So I learned a lot this morning by deciding to review Mumakil’s upcoming album Flies Will Starve
today. First, they’re named after a fictional Tolkien beast, those
six-tusked two-hundred feet tall elephant creatures who royally fuck
shit up in Return of the King.
I found a poem written about one by Samwise the Hobbit and he has a
totally amateur grasp of poetic forms and rhyme schemes, incapable of
capturing their enormous fury the way this band has. I then researched
the life cycle of flies and discovered that most don’t live for more
than a month, and can starve after just a few days. This confirmed my
disdain for these pesky little jerks for buzzing around my eyeballs
during the summer, as if they have nothing better to do with their
thirty days on this planet.
The
members of Mumakil use their time alive with a higher purpose:
Blistering their fingers and snapping your neck with ferocious grind
that will pry your ear canal open and funnel in anthrax. From the
confident first blast of “Death From Below” you can tell this ain’t
Mumakil’s first ride at the rodeo. They’ve been assaulting the world
from their Swiss lair in Geneva since 2004, releasing several split
albums and three full-lengths, including Flies Will Starve,
their second with Relapse Records. They have used every moment of the
past nine years conceiving ways to injure you with the sound screaming
from their amplifiers and off their percussive devices. With 24 tracks
it would require a manifesto of Tolkien proportions to accurately
describe all of the lethal techniques used on this monster, but some
highlights of their multi-faceted attack include: The stop’n’start
trauma of “War Therapist,” the thrashing groove of “Waste By
Definition,” and the technical death wizardry of “Fucktards Parade.”
There’s definitely more than a pinch of tech-death here, as the riffs
often have as much in common with Nile or Decapitated as they do
label-mates Brutal Truth or Rotten Sound. But Mumakil really is its own
(six-tusked) animal.
This
is the catchiest blast of 200+ BPM sonic anger I’ve heard in an
elephant’s age. Elephants live a long time, right? About a billion times
longer than flies? My lazy internet searches and lazier math confirm
this is true. It’s just exciting to hear a band building grind on riffs
rather than blastbeats (but if it’s blastbeats you want, good lord, does
Kevin Foley not disappoint you) and actually forming these crazy things
called songs.
Somewhere along the way, a group of near-sighted people obsessed with
guidelines and mind-numbing consistency decided there were rules for
grindcore, and those rules are only allowed to be broken if you increase
the average song speed by X amount. By its nature, grindcore is a genre
that should be forever evolving, restlessly searching for new weapons.
Thankfully, all of the bands worth a damn took that rule book, said “No
thanks” as impolitely as possible, and set it ablaze with a mouth full
of bathtub bourbon and a lit Molotov. They may not challenge perceptions
of grindcore (and reality) as defiantly as someone like Pig Destroyer,
but Mumakil is absolutely one of those bands.
This
album releases in late June, right around my birthday. This will
definitely be spinning while I blow out my cake candles, lit from the
same burning grindcore rulebook.
Check out more information on Mumakil over at their profile on Relapse Records, including how t pre-order this beast: http://www.relapse.com/label/artist/mumakil.html
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