As my friend and I were riding around our mid-size southern town, listening to the new Agoraphobic Nosebleed, he turned to me and said, "This stuff's pretty cool but a whole album of it just turns into whatever after a few minutes...but, they've got a good drummer." That's because their percussionist is a fucking inanimate object from Japan called a drum machine.
At least my friend was correct about one thing: Agoraphobic Nosebleed's digital grind-power violence-hardcore turns into "whatever" in just a short period of time. Their credo revolves around bringing glory to the sacred deity of speed and grind, while their profane lyrics flicker with fury and pomposity. At least I assume they do, as they don't feel the need to provide the listener with written lyrics for this 2xCD reissue, which encompasses everything they did prior to their first Relapse record, Honky Reduction.
Recording for Relapse, ANb grew restless with their standard grind sound and released Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope with all of its strange digital flourishes and Altered States of America with of all its two-second tracks. Bestial Machinery represents a purer time when the sorcery of a machine was being harnessed because of ANb's inability to find a drummer of suitable speed. It's definitely not "straight" grindcore but it's also not drastically different from any album that colorful reviewers call "filled to the brim with buzz saw guitars that cut like a rusty bayonet through the ripe flesh of venereal diseased Vietnamese hookers." You've heard many albums like it, but in an established hardcore genre it's not whether you break the formula, it's whether you can give it enough attitude to make it interesting. ANb have a little bit of attitude-- and a bunch of kickass cartoon devils and skulls on their cover! I could see this cover art being photocopied and plastered on some notebooks at school, right under someone's hand drawn Slayer logo. It's that good.
Disc One contains 76 tracks-- taken from various 7-inch records and splits-- of flailing guitars and cathartic screaming, while the drum machine farts off non-stop double bass. It's not metaphysics or anything, but with titles such as "From Filth to Defilement", "The Newlyweds Are Raped", and "The Executioner Vs. The Sodomite", it's just good, wholesome Satan-influenced stuff. There are 60 more songs on Disc Two. The demos on Disc Two sag due to their lackluster mixing and production, while compilation tracks seem misplaced.
Most grind snaps you into attention at the beginning then you either catch the groove (if you can call it that) or you tune it out in an ambient fashion and let your mind wander. Bestial Machinery mixes the two and turns into a sort of interesting drone. It's not bad music as far as this goes, it just isn't filled with one interesting idea after another, which is what is usually needed to be completely engrossed. After a little while it simply turns into "whatever." But it's a really loud and fast whatever.
