Reading metal reviews would be a lot more entertaining if we'd occasionally pause and allow our imaginations to run wild through some of the album titles and band names. Monikers like Palace of Worms and Lake of Blood capture the mind’s eye, while Ride for Revenge, Pig Destroyer, and diSEMBOWLMENT send chills down the spine. While a Skeletal Spectre haunts your dreams and a Front Beast with One Tail, One Head lurks in the shadows behind your bedroom door, a Mammoth Grinder sounds like a fearsome contraption in a scene from some wintry Neolithic Fargo, a sputtering metallic beast cranking out ropes of dark, bloody flesh and orchestrating a chorus of deafening clangs, frenzied roars, and whirring blades as the show turns crimson beneath it.
You could describe the Austin band Mammoth Grinder's latest album in much the same way. It's been four years since the release of Extinction of Humanity, but Mammoth Grinder’s third full-length Underworlds maintains that forward momentum-- it's a savage collection that sees the four-piece (who were a trio the last time we heard from them) heading straight for the jugular from the first note and tearing through the title track in under two minutes. It’s the kind of entrance that catches you off guard, and the intensity doesn’t let up. When they go slow, it’s all sludgy, bludgeoning breakdowns and Stockholm grooves; when they speed up, it’s a torrential storm of gutter thrash and hardcore punk that aims to fuck things up faster than a Sharknado. The band have long incorporated death metal elements into their songwriting, and the 2011 split with a grind-heavy Hatred Surge (with whom they share key members) may have dropped some major hints, but on Underworlds, Mammoth Grinder have fully come into their own as genre-bashing geniuses.
“Wraparound Eyes” stomps in with a big fat groove and dips in and out of the same, padding out the rest with Disfear-driven d-beats and Entombed riffs, while “Revenge” sounds like Bolt Thrower’s “... For Victory” sped up to 45 RPM with a few lines of yayo laid out on top. “Roperide” has the album’s best moshpit anthem-- you can almost see the bodies fly. Three-minute burner “Cog in the Machine” is an epic by Mammoth Grinder’s standards, and they use those extra thirty seconds to hammer their message home (hint: it’s not a very nice one). “Born in a Bag” is pure Swedish death down to the guitar tone and whiplash guitar solo, and album closer “Moral Crux” drags it all back down, a stoned stomp towards oblivion. (You can’t go wrong with a good “bleah!” grunt.) When not indulging his inner Matt Harvey, vocalist Chris Ulsh’s hoarse throat erupts again and again as a gravelly warning or enraged bellow; you can hear the spittle flying out and feel his white knuckle deathgrip on the mic.
The album is peppered with the kind of wild-eyed, squealing guitar licks that’d make Jeff Hanneman proud, and a big, hollow drum sound acts as a powerful backup generator for when the guitar and basslines need a bar or two to breathe. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all, and much like a particularly cutting Oscar Wilde diss, the short lengths of the songs come off as calculated and clever. Nothing feels hasty or rushed. Mammoth Grinder know exactly how to get in, cause a ruckus, and get out in three minutes or less, and aren’t interested in belaboring their point. They've earned the right to keep it tight.
