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GENOCIDAL SLAVE
Perfection EP

Self-released (2014)
Rating: 7/10

Genocidal Slave is, I believe, a one-man project from Chicago who has produced a truly harrowing experience, bringing to mind those early, grey experiences with Godflesh, although this opus has a far more manic and deranged presence about it.

For a start there’s the drums, which I’m guessing were created on a drum machine; but if not, then a clearly unhinged musician. Either way, Perfection welds together a horrendous racket of industrial metal, grindcore and avant-garde anomaly.

This six-track affair runs for barely over ten minutes and yet it is the musical equivalent to being raked by machine gun fire, especially with that racket of a drum. Surprisingly however, the drum is actually a quality rather than an irritant and it quite literally smothers every track on offer, meaning that they exist as mere bursts of vile speed accompanied by unintelligible vocal rasps which evoke images and sounds of the old 80s grindcore scene.

‘Overload’, ‘Imperfection’, ‘Combust’, ‘Down Syndrome’, ‘Malevolent’ and ‘Wank’ are frightful noise-blasts created in the world’s most inhospitable factory of hammering machinery, torturous din and sordid lumps of rust-infused flesh and metallic bile. It’s as noisy as a day trip to the dungeons of hell, and experimental to boot in the sense that it exists as something akin to those ear-shredding Skin Chamber et al albums of early 1991. That’s not to say this is the same – in fact, far from it – but Genocidal Slave clearly have the same deranged talent as those migraine-inducing industrialists in that it somehow manages to create a noise almost as if musical instruments were not used.

Sure, there’s some deep-throated grindcore on the 60 or so seconds of ‘Combust’, which sounds as if you’ve just been hit by the atomic bomb. ‘Down Syndrome’ is the true sound of tumult, meanwhile; a deafening holocaustic racket of horrifying hoarse shouts and battering, relentless drum. And as you bend down to pick up your teeth you’re hit by another wave of frenzy in the form of ‘Malevolent’, which is so fast that I doubt a human could even construct such drumming techniques.

Fans of very extreme metal and industrial / grindcore mayhem will no doubt find this ashen mess a real buzz, and I have to admit that there is a certain hypnotic quality about those lacerating drums and truly frightful explosions of hate which rain down pieces of flesh and charred bone upon our sorry ears.

By the time the guttural cacophony of ‘Wank’ has left the building I’m left wondering what sort of unhinged person could come up with such a piece of musical annihilation, and yet there I go again, pushing the “play” button for another hit of this filthy yet oh so brief drug of perfection. Certainly not one for the Status Quo fans, Genocidal Slave is the soundtrack to violent death.

Neil Arnold

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