Apocalypse
Review Score: 10
Reviewed by: Johnny Ibay
Oldschool Finnish grindcore legends Rotten Sound are back with Apocalypse, their first newly recorded material in over 5 years and MAN DOES IT SLAP! To people familiar with the genre this band needs no introduction; they’ve been around since ’93 and are one of the big bands that popularized the HM-2 impenetrable wall-of-sound grind style (along with Swedish legends Nasum and a few others) that has been massively popular over the past 10+ years. This new record delivers in spades with 18 tracks of suffocating blasts and gnarly walls of distorted animosity that will scratch the itch of old fans and earn a lot of new ones.
This record rages hard right out of the gate like a sucker punch to the face. It has a lot of the classic grindcore “blastbeat/d-beat/blastbeat” structure, a groundwork laid by genre pioneers Napalm Death, but adds a modern spin to the formula with some choice mosh riffs, mid-tempo breaks and sludgy filth to keep it interesting. The mosh riff in “Fight Back” is one of several highlights for me and I imagine will induce a full room sized circle pit when played live. The mid-tempo riffs in the title track and “Empowered” are also exceedingly moshtastic and give a bit of a FETO era Napalm Death vibe. The hard ass sludge parts at the end of “Sharing” and the beginning of “Denialist” are so god damned heavy, they make me feel like I’m being slowly crushed in a human sized hydraulic press.
Lyrically Rotten Sound deals with socially conscious themes typical of the genre. The lyrics “Mortgage of tomorrow; Reason to wake up; Must work to pay; Too many square meters” in the song “Suburban Bliss” are a commentary on the societal expectation to work hard and accumulate debt to buy property, which is unfulfilling and leads to normalized slavery, resulting in the fake promise of perfect living. The lyrics “Energy sources are to be built; Materials are to be mined again; Batteries for charging storage are not sustainable” in the song “Renewables” criticize the paradox of renewable energy sources that require non-sustainable materials to be built, pollute in new ways, and rely on non-sustainable batteries. The song questions the sustainability of renewable energy and the “insanity of creativity“ in our current system.
Overall, this record delivers exactly what most fans want from a Rotten Sound record. They managed to put out a somewhat dynamic record without straying too far away from the standard grind formula. There seems to be an endless sea of bands playing this style of grind nowadays but not only are Rotten Sound among the originators of it, they prove on this record that they are still among the best to play it.