Proletar - Back to Hatevolution (Discography)
55 tracks in 74 minutes! Gotta love those grindcore discographies - see Nasum's Grind Finale (2 discs, 152 tracks) or Yacopsae's Discoregraphy (2 discs, 149 tracks). Admittedly, this thing is a little hard to digest. Who sits down and goes, "I will now listen to 55 tracks of grind"? (If you do, whatever you're smoking, keep it the hell away from me.)The ArrogantA Design for DestructionWar Against the New World1...2...3...Let's Rock
Back to Hatevolution (To Live a Lie, 2007) collects everything recorded to date (demos, splits, tapes, EP's) by Indonesian grinders Proletar. Hailing from Jakarta, they unleash straight-up, old-school grind a la early Napalm Death or Assück. The tracks are one-minute floggings with barreling bass drums, clattering blastbeats, and "papa bear, little bear" low/high vocals. No surprises, just bulldozing, down-tuned argh. With six recording sessions represented, the production quality varies throughout; the live cuts sound like they were recorded from inside the venue's bathroom. Yet the lo-fi sound only enhances the sense of seethingly pissed-off-ness.
The packaging is phenomenal, oddly housing a CD inside an embossed 7" sleeve. The sleeve has lyrics and a neat little flap that folds out to show pictures of all the band members, past and present. Lyrically, this is left-wing grindcore (is there any other kind? "Right-wing grindcore" seems as oxymoronic as, say, "posi black metal" or "straightedge thrash"), with diatribes against imperialists, colonialists, "George War Bush," and so on. The English is a little fractured ("The Broken of Your State Like My Broken Songs"), but that makes it even better. After listening to this, my ears feel like they've lost a layer of skin - exactly what grind should do.
Back to Hatevolution is available from To Live a Lie and Interpunk.
5 Comments:
I can't help but stick my oar in – my favorite thing about grindcore is the ridiculous numbers of tracks that make it to disc, which I think started with Sore Throat or the Meat Shits or Lawnmower Death (how's that for some blasts from the past?). My personal favorite, though, is Agoraphobic Nosebleed's "Altered States of America", which fits 99 tracks onto a 3" CD. I love that thing, because it's an absolutely pathological test for MP3 players that claim to do "gap-free" playback. I still haven't found one that can handle more than four or five tracks without having a nervous breakdown.
Discordance Axis fit 69 tracks (har, har) onto "Original Sound Version". I figure you could fit a complete Discordance Axis discography onto two CDs, and it'd have over 200 tracks. The only one you need, of course, is "Sega Bass Fishing".
I might have to check this out. It's been a while since I've picked up any Indonesian metal (and I know I have, aren't there like a billion Indoneian death/grind bands out there?).
Did I really misspell Lawnmower Deth's name? Dag, du. My spell-correcting fingertips strike again!
I absolutely adore "Altered States of America." Perhaps no other metal record has made me laugh so much. And, yeah, Discordance Axis...I practically got carpal tunnel typing in their MP3 info after ripping their CD's.
* I might have been exaggerating a little. How many of us would even know about Discordance Axis had it not been for The Inalienable Dreamless? I don't think there's ever been a better grindcore album.
Not bad again. It's always cool to get to check out relatively obscure bands from interesting areas like this. I don't think I've gotten to hear very many bands from Indonesia at all over the years. I'm kind of surprised how solid the recording quality is on some of these tracks, too. This is better than the Athrenody, actually...
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