Insect Warfare – Noise Grind Power Death

April 21, 2009 • Survivalist Records

Ah, the EP. Arguably the best format for punk music, and especially so for its more abrasive subgenres like noisecore. An on the aptly-titled Noise Grid Power Death, the format shines: fifty-three songs compiled into one blistering eight-minute track. The long-string-of-microsongs structure isn't anything new—the Gerogerigegege have been doing it for years—and while it seems neat to have a legendary band like Insect Warfare try their hand at it, I came away from this EP feeling a bit dissatisfied.

I imagine it's tough to come up with so many tiny vsongs all at once, since here each song is practically identical to all the others. It's impossible to say anything about the songwriting, then, so the listener instead has to focus on the textural aspects of the record instead. But I won't say the EP's sound is inappropriate: There is no guitar, just incomprehensible noise which is either gratingly high feedback or toneless static; the vocals aren't too different. Generally I prefer my grindcore with a cleaner, riff-filled guitar style like Discordance Axis, but sometimes the noisy stuff can be good too. Here it's a bit too formless, though, and it's tough to pay attention to.

So eventually I realized that the whole thing is basically a drumming exposé. The drumming is quite good, though, I'll give them that; though it's mostly mindless blasting it's definitely skillful and there are a lot of nice fills.

But after listening to this EP a handful of times I still don't really understand the point of it. As I mentioned, the songs aren't memorable in the slightest, and they are even sometimes downright silly—half of them have a ridiculous tempo countoff from the drummer at the beginning, the purpose of which is lost on me as it usually doesn't even feel like the countoff is the same tempo as the rest of the song and nobody else follows the drums anyway.

I know this kind of music is definitely not always for everyone—heck, even the band themselves admitted it won't appeal to all their fans—so I guess that for what it is, it's not bad. But for me, personally, noisecore is still something I'm not too terribly fond of and this EP hasn't really done much to make me any more fond of it.

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