Vomit Spawn – Split 7” EP with Viscera

Vomit Spawn263

Classic mid 90’s contagion! Vomit Spawn! A four-piece Floridian mob trisecting Grindcore, Noisecore & vesicating erratic Death-Thrash regorge six barely digested burners of truly wonderful concerted & obnoxious spastication. I still consider this recording one of the best & most original in it’s field, fifteen years or so down the line & it’s clearly going to stay that way. seems that these guys were a bit older than the more common teen upstarts & had a slew-load of prior-experience & honing from bombing about the Keyes with Thrash/Death/Grind bands that probably never got past a few local shows & small scale demo oligopoly. Virtuosity & cultivated expertise are clearly present, particularly from the guitarist who is shit-hot, blur-shredding & thrashing with a real exigence & revelry whilst also pulling classic Metal pinched harmonics & chord-howling into the much more extreme territory of scathing Grind-Blur & Noisecore that generally dominate this EP. As well as totally antiphonic Blur, well-structured progressions & even quite technical compositional components can sometimes be detected. It’s played often so frantically, decked with the typical discordance that it’s easy to miss & just perceive on the whole as a noisy chaotic arse-whupping, but clearly contrived formation & adept song writing has been thrust into the vicious mangling in some sections. Most of the material is fast-picked & the tempo’s are quite considerable for the time. The next adorable genetic-defect is the drummer, Phony Tony who beleaguers one of the best displays of character drumming available. Clearly struggling to keep up with the required tempos, this guy churns out cult, laboured double-kick blasts, obviously beyond his comfort margin, just about keeping the whole thing streamlined through the straining. It sounds like he could derail or go into cardio arrest on the kick-drum mid blast. Not quite tight but just about making the gap & putting every ounce of stamina into it. it’s brilliant! & the trashy drum-kit with it’s garbage can snare & cracked-cake-tin cymbals are a fucking treat. Then comes the vocalist Ern. Lured from the Florida swamps by the stench of human carcasses, this reptile-mutant bellows & garbles unintelligible lallation & Tourette’s-turbulence with an extensive arsenal of hysterical malformed teratoid retch. You’ve got to give it up to this freaks scope & passion, twisting & strangling so many contrasting malfunctions out of his voice-valve & majorly bolstering the chaotic, fast & overwrought songs with even more trauma turgidity & psycho-fluctuation. Superb! Luckily the lyrics are 98% indiscernible as VS’s occasionally funny but extremely bad-taste ultra-unpleasant gross-out shit is something I can really do without, like puke in the skull cap, I really don’t need this junk soiling my fuckin’ thoughts.

That aside, this is a pretty spectacular kick in the chops with so much damn personality & character. As with most VS releases, great comic art abounds. I snatched this EP up pretty early during my entrance into the Grindcore/Noisecore underground & it set quite a standard. I expected to uncover more of the like but reluctantly realized that this kind of diligent, notably differing, effort soaked shit was far & few between. The old Four Tracker recording production & the fact that the guild are overtly so into their music & playing with everything they’ve got as well as experience & adeptness makes this opuscule-pustule really fuckin’ shine, track after track. After this EP, VS switched drummers & switched styles, doing much more straight-a-head GrindDeath which for me was a substantial fall back from this crazy & maverick style of intense overloaded NoiseGrind, spazz-Thrash.

Viscera– were a bunch of dirty degenerates from Australia doing some kind of feculent ScumGrind. It’s pretty terrible stuff but there is definitely a strange originality here with some non-conventional riffing & influences evidently from outside standard Grind canards. definitely not enough to save it from it’s own ultimate shitness though.

Rekd: mid-late 90’s

Label: No Weak Shit Records