Album Review: Undertakers – Global Dominion

Album Review: Undertakers – Global Dominion

Reviewed by Eric Clifford

“For the Ugly and Unwanted, this is Grindcore”. So far as album titles go, Brutal Truth essentially nailed the perfect one when they gifted a live album with that one. It encapsulates and underscores what the genre is about, a white-hot supernova of rage and resentment aimed at an unforgiving society that strangles each breath you try to take. Every time I listen to a grind album, that title and the standard it implies springs into mind like an obligation: how much does this album feel like it would disassemble civilisation overnight if it could? How much does it take the boiling negativity that splays throughout you like an ache and free-fire it back at the world? If there is any pain to you, any fear, any unavenged injuries gnawing at your mind, can this album howl out that unspoken need for retribution with crashing waves of speed and distortion? If the world itself feels to have done you wrong, can this album speak to that yearning need to be – if not healed – then at least made even?

Can Undertakers do that for you?

There’s a therapeutic comfort I can find within grind; the havoc of it validating every traumatic moment, every angry thought, every painful memory that I beg to be anything other than what it is. And periodically, I can find that blessed relief within Undertakers too; at their prime they shoulder the weight of my burdens, and somehow within this banquet of enraged rampage fuel I can find what passes for peace. The reaping thrust of “Collapse Control” with it’s harmonized tremolo lines slashing away over a tidal surge of blasts, threshing flesh before the floor collapses from below and we plunge into a nasty, bone-splintering breakdown. Other times are unfortunately less successful, and an occasional surfeit of basic riffs and middling tempos smothers the rage a little like sedatives (“United Front” has a few of these moments, notably from around 1.27 to about 2.06 where the momentum feels to stall a bit).

This isn’t the pure-breed grind; it’s heavily spliced with death and thrash, and the moments that the latter leaps forth to slit your throat to the spine are amongst the album’s best. “Rise of Resistance” seethes with them, latter-day Exodus riffs the likes of which would have Gary Holt smiling from an ocean away. Sinuous, full of slides and hammer on / pull off intricacies to keep the blood flowing. Similar sentiments apply to”Global Dominion” – at least in the introduction; I’m not wild about the chorus it has. It feels a bit placeholder – a simple strummed pattern with a relatively commonplace chord sequence that isn’t wildly offensive, but nonetheless feels as though more could have been done. It’s frustrating in the sense that through the release I’ll feel that connection that good grind gives me, the irrepressible urge to roll up the sleeves and begin taking heads, but then the album will every now and then dip into more lacklustre territory that takes the energy down a notch or two, and the will to kill slips away and the dull realisation that I have not yet completed the ironing crawls mundanely back into focus.

Taken in full the album is an uneven but largely satisfying ride. I think that if the band were to combat their instincts to slow down and instead speed all the way up, it would only be for the better. I love the mercenary stalk to the thrash riffs they’ve injected, and I cannot fault the evident passion behind the project – the vocalist also runs Time To Kill records, in case his love of the music should ever be held in dispute. Even so, there are just a few frustrating aspects scuffing the shine on the album as a whole. Still – lets not pretend that those irretrievably doom matters. If you like death metal, and you like grind, I can imagine you having a good time with much of Undertaker’s efforts here.

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