Keen ears will notice that Stranger, the new one from California grindcore/death metal band Cretin, is decidedly more death metal than their debut, Freakery. Sure, it still grinds and it still carries with it a huge love of Repulsion (it's telling how often Cretin guitarist/vocalist Marissa Martinez, who has played with Repulsion in their later years, mentions the legendary grindcore pioneers), but it's heavier, bulkier, just more serious and ready to kill, as opposed to the debut, which was more ready to get a chuckle out of ya.

"Freakery was more garage-y," says Martinez. "And we did that intentionally. We wanted to sound like 16-year-old kids practicing down in the basement in Flint, MI. Even though we were in our early 30s (laughs). This time around, we've all kind of expanded as far as our capabilities as musicians."

 

 

Not only does Stranger show a band that has stepped up their musicianship since last time out, they've changed where they're getting their influence from. Martinez points to the change that Napalm death went through when they released Harmony Corruption, and says that influenced the tunes on the new Cretin disc.

"They brought way more death metal into their sound," she says. "I really liked that change. So that was something that was very conscious in my mind, I wanted to bring some of that type of change into the music. We're all metal fans, anyway; we're more metal fans than punk fans. Cretin has always sounded, in my mind, more metal than punk. Really aggressive grindcore is very punk, so I really wanted to highlight metal this time around. So the Harmony Corruption thing as an influence, then the proto-grind Repulsion sound that we were doing, that was pretty dated, I think, but it was charming, and I like it."

But it doesn't end there, with Martinez finding another influence for Stranger (the band's first with guitarist Elizabeth Schall: "Elizabeth brings in tons of guitar player shredder magic," says Martinez) in a rather unlikely place: a coffee-table picture book documenting the early thrash metal scene in San Francisco.

"I had drawn some influence from the book Murder In The Front Row," she says. "It was sitting on my coffee table in my living room, and every day I'd see the cover, that picture of James Hetfield headbanging with the white V... just living in SF and realizing, hey, it was blocks from here, from where I'm sitting right now, where all this stuff happened. That gave me an influence too, so I wanted to try to capture some of that old headbanger youthful energy and old metal sound and tie that in to the whole soup of death metal, Repulsion-y grindcore."

 

 

And, as always, the soup is tainted with some extremely twisted lyrics. But let's get this out there right now: while many may think of Cretin's lyrics as being silly and freaky, I think there's more to them than that, and Martinez confirms my suspicion.

"I think silly, freaky is probably the inspiration, but Matt [Widener, bassist/lyricist] is a literary major," she says. "He's studied literature, especially existential stuff, he's tutored under James Kelman, who's this existentialist anarchist writer from Scotland who's won tons of awards. So Matt is a writer by heart, he has his own rules and goals that he's going for when he's writing the lyrics, but he definitely tries to bring a human element into whatever 'silly' topic he might be writing about. He always tries to add some human element that would make you feel while you were reading along to the lyrics. They are a huge, important piece of the music. If you're just listening to the album and don't know the lyrics, you're missing a huge portion of that presentation of what Cretin is."

(Photos by: Sean Wix)