Mincecore seems to be having something of a moment right now, and spearheading this moment is Oakland, CA's Haggus, one of the most active and consistent bands in the subgenre. Haggus have released an album every summer for the past four years, and they've all been great — latest offering The Mincecore Manifesto included.To fully appreciate it, you need to have some understanding of mince itself, a style of music that is repetitive by design and, in some ways, simple. I saw a post on r/metalforthemasses years ago decrying the entire subgenre as just "bands playing the same drumbeat since the '80s." Hey, it's a pretty cool drumbeat!In actuality, great mince bands are defined by how they use these common elements and what they do to stand out between that D-beat. While the point of mincecore is to go back to the more punk elements of grind, this album from Haggus also seems to invoke some characteristics of thrash metal — best heard in the screeching guitar solos and catchy melodies across the LP."Fucked Up Future" is a stellar demonstration, and one of my favourite punk/grind songs in recent memory. It's dynamic, it's exciting, it makes you wanna move, and it has some great late-'80s solo guitar going on. This isn't to discredit the riffage on The Mincecore Manifesto as a whole, however, which is unrelentingly groovy.The goregrind-esque guttural toilet vocals on this album (and almost all of Haggus's work) often exhibit the band's sense of humour. They don't take their own image too seriously, and much of what they do is tongue-in-cheek, like the "Okay!" ad-lib at the start of "Welcome to the Mincecore Jungle," which made me chuckle the first time I heard it. Haggus sound like a bunch of muppets started making grindcore, and were inexplicably really good at it. This doesn't detract from the seriousness of the lyrical content, though. While difficult to decipher, in authentic mince fashion, most of the lyrics are about the police, being anti-authority, living in a cruel world, and demanding better. For the most part, it's real punk shit — unless it's the occasional shock song, like closing track "Head Infection," which forgoes this political background to mostly be about viscera.In addition to the main themes of political struggle and gore, the amount of love this album has for its own subgenre is something seen almost exclusively in hardcore. The second-to-last track "Mincecore Gratitude" is maybe the only grindcore song I've heard that I could characterize as adorable; it's all about playing shows, releasing splits, loving bands, and sleeping on strangers' floors with their cats on tour.Full of infectious reverence for the titular subgenre, The Mincecore Manifesto is another demonstration of Haggus's consistently effective and high-energy songwriting. It would be easy for an act so active to release the same record over and over again, but the band's little details and creative flourishes shine. If you wanted to introduce someone to grindcore or extreme metal, this album would be a great starting point.
Wavelength
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