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GRAVESEND
Gowanus Death Stomp

20 Buck Spin (2023)
Rating: 9/10

The New York City sleaze merchants have returned, scurrying like rats from the sordid underbelly. More heinous tales are spun, tales which scrape the barrel of New York’s alleyways. Urban decay, streetwise scum and blizzards of trash channelled through a blackened grind cacophony.

The 2021 debut full-length outing from the trio – Methods Of Human Disposal – was a vile blast indeed, but with Gowanus Death Stomp the demented clan has delved further into the inner city misery by peeling back the layers to reveal fetid waterways clogged with animal remains, syringes and gunk and garbage bags bulging with severed human limbs.

As per the debut outing, this second record pummels you to the ground and mashes your skull and brain through the grates of the drain. With its distorted samples and black plumes of grinding smoke, Gowanus Death Stomp stinks of industrial filth as juggernaut riffs are burped out to the slamming percussion which tumbles and rumbles like a subway train on a humid, diseased underground network.

As ‘11414’ exhibits, Gravesend is the musical equivalent to having your head put in a full cement mixer; a dizzying experience of 16 tracks that spin and whirl like a grit-embraced cyclone. One imagines those squalid New York gutters lined with homeless bodies, litter and fumes as the crushing escapades of ‘Even A Worm Will Turn’, ‘Festering In Squalor’ and ‘Code Of Silence’ unravel like sudden storms.

Everything in the world of Gravesend is grey and wicked and above all agitated as ‘Thirty Caliber Pesticide’ rages seemingly uncontrollably alongside the equally maniacal ‘Carried By Six’ and ‘Vermin Victory’. Barrages of sickening drums emerge on the harrowing ‘The Third Rail’ which is grindcore at its most formidable, while ‘Crown Of Tar’ slows the pace but drags you deeper into the sewer.

This is pulverising stuff from Gravesend, a band without limitations or mercy as once again the trio leaves us for dead in the street so that the birds and rats can finish us off.

Neil Arnold

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