Time Signature The screaming wind...

Genre: sludgy grindcore

Granted, I think that a lot of grindcore music is utter cack and unlistenable stupidity boiled down to pseudo-intense sloppy noise. However, for every hundred crappy grindcore bands out there there is one really outstanding one, and thus we have awesome grindcore artists like Carcass, Brutal Truth, Napalm Death and a couple of others. To this group we can now add the Atlanta-based act Dead in the Dirt.

This release is an EP with ten tracks on it, and that should be enough to give away that they observe one of the sacred tenets of grindcore: short songs. The longest song is 1:50 minutes and there are also a couple of micro-songs, which means that you basically get ten small packs of pure intensity on this release.

The style on "Fear" is a combination of grindcore, hardcore and sludge metal. There are plenty of energetic hardcore-ish riffs plus blastbeats galore, while the overall sound is totally sludgy with the guitar being considerably downtuned and distorted to the extreme (but fortunately there is a lot of bottom, so it is not like having needles punctuate your eardrums). Add intense screamed vocals on top, and you have perfectly intense brutal music delivered in tracks that are long enough for you to actually enjoy them, but short enough that the intensity remains intact.

Dead in the Dirt is definitely one of the quality grindcore bands around, and if they carry on and build on the work they have done with this CD then they might might well join the upper grindcore artist echelons.