ROTTEN SOUND - Apocalypse
April 29, 2023, a year ago
(Season Of Mist)
I'm not sure if anyone is grinding as great as Rotten Sound is these days, the band, as always, putting their heads down and blasting hard on new full-length Apocalypse. If Napalm Death are just getting better in age but spreading their wings a bit, Rotten Sound are getting better but more focused and precise here on their first full-length since 2016 (!), openers “Pacify” and “Equality” feedback-laden sharp knives of grind death, short fast and loud, no funny business whatsoever here.
There's 18 songs on this fantastic record and not a single one of them cracks two minutes, and that's what I like; I also like the biting, treble-heavy-yet-bottom-end-represented production sound, the ability to go low and slow when needed (“Sharing”), hurricane drumming (“Newsflash”), old-school Terrorizer-nodding grinding DM (“Denialist”), the total chaos of closer “Inflation”, the smarts on display despite the caveman sounds... Everything Rotten Sound always does is done to perfection here.
While I'm extremely hard-pressed to try to differentiate this record in any way from any others by this band (new bassist this time around), that doesn't really matter: this is an extremely top-notch grind album, one that will place high in my albums of the year list, Rotten Sound again showing they are at the top of the modern grindpile.
