Sheavy Hailing from the deep south of Atlanta, Georgia, and appropriately were signed to Southern Lord, Dead In The Dirt’s sole full length, The Blind Hole, is a crushing, catastrophic slab of grinding Powerviolence. DITD deal in fairly typical PV lyrically and sonically speaking, but don’t even think for a second this is meant as insult. Frequent and Extreme start and stop tempo shifts, even within the confines of 60 second or less songs, often punctuated and preceded by squalls of feedback. Downtuned growling, grinding guitars thunder away to merciless but tight Hardcore drumming and blast beating. Occasionally settling into a more metal inspired mid-tempo or thrash groove, and some songs drop entirely into disgusting filthy Sludge Metal (Will Is The War and Halo Crown). As could be guessed from the album title, nay, band name, the lyrics all tend towards the introspective and unwaveringly nihilistic, often with political or social subtext. These are handled by dual vocalists, Bo Orr, also on Bass, and Blake Connally, also on Guitar. Dual vocalists means we are treated to differing delivery styles, one a Death Metal growl, and the other a Hardcore Punk styled full on shriek. Production wise it’s all very clear and clean, none of the dirt and grime, nor aggression and rawness is lost.

A beautiful, maniacal not quite 24 minute assault.

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.