Album Review: Byonoisegenerator - Subnormal Dives
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Byonoisegenerator's sound is a mad catherine wheel of grindcore, brutal death metal and jazz, as complex as it is combustible. Crazed amalgamations of time signatures at warp speeds link flailing arms with beguiling, sexy swing in this intoxicating cataclysm of noise that's as nifty as it is impossible to dance to.
It’s the chaos of it that I think will wind up commending this as much to mathcore fans as much it does grindcore adepts. While not as palpably insane as, say, Effluence, it’s still a bit like being thrown in a washing machine filled with bricks. If, as opposed to sugar, spice and everything nice the man who made the powerpuff girls instead threw Discordance Axis, a saxophone and unwise amounts of crack into the cauldron, this is what might crawl out, chitinous and gibbering. Songs have this almost improvised feel courtesy of just how warped and mercurial they are; alien fractals sewn in union with threads of human sinew. It’s elements weave into this frenetic grand mal seizure of a soundscape; and yet, somehow, within the pyroclastic expulsion of songs like “Lovechargeddivebombs” come moments of eerie serenity, slinky rim hits and hi-hat trills while the sax croons; a 1950s over-the-hill detective in a trench coat lights another cigarette, pondering the crazy dame who popped back into his life out of nowhere to drag him back into one last murder case, smoke trailing out into the cold air of 1950’s New York.
Groove too sees it’s dues, not just in the alluring suavity of the album at it’s jazziest, but within repressive palm-muted slams; “4-HO-DMTNzambiKult” in particular takes hammers to your limbs with vicious ascending riffs of this type, but the album throws slams around like viral outbreaks to punctuate the madness all over the place. Yet at the heart of the album is the Grind, that rabid tumultuous grind, that breathes life into unhinged storms of blades like “Nosuccesstoday!”, all fast-twitch muscle fibre and murderous intent. 10 tracks blitz past in an overwhelming torrent of stimulation, crunching more into 23 minutes than most bands, metal or otherwise, manage in discographies. And can I just highlight the sheer talent on display here? It takes seriously ability to be this unhinged. If the drums were slightly out of time, if the guitars fumbled here or there, if the sax could manage but one or the other between harshness or subtlety, then this album could just be a complete mess. Somehow though, this hive of activity clings together, so tight it’s damn near fused. Consider “5mgInspiredVibes” for a heartbeat: the smoky, femme fatale sway of its introduction, then, in a blink, she’s whipped a stiletto off and jammed it through your heart. It’s all downhill from there, in fits of squealing legato discordance. A squall of swarming distortion and blasts, that itself segues into a frantic jazz passage. It closes with the mutagenic ugliness of Malignancy, all pinch squeals and stop-start cardiac arrest rhythms. And so much of the album resembles this, layers upon layers of rampant aural abuse that doesn’t on paper seem like it should work, but somehow or other they pull it off magnificently.
What faults it bears are a touch hard to define. Part of the problem is that when the music is this chaotic nothing that bothered me stuck around for more than the second or so it took my outrage to flare. Listening to their previous work, I do think the album could use more variation on the vocal front – listen to their “Neuromechanica” album for example; it uses this disgusting pitch shifted guttural vocal style across it that seems sadly in absentia for this new album. Why? We may never know. The more conventional death growl they’ve opted for fits like a glove nonetheless, but still – it’s the one part of this album that isn’t quite so joyously deranged comparatively, and it’d be nice to see that change next time around.
I’ve heard some good grind this year. Primarily I’m thinking of Type Armour Unit and the last Feasting Neuropathy release (I know it's only 10 minutes long, it’s grind, that’s kind of par for the course). I don’t think I like this more than those two, but we’re in a similar ballpark. It's skronky, angular, spiky, and utterly charming for it. Like all the best grindcore, it’s like taking a bazooka full of hedgehogs to the face. And I fucking love it for that.
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