Drink My Milk

In my eyes, and my world, the only good grind bands are those who are so over-the-top or ridiculous that I can’t help but laugh at it all. THOSE are the entertaining ones, and those who wish to take their musical schizophrenic seizure seriously are just too noisy and unpleasant to enjoy. That being said, though, you’d have to be careful on which silly grind acts you find, as sometimes they end up having titles and themes that are pretty sickening in approach (then again, that may be the point…), but in the end, it all comes down to how many riffs, hyperblasts, and vomitory throat gargles can be pushed into a 30 second clusterfuck of a song. Good times…at times.

And then, there’s Ultimo Mondo Cannibale…

You know you’re in for a charming treat when the rusty guitar distortion following those oh-so-NECESSARY samples, that always take the first few seconds of the song, come at you like twin drills left out in a pouring rain for a few days. And boy, what a treat it is…though at a slower pace than I/some of us may be used to. That doesn’t make the songs present any less “sophisticated”, but its crawling speed makes it seem a little less chuckle-inducing and more, well…groovy. Who knew you could move real smooth to this kinda stuff? With that said, though, the level of slack-jawed enjoyment is only so limited as a result, and if the central performance and compositional themes were in the blurry, Mach 1 variety, no doubt I’d laugh my way from front to end. That’s not to say that there aren’t moments where the retardogrind doesn’t smack your funny bone around with the sensation of striking a fly with a sledgehammer. It’s just not as prevalent as you’d expect…if you were looking to find that sorta thing.

Like any good grind act, these guys just throw songs at you with no sense of flow or cohesion, expecting you to somehow maintain your attention as riffs, drums, and pitch-shifted belches are scattered to and fro like fragments from a nail bomb. That’s part of the appeal, I understand that, and the whole slapdash approach gives it that schizo edge, but I suppose that in doing so it makes it tricky to ingest. That and the musical package as a whole is rather adolescent in its exuberance; it just darts back and forth, not settling on any particular sound or feel, and not in a good, Zappa-like way; this is kinda like the metallic equivalent of drinking too much coffee and jumping from room to room, all the while being well meaning but not settling on one thing to keep your focus on. To an extent, tt made me laugh in its extreme take on partial insanity, but not as much as I’d’ve liked to, and the bulk of “Drink My Milk” is a touch too hollow to enjoy for what it is, despite what songs with titles like “Pornocrazia”, “Hello Spanking” and “Cumshot Criminals” would have you believe.

So in the end, Ultimo Mondo Cannibale is something that would probably just appeal to the grind crowd, maybe the death metal crowd, but no one else, really. If that’s what they’re shooting for, then I say Godspeed on the devil’s thunder. Just remember that some of us out there would like a delighted, humored smile on our faces with our grind.

Originally written for The Offering
www.offeringwebzine.com