Murderworks

Rotten Sound defines All Gas, No Breaks. They absolutely decimate everything, doing it with flavor and consistency like almost no other band of their kind. Drain is when they found their identity; Murderworks is them becoming the monster of grind. Polished to a crisp, their formula consists of breakneck tempos filled with the chaos of superhuman drumming, bestial bass, pulverizing riffs, and Keijo’s barbaric roars. Blasting away is something any band of their ilk can do, but this is the total devastation via nuclear bombing. They bludgeon and overpower their way with unrelenting force on every album, and this time it’s more ferocious than ever.

Enlisting the help of Nasum’s Mieszko, Rotten Sound turned their filthy, blasting death rattle into lustrous, brutal grind supremacy. Production is slick and juiced with electrifying energy, so the tone flawlessly matches the music. Ambient segments notwithstanding, their wall of sound has now become a blisteringly loud avalanche, making you feel even more insignificant and subject to an assault on the senses. Kai Hahto’s indomitable performance on here is ruthless with the blasts, snare / cymbal gymnastics, whatever the ending of “Insane” was, and other hyper-movements that you wonder how this man’s arms and legs haven’t fallen off. Better yet, none of it is some excuse to spastically attack the kit. He’s calculated every hit for maximum potency.

Rhythmic stampedes are well and good, but without some memorability to it you’ll leave the experience empty. That’s where this band’s flow and groove come into play. Rotten Sound has mastered the art of presentation, balancing the right amount of spiteful, cacophonous aggression with catchy riffs, breaks, and chords to quench the brain. Aalto’s delectable guitars in songs like “Target”, “Obey”, “Insane”, and “IQ” satiate the desire for something more tuneful to latch onto. Niinimaa, with his extensive harsh vocal range, also finds the right delivery each time between sturdy growls, high screams, and those crusty mid-range barks. My only detraction is that there wasn’t more of this to extensively exploit. Not by increasing the number of tracks, but by writing into the core of each song.

Don’t let the boorish nature of the music fool you - Murderworks is a benchmark of grindcore. It has everything you need in music of this style and still leaves you wanting more. It has the position of being in the shadow of something better (that being the untouchable follow-up, Exit), but that just demonstrates their ability to improve and isn’t an indicator of something wholly inferior. Grindcore was advancing and bands like Rotten Sound were leading it. Check this out and catch yourself up on how murder works.

It doesn't matter how many times you listen to this. It never gets boring. This is the best grindcore gets. Short, heavy and at times extremely fucking catchy. Just under 29 minutes of ferocious, crusty, pissed off grind.

The riffs are played in that heavy distorted Entombed buzzsaw guitar tone that could cut through butter like a hot knife. It really adds to the heaviness, especially due to how fast they are. I know this is grindcore, a genre hardly known for being slow paced, but this is so fast it makes Insect Warfare sound like Sunn O))). It literally never slows down (apart from some ambient noise that opens/closes the album and sometimes appears between tracks, usually so you can catch your breath). The bass isn't too audible due to how loud the guitars are, but at this point i'm beyond caring. It's too good to care about a problem most bands suffer from.

The vocals range from throat shredding screeches, punk-esque barking and low death metal grunting. The vocalist changes his style so often, you'd be forgiven for thinking there were 3 vocalists on this. The drums are what you come to expect from grindcore. Non-stop blasting. I can feel my skull splitting while listening just because of how the drummer attacks his kit like it fucked his mum. No silly little time signatures or technical precision here. Just straight forward blasting with a few fills here and there to balance it all out.

The music is always in the right time signature. It all fits together. My main problem with most grind is how the bands tend to throw everything they can together and how it rarely fits. Rotten Sound do not suffer from this problem. They know how to play their instruments and the producer knows how to put it all together in a package that works.

While the album would've benefitted from a better production job to make the bass more audible, this flaw is too insignificant to hinder the score. Absolute grind perfection.

Highlights: Targets, Suffer, Agony

As soon as I heard the first song off of this psychotic, mind-splitting album, I thought that no other following song could be as brutal as what I had just heard. Yet, the track list kept going, and going, and sheer chaos was blown all around me.. and I still can't get over it.

Rotten Sound, an extremely pissed off, political hating themed band, barrels through the grindcore circuit, proving a serious genre-defying statement. Nothing stands in their way with such an album as this. You're either slaughtered in a matter of seconds with songs such as "Insects" and "Suffer", or you are dragged on infected pavement for a horrific 3 minutes of blistering destruction ("Obey", and "Iq" to name a few).

Each member stands out, promoting their talent through demon like growls/screams, mashed, extremely distorted packed guitar riffs, sludgy bass grooves/lines... and then comes the drums. I believe this album would be nothing without the blasting/ballistic championship of a skinsman Kai Hahto. This guy is unbelievable. There are many drummers in death metal/grindcore, who think they are amazing just because they can do a gravity blast at 300 BPM, but they are just a sad gimmick. When Kai Hahto is thrown into the mix, he shows off the wall quads, sporadic time signatures, and pulverizing precision against the snare, (Listen to his little drum solo in "Insane" at 1:46, and you'll see what I'm talking about). Overall, He pulls off a throat slitting barrage of drumming speed, and precise madness.

The only problems I had with this album, were the lack of audible guitar riffs.
At times, atop of the implosion of acid spitting vocals and volcanic drumming eruptions, the guitars are just a mere wave of static.

With "Murderworks" (Produced by the legendary Mieszko Talarczyk, R.I.P), I think it highlights the best of their career. Though, their following album "Exit" is even better in my standards, this album is still one hell of a grindcore dream you will never forget as soon as the play button is pressed.