Album Review: NO/MÁS - No Peace
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
No/Mas. “No/More” in English. What genre but grind is better suited to embody the defiance, the enraged resistance of those words? The bitterness, the anger, the unwavering conviction that enough is fucking enough and change will come to pass even if it must be forced there. But anger is naught stripped of direction; the fury must be moulded and channelled, aimed as a means to an end beyond impotent self destruction. Sometimes though, there’s nothing more cathartic than giving in to a mountainous tempest of supressed discontent. In these moments, it must be grind and only grind to give voice to this fulsome hatred of the way things are. American grind sovereigns Brutal Truth” titled a live album “For the Ugly and Unwanted, This is Grindcore”, and there has never been a more apropos mission statement for an entire genre ever penned. And thus, the time has come to ask: do No/Mas carry forth the blinding flare, or the guttering ember of the genre?
Listening to their prior album I felt as though No/Mas provided something of an easy onboarding station for grindcore, if such a thing is possible. Energetic thrash riffs rained from it, and the grouchy-but-clear production sell it as a clear step forward in extremity terms but nonetheless with enough familiar points of reference to potentially hook the unsuspecting and reel them in to deeper waters. I have similar feelings about this one – the thrash is still readily available in spades, but to my ear what they’ve really cranked up is the hardcore influence. The result is work like “Leech”, that would sit well with fans of Integrity or Ringworm and other such merchants of blunt force trauma. Grooves like bricks against riot shields stake irrefutable claim to your attention whenever and wherever they land, so much so that the album begins to feel rather less a grind album than a grind-adjacent one. An honorary member of the tribe for sure, yet one less concerned with the relentless oppression of blastbeats and quadruple digit tempos as it is with taking it’s time over with the beatings. This is especially true of the midsection of the release, wherein reside acts of continent-spanning two-step induction like “Ley Indígena” and “Choke Point”.
This can have the effect of somewhat bowing the album’s momentum at the waist. Bookends like “Manic” and “No Peace” are far happier to yank the control rods out the nuclear reactor and let the spiralling power blow the whole thing to bits. This lent the full release an unfortunate – if entirely personal – level of frustration, as I’m much more a grindcore fan than a hardcore one. But even beyond a simple preference for crackhead cheetah speeds, there are components here that I quibble. “Act of Killing” is effectively a 1-minute breakdown. It feels underdone and a little redundant considering the presence of more developed and effective passages of similar type elsewhere, and even at it’s current brevity I’m not convinced that anything it does justifies its inclusion. Also, “Choke Point” and “Spineless” close and open respectively with scornful ingrates of chunky riffs at close tempos, but as one follows the other the impact of both is blunted. Given all the above it’d be fair to say that I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with the belly of “No Peace”, but the thing is, the bulk of that lukewarm reception does come down to taste. If hardcore is more your thing than it is mine, then the combination of rigorous midpaced skull fractures and steel-forge blasting on display here might well prove a dangerously enticing prospect.
And it’s for that reason that I still think that No/Mas are still an ideal hopping-on point for those yet to dip a toe into grindcore, with the next stop ideally being a similarly blunt group of grinders like Ground, for example. The production is crunchy and confrontational but readable nonetheless, with a marvellous bass tone that thrums and twangs along with each note like the bunched deltoid hurtling a straight right on collision course with your ever-so-frail orbital bone. It vomits groove and thrash along with the formidable grind broadside that I’m primarily invested in, that same grind they perform so well as to make me mourn the sharing of it’s seat with the hardcore elements that draw less interest from me, but might well speak to you with more mellifluous, tempting tones. This, then, is the crux I would have you bear away with you should you have already borne with me so far: No/Mas continue to demonstrate their vitality and power here, even if their present direction is one I find less immediately engaging than I have in years gone by. For those of you not yet familiar with the joys of grindcore (and especially if hardcore is more your typical fare), I would urge you to give this album a go; “No More” is the last thing you’ll be saying.
