Album Review: Barren Path - Grieving
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I’m a simple man with a complex vocabulary, and for the extent of my tenure with The Razor's Edge, my approach to the promo list has been correspondingly simple too. It goes something like this:
- Peruse promo list for grindcore
- If grindcore is not available, weep.
- Recall English nationality, and apply stiff upper lip to quell blubbering.
- If grindcore is available, rejoice, and apply for review copy.
It’s uncomplicated and does incur a degree of repressed emotional difficulty, but it has otherwise yet to fail me. Proof positive: here before me sits grindcore; thirteen blistering minutes of it by the grace of Barren Path. Yet even the most inveterate blast addict will concede there to be degrees in these things – we all have favourites after all, and this year has already proven generous with unimpeachable grind offerings. Fierce competition abounds; Barren Path step to the plate. Their mettle stands ready for the testing. Show me, Barren Path. Show me what you’re made of.
Grindcore being abrasive isn’t exactly news, but even by those standards, Jesus Christ. I feel like someone filled my vape with battery acid, and I’m fairly sure my spinal fluid has evaporated. The core concept appears to have been taking a death/thrash album (a good one) and accelerating it to the point that physics stops making sense. The drumming is fast even by the standards of the genre, to the point that we’re bordering on the sorts of hyperblast musical amphetamine abuse percussion that the likes of Sulfuric Cautery or Viscera Infest practice. And the riffs...they shear through the air at you like shurikens, whether it’s the adrenalized Testament strains of “Primordial Black” or “In the End, the Gift is Death” sounding a little like Dark Angel in a knife fight, thrash fires out of this thing like solar flares. It helps in the sense that the album, despite being possessed by an unyielding thirst for violence, is still impossibly catchy – embedding broadhead arrows in your hide that slice and impale but refuse to be withdrawn.
There’s a button in my brain; all true blast addicts have one. It has “DOPAMINE” printed on it and it responds only to blastbeats. Plenty of bands Hammer away at it with an admirable zeal but Barren Path, on the other hand, have beaten the absolute shit out of it. Sticksman Brian Farjado puts in an olympian killing spree of taut blast mastery that trebuchets the music into you. This is barely drumming at this point, it's being caught in the epicentre of a cluster munitions airstrike. In fact, if it doesn’t feel like you’re being carpet bombed, then it can only mean that you’re listening to “Celestial Bleeding” – a brief (of course) ambient/spoken word track that forms essentially the only thing I dislike about the release.
The album isn’t long enough in my mind to warrant a diversionary breather, even at the intensity it maintains. For some albums, a smoke break between bouts of aggravated assault can be advantageous – I do not concede this to be one of them. I do not want to be separated from the enthralling hostility on display a second longer than I have to be, and nor does the break really add much worthy of note. Another top-tier contemporary grind band like Full of Hell might fill that same space with disorienting noise fluctuations, as on their collaboration with noise royalty Merzbow – something like that might perhaps have been more apropos to Barren Path’s accomplishments with this album.
That little moment of discord aside, I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed Grieving. Beyond the reasonable expectations you could have of it given that it’s crewed by former Gridlink and Maruta members, the album simply decimates the competition. Listening to it on a run felt as though I was being chased by a flood of angry Gibbons trying to shank me with screwdrivers. Thematically I guess it’s appropriate to do a short and sweet review for a short and sweet album, but that shouldn’t be held to imply any reservations I hold about the quality of what Barren Path have done here. Let it be stated emphatically and snappily then: This shit is fucking amazing and if it’s not in your possession the second it releases then you’re not doing life right.
Be the first to comment