can stomach the wait - the true believers - will be rewarded richly. Everyone else can go listen to Amon Amarth. Orphan is 12 minutes of the most skin-flaying, eardrum-rupturing, skull-piercing technical grindcore known to man and probably any other intelligent species in the multiverse. You will enjoy it...

...and then beg for more.