Album Review: Gridfailure - Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Noise. It’s a genre I’ve dipped a toe in lately, and the fruits of a dilletante’s foraging has generally been quite pleasing to me. There’s a few albums I could point to as particular favourites (Pedestrian Deposit's “Austere”, Lingua Ignota's “Caligula” and Hunting Lodge's “Will” for example) though few that I suspect a seasoned veteran of the genre would be surprised by. All that is to say that while I’ve obviously got opinions on Gridfailure’s work, it should be taken with a grain of salt appropriate to my stature as something of a neophyte within the genre as a whole. So. Self-deprecating disclaimer out the way with, how did I feel about this upcoming Gridfailure release?
There’s beauty here, but a stark, unforgiving beauty. That of a windswept cliff face or storm-whipped ocean; something possessed of a resplendence at once remarkable yet lethal. Filth too. Engine oil and dust commingled in streaks and clinging chunks. The noisome film of cold, congealing grease that no amount of water alone can ever fully banish. Massed choirs of screams, the mad stampede of flight before the inevitable. Gunfire in the distance. Throbbing swells of electronic discordance as distorted hardcore yells echo like the death rattles of strangled titans. Horns bleat and bray like startled goats; a bass drum beats out a heartbeat under the prickling snowfall of static. Vocals – such as they are – breach and recede back into dense mists of white noise like faces smothered in plastic bags, sucking the membrane of it into their throats in desperate struggles for air. The clicking of insect communication, carapace grinding on carapace. Piano clunking away despondently as though alone onstage in a wrecked ballroom. Rainfall and harsh industrial pulsations, the glum grey depression of an overcast English sky heaping drizzle over the abandoned rust-bones of decaying facilities and machinery, poisonous and polluting even in abeyance. The breadth of sounds summoned forth is vast, and all in service of this confrontational edifice of heartless, cynical misanthropy.
What you’re dealing with here aren’t songs, precisely, it’s dread and spiralling paranoia. The feeling of wishing you were alone, knowing you aren’t, and not knowing if the other thing knows that you’re there. Metal exists as scattered accoutrements, as much as clippings and sprigs from many other genres do; strings here, percussion there, occasionally coalescing into something the common or garden variety metalhead (me) might almost recognise as a thoroughly begrimed spurt of symphonic black metal. It’s eclectic and sprawling, daunting as much in length (almost an hour and a half) as it is in sheer antagonism; despite how many things the album might be – often simultaneously – it never extends to anything approaching warmth or benevolence.
The closest it might get is a rueful reflection on the reality of the human condition:
“It never needed to come to this
But now it has, and here we are”
That’s it. The closest you’re getting to a measure of compassion. The vocals are rarely intelligible; they create stalactite patterns spiking out of the surrounding static, spectral frequencies beamed out of radio sets that can’t possibly be functioning. Pained cellos wail sonatas out across a soundscape both gargantuan and remorseless, splendid in its incorrigible sociopathy.
Despite the overall harrowing impression Gridfailure leave, there were moments that plucked me free of the hole in which I was wallowing in nihilism. Occasional contradictory moments within the blend that sit ill with the remainder of the music. “Hybrid Warfare in Defence of One’s Habitat” for one sees fit to pop out with a trumpet and an understated trap beat, as though in the midst of a brutal struggle for survival there was yet time for a dance off, presumably after which the loser gets eaten. The vocals, beastly as they are, do not always successfully elevate the album either – quite the opposite at points. The disquieting ambience of “Drunk on the Blood of my Neighbour” was more unsettling left to its own devices than it was once the vocals made landfall.
The album in full is also drastically long, hitting an eventual runtime that makes Dopesmoker by Sleep look like a grindcore EP. This, combined with the amount of influences and soundscapes it employs, can conspire to render the album enormous but rudderless, sailing vast distances at the cost of consistent direction. There feels to be a better album within it, one that might shine all the brighter in its repulsive splendour were it tightened and disciplined a bit more.
Whether you’ll like this or not depends on a few things, including but not limited to:
- How vigorously antisocial you’re feeling today.
- Whether you like noise music.
- How much time you have on your hands.
It’s a work I found best consumed in full, allowing the entire thing to push over you like waves of razor wire. It’s a thick, hopeless, anomic mire of might-makes-right antipathy, and while it does sometimes work against itself and rather overstays it’s welcome, the cancerous heart pumping away with grotesque animation within it is of a rare bleakness.
