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GREENWITCH
Grid Walker EP

Maggot Stomp (2022)
Rating: 7.5/10

Only a label like Maggot Stomp could release such a filthy, putrid and diabolical lump. Greenwitch is a rather demented five-piece out of Los Angeles, California which likes to dabble is utterly sick vocal growls and deep, blubbery, churning riffs. And I just love foul, swampy death metal that sounds as if it’s covered in cysts and riddled with maggots.

There’s no denying the grotesque grooves within of this EP, but it comes as no real surprise as the band’s 2020 debut full-length album CosmoSteelBlood Trinity was just as manky.

A chap named Galaxy Eater is the man behind the harsh vocal rasps and he should surely be locked up alongside the axe duo of Brandon Bond and Harley Woolston who clearly don’t need silly names to excrete their bouts of flesh-chomping riffage. Bassist Jeffry Aguila and drummer Jose Gutierrez are equally maniacal, driving this nasty three-track affair by injecting congealed pus into its already hardened arteries.

We get fast, foaming tides of eye-gouging cosmic weirdness coupled with mid-paced miasmas of molten mould. Throw this weird entity in the pan with the likes of Wharflurch as the quintet ignobly revels in its own stinking slime and pummels us with the mucus-lined chugs of the opening title track. There’s an immense, bulging membranous sack of filthy riffs, pounding drums and dehydrated coughs that vomit up specks of dust and blood. It’s all strangely catchy in its oddness, even when those evil faster segments consume.

However, the true menace of this composition is the nuclear soundscape that is ‘The Modification Of Useless Appendages’. Clocking in at over 13-minutes the cut is a surreal and dissonant industrial soundtrack of alien design that just swirls like a lost radio frequency bereft of any instrumentation as such; a white noise effect reaching out into the cosmos and echoing back peculiar otherworldly signals. Some may argue such a drone is a waste, especially when we’ve been treated to such bowel-removing chugging, but ‘The Modification Of Useless Appendages’ just confirms my belief that Greenwitch are high on their own bodily fluids which they greedily guzzle down from a cauldron also containing the body fat of its victims.

Grid Walker starts off as a legal high, but 18-minutes later you’re left as a mere costume of yourself. In the end it’s a difficult EP to rate when a majority of it is just noise, but I’ll go with a 7.5 for its anomalous audacity.

Neil Arnold

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