Album Review: Grog - Sphere Of Atrocities
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Grog, so far as my good friend Google informs me, is essentially diluted rum, sometimes with juice though generally with water. This renders it something of an inappropriate name for the band then, because there is nothing watered down about the band's sound. Songs are brief but rancorous, snapping and untamed, extracorporeal wraiths clad in glittering scalpel blades. There is a breed of haughty sophisticate that will snort with affected derision at a blend, insisting that the truly refined palate will brook naught but the purest of spirits, taken neat. Well, let them avert their hazy, supercilious eyes if they must; Grog is today the tipple of choice, and with any luck over the next...however many words, I’ll have been able to explain exactly why.
Probably the highest compliment I can pay Grog is that their various foul emanations reminded me of Cryptopsy quite frequently. For reference, I think that None so Vile is the greatest album released anywhere ever. I think Blasphemy Made Flesh is a killer slice of wholly rancid old school death metal, I think Whisper Supremacy is criminally underrated by virtue of it’s older brother being such a monumental achievement, I think And Then You’ll Beg is given a hard time for no readily discernible reason when it contains songs like “We Bleed” and “Voice of Unreason”…so on and so forth. I’m something of a diehard fanboy, driven by a fanatical compulsion to promulgate their wonders when and wherever possible; simply by putting me in mind of them, you’re already scoring copious points. It’s the speed I think, the technicality, the somersaults between lower and higher tremolo lines in between darting bursts of sliding powerchord grind violence, the intricacy and flow of these lengthy yet infectious riffs atop a heroic performance on the drums, laden to overflow with blastbeats and drum fills. I perceive that same animalistic bloodline within Grog and it goes some way to endearing them to me mightily. You can hear it right from the moment “E.xit G.lobal O.bliteration” alights upon earth and sets to torching all Christendom around it. Those power chords slither around the fretboard like an epileptic viper as the blasts lay down suppressing fire and I’m haplessly in love already. I can’t help it. For better or worse I’m a complete sucker for this stuff, and it’s rakish charms had me at first sight.
If there’s a philosophy or ethos to Grog’s output it would probably be something along the lines of “never fast enough”; even when they do play with more morose tempos during the necrotising melodicism of “Lucidity” you’re never too far removed from them deciding that enough is enough and it’s time to nail the gas pedal down again. It’s a highlight reel of fantastic riffs – “Necroearth” mines the fertile earth between the thrash-dialled-to-11 viciousness of mid-period Aborted and Origin’s tech death flair (listen to “Aftermath” from the “Antithesis” album, you’ll hear the similarities). Drummer Rolando Barros has a fairly lengthy litany of bands past and present on his CV and it’s not difficult to see why – his performance here is fantastic, blasting like someone force fed red bull to a minigun. But there’s more nuance to his work here than snare abuse alone; “Reproductive Extinction” is thick with fills to spice and season the rhythmic punishment. Both he and guitarist Ivo Martins appear to have joined the band at around the same time, and it shows, because these two are dialled all the way in with each other, and play off one another magnificently. There’s dark alchemy afoot, the whole band perfectly attuned to the respective member’s talents and dispositions. Their output isn’t precisely voluminous – this being their first full length since 2017 – but quality shall always trump quantity once the dust has settled, and beyond the typical frothing of the promo sheet I hope the band are justifiably proud of what they’ve accomplished here.
I've a few wishes for the release: the first is for a beefier production. As is, the job is done well enough to a surety, but it would be so much sweeter with a more aggressive production job to really drive home the knives the album wields. Secondly, I do wish it included more solos. Not that the songs are inadequate on their own terms – some songs do actually have solos in them, but more frequent splashes of lead work would really push this above and beyond. You already have this bountiful Eden of superlative riffwork; why not contrast it further with additional leads? Some of my favourite music of all time is brutal death metal with solos; not just the aforementioned deities of the style like Cryptopsy, but bands like Ohioan perversity vendors Regurgitation for a second example. I find myself sat with these songs, yearning for that last element to just click and launch my mind into the troposphere. Also, god alone knows why, but there’s like half of minute of dead silence at the end of the last track “Terrorithm”. Being as it’s the final song it’s not as bad as it could be, but even so, what’s the point? did they forget to stop recording when they went to try resuscitate the drummer? Man may never know. Fleeting quibbles you might say. Mere matters of taste. And you would ultimately be correct, for none of the detractors outlined here – pernicious though I might find them – come within a mile of derailing Grog on the whole.
Partially I wonder if the similarities to a band I adore are frustrating my attempts to connect with this album to mild degree, compelling me to assess it against perfection more so than on its own merits. I am, in the end, hopelessly, helplessly, in love with stuff like this. It never seems to get old to me, if I could have it delivered intravenously I’d be slamming it into my veins morning, noon and night like something out of requiem for a dream except with Inherit Disease albums. Grog have delivered a stripped down wyvern of cauterising death metal that holds to the sacrosanct doctrine of refusing to differentiate between death metal and shock combat. I can identify points at which there could be improvement, true, but that shouldn't be held to imply that I didn’t have a whale of a time with what they’ve done here. I can’t speak for your own tastes, but for those of you with a similarly rapturous response to music like this, I reckon you’ll have a complete blast with “Sphere of Atrocities”.
