Sunrape

"Christ!" exclaimed Gamroth. "And who among them are the best?"
"It depends. For the crossbow, the best is the English, who can pierce a suit of armor, and at a hundred paces will not miss a dove. Czechs cut dreadfully with their axes. For a two-handed sword the German is the best. The Swiss is glad to strike the helmets with an iron flail, but the greatest knights are those who come from French soil. These will fight on horseback and on foot, while speaking brave words, which you will not understand because it is such a strange language..."

Henryk Sienkiewicz "The Teutonic Knights"


While just letting the French be the French, it would be curious to try and apply this classic classification to modern metal scene and see what sticks. The above quote from something read eons ago surfaced up for some inexplicable reason, as I was listening to the subject of today's write-up. Even more strange, as grindcore bands do not necessarily bring out immediate literary reflections and references in their listeners, even if you are Discordance Axis on "Inalienable Dreamless". But what's done is done.

I do remember these guys from once upon a time, when their split 7" with Haemorrhage passed through my hands. Having picked this particular disc up from a blow-out bin, I did not anticipate any big surprises, so much so that I honestly have no clue as to why I saw fit to even bother to symbolically shell out a couple of bucks that covered the asking price. I guess it had more to do with the band being Czech than anything else. Despite not having a hand in the genre's formative years, the Czechs managed to set up a distinctive (by having, if anything, the most sense of humor) grind hub in their back yard over the years. Amidst this fertile soil, Ingrowing have an established place as one of the scene's mainstays, alongside, say, the considerably more socially conscious Gride, though not quite as one of its signposts, trailing behind local pioneers like Hermaphrodit, Four Seats For Invalides and Malignant Tumour, while letting the more eager or younger brethren, of which there is a handful, bring out the so-called originality and rip the underground acclaim. Throughout the years, Ingrowing steadily stuck with meat and potatoes tenets of grind with adorning death metal influences without any pressing necessity to cut across surrounding frontiers, which is what most grind bands do anyway - 'cause if ya ain't grindin' it, ya ain't no grind, boy!

To be fair, Ingrowing do at least shoot for expansion of lyrical themes (as opposed to music, aside from a couple of electronic intros courtesy of an Ahumado Granujo member), which were already hinted at on the preceding disc "Suicide Binary Reflections", and come up with some kind of pseudo cosmic/technological, gore sprinkled existentialism, which starts with the title of the record itself. Of course, most of it turns out to be pretty nonsensical and even clumsy. Negligent Collateral Collapse had a record out around the same time that focused on technology but modestly refrained from sticking their leg out all the way into space. Not Ingrowing, who went their own way and dashed beyond the atmosphere to violate our holiest celestial body. "Exposed to the Light" takes the concept of cosmic gore a bit too literally, with sizable doses of birth anatomy thrown in: "Shine of menstrual sky...In pulsating waves I bleed...Devoured with inertia/Carving the lines of my mental veins/Into the hymen of celestial graveyard/After-death-veiled/With interstellar placenta/I am exposed to light." But as the record progresses, the imagery becomes a tad more streamlined if still grandiloquent by regular standards. For instance, the title track's impending violation of the sun, which is "dying in the cage/of our insidious, vile hearts" and then "fades away attacked by greedy heavenly industry" at least attempts to make an arguably logical prediction for the not-quite foreseeable future, while "Virtua Bleed" (sic) offers a somewhat alarming account of lives floating in the ocean of information: "I am the shadow of your digital "me"/Reversed image of your virtual core/My consciousness fills every byte/Of your binary soma/And disintegrates you/In that cyber gore". For my two bucks, however, the cosmic epitaph on "Spectral Passages" is something that had the potential to go as far as to possibly touch a listener, if these lyrics were actually endowed with verbal clarity and a bit different musical accompaniment: "To spectral passages.../My soundless steps lead/Free of corporeality.../Eschatological nightmare no more/In shining tubular corridors.../By strange magnetism I am pulled/All earthly I leave behind.../right as you did before. My vanishing body.../Shadows, so pleasant/My own soul memory.../Iridescent thread of wisdom/In soothing twilight.../Of this afterlife labyrinth/I go my own way..." Yet it is still endearing to have a denizen of this stylistic ghetto nail something so, well, lyrical and poetic, even if it goes completely unnoticed by just about anyone, including, most of all, the genre fans.

Genre fans focus on the music, of course, and musically "Sunrape" is an unrelenting, rock-solid, second tier grind record, in this case meaning that it is a tightly performed, pretty well recorded yet all too mono-dimensional and unoriginal affair. Familiar riff sequences and tremolo patterns start to appear early on and make themselves at home throughout the album, and so do the fairly standard song structures. Decent amount of rhythmic changes is, of course, employed, but utilized and performed in a tried and true fashion, without being particularly complicated or unpredictable and, hence, not really standing out all that much. Although not exactly slouches, Ingrowing are not quite a super technical bunch per se. The band's two axe-men are inclined towards fairly normal buzz-saw guitar work of reliable, mid-level dexterity, which means that they tend to pretty much bypass any unorthodox sound extraction and dissonance (there are tiny scraps of it on "Nebular"). Plus, the band's singular intensity also leaves little room for slower breaks and grooves (pieces of which spring up only towards the album's end on tracks like "Spectral Passages" and "Illumination"). As such, the record essentially alternates between the fully blasting segments and the more crust influenced, "punky" gallops. The commanding dual vocal attack and the dead-on, surgically precise, and of pretty high velocity to boot, drum-work (which would easily qualify as a highlight) do elevate the general impression a good deal, yet Ingrowing's methodical, rhythmically sustained workouts do not bring any extra spice to the table. General impression is akin to witnessing a fierce training session, which is heavier on motivation rather than inspiration. Occasionally a small bone of catchiness is thrown the listeners' way; first in a more reluctant, veiled manner, as on the title track, and then during a neat combination of a melodic solo (the only instance of such a thing on the album) and a groove-backed, typically wacky in that Czech kind of way, but just as catchy, screwball vocal excursion on "Not Enough" that sort of comes out of nowhere, as the album is already nearing its closing phase, briefly stirs up the waters and disappears shortly thereafter. This, alone, I suppose, gives out an idea of the band's priorities, their degree of willingness to tease, on the one hand, and stray off the chosen path, on the other, from which one can conclude that records like "Sunrape" are what this band wants to be doing and will be doing until the day it all will have been laid to rest.

Guess if your business is to "cut dreadfully", then you gotta keep yourself in good shape. Amen to that!

Well, apart from the intro, the first thing you hear is well played fast drumming and good riffing. Then this fantastic screaming that works splendidly. The songs are very tight and fast and the time changes are spot on. The vocals are the perfect blend of a low growl style roaring and piercing screams. The song structure is ok. Musically they are nothing new or special, but fast, tight and all is put together very well, which sometimes can be more important.
Once you get deep into the CD, you find it starts to get a bit boring and lacks variation. Thus meaning no songs really stick out from the rest. Also, the LP is too long, too many songs which just clog it up a bit. :-/

But overall not too bad.. Check it out..