Album Review: Brutal Sphincter - Sphinct-Earth Society
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I’ve decided that I don’t really want to know what a sphincter has to do to be considered brutal; the mind runs to too many unsavoury flights of imagination as it is - some hideous happenstance involving being devoured by an evil rectum that then goes on to steal nuclear launch codes and threaten apocalypse unless a steady stream of pliable oiled virgins are provided for consumption. You probably already know what Brutal Sphincter play from the name alone, but in case you’re still wondering they fester within that same bubo-swelling cluster of maladies as Rectal Smegma or Gutalax, a groovy form of goregrind that does a lot more at medium tempo than is typical for grind bands. It’s often as not a style as much about gross-out flippancy as absurdly fun grooves, prompting me into spasmodic, morally questionable dance routines every time I hear it. This is their first release in around seven years, with their last one being the ode to cultural sensitivity that was their “Analhu Akbar” release in 2018. So. Have we grown and matured in those long years?
No. No we have not. And for that reason It would be easy to call this stupid music, but there’s more to it than that – music doesn’t have to take itself seriously, but it does still have to be good, and no amount of frivolity can smooth over clumsy or unimaginative writing and performances. This album might be superficially braindead, but there’s an art to it nonetheless – mixed in with the ethically reprehensible groove deployment come the seriously mean riffs of “Abolish Frontex”, svelte, fleet and more like something you’d expect to hear in a death metal release. There’s the harrowing percussive leathering of “The Juice Did It”, which begins with a monstrous blastbeat hate campaign. In part I think it’s the way these elements net like capillaries through the album that’s making it so enjoyable – the band make an effort to season and garish their scatological excursions. “Beatdown Syndrome” does this with tasteless verve by combining the DNA of Cannibal Corpse and – appropriately enough – the blunt curbstomp of beatdown hardcore.
But for all that, it’s still the groove that rules here. It’s not the first time I’ve wondered whether nu metal has had an influence within this diseased little subsection of the musical landscape. I can’t remember which band it was that I was listening to when first this occurred to me, but the impression I had at the time was along the lines of “damn, these guys must really like Korn”. I had that same suspicion here – how could I not, given the Adidas-bedecked bounce of “Prolapse of Society” or “Unvaxxed Lives Matter”? All the more contagious for the sheer low end of the production, each note thick and imposing, strings thicker than undersea cables vibrating like a caffeinated hummingbird. Good goregrind groove is not unlike what you might get if Satan wrote you a polka; it should make you want to dance, to throw shapes the likes of which man may consider himself fortunate if he never bears witness to again. I don’t know if it’s something any of you would feel particularly blessed to know, but this album had me jigging about as if the floor was electrified at random intervals, 6”4 of unshaven dad bod moving like a bag of shagging ferrets.
So it’s catchy, danceable, heavy and varied enough to keep things spicy. Sounds perfect, right? Not quite. Some songs lack the same spring as others – confusingly enough, the title track is one of the weaker tracks here, containing as it does an unpleasant section of whispering vocals that would be improved by virtually any style of harsh vocals. I’m likewise not altogether sold on the squeaky mouse fart mathcore chords – you know the type, think of the introductory portion of “Future Breed Machine” for a reference – in “Tony Hawk's Pro Choice 2022” either. They feel as though they exist for the sake of adding a bit of variety – not an unworthy aim of it’s own sake, but they’re not part of a separate riff per se, it’s just a case of repeating the same spontaneous chord, zero progression, on the first measure of the beat, over and over. It’s short but that also means it probably could’ve been removed without causing too appalling an upset. I can do this throughout the full runtime, picking out individual sections that I wasn’t sold on, and while it’s true that in totality there isn’t a great deal of ire drawn, this isn’t a long album and so even a smaller accumulation of time can be consequential.
At the same time, I might just be overselling the point there. Something I worry about when writing these reviews is that when I listen to an album with the intention of reviewing it, I’m doing so with a necessarily critical ear. I’m looking for things that piss me off, that don’t sit well, that speak to a perceived lapse in songwriting acumen, etc. But at the same time...if I was to just come across this in the wild, would these same faults that I’ve identified still bedevil me so? “the lady doth protest too much” penned the bard some hundreds of years ago; had he gazed into the future and seen me feebly flapping at a keyboard? The truth of it is that I had a lot of fun with Sphinc-earth society. Its silliness is endearing, but that wouldn’t matter if the writing couldn’t put some steel into it’s spine. Thankfully, Brutal Sphincter have again proven why they belong in the upper crust of the genre. It’s tight and inventive, sewn to its genre conventions but unafraid to reach out as and when necessity strikes. It’s not a classic exactly, but should you happen to be in the market for a gloriously flippant, unreasonably heavy half hour of groovy grind, you could do far worse. Perhaps I do want to know what would make for a brutal Sphincter after all.
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