This is a band without a huge amount of history behind them, meaning that it’s a case of cutting to the chase as far as this review is concerned. A couple of things to note are that they are a trio from Toulouse in France, they have released one demo prior to this debut album and they are right noisy bastards! 14 tracks of death grind make up this album and I kind of like the somewhat childlike artwork on the cover as well as seasonal song titles such as ‘Snowball Fight,’ which may or may not include yellow snow with rocks in it. The songs certainly hit like a brick and with an average time of around 2 minutes you probably already have a vague idea of what to expect here.
I am not going to bother trying to get beneath the lyrical ideas behind numbers such as opener ‘Oyster’ everyone in the band sings, yells or screams and there is a lurching bass groove and flattening drum barrage thickly in the mix here too. I would not call this straight up grind although there are many elements, especially in the high / low singing. There are moments of sludgy NOLA tempered doom in this opening track for example as well as the obvious death bombast. The biog mentions bands such Disgorge and Inhume who they have shared the stage with and with the crusty dis(temper) of that second track ‘Snowball Fight’ these are a good starting reference point. They know how to inject a sense of melody about things too and the rampant punk fuelled / hardcore swagger of the guitar and bass on ‘Do I’ has a bit of the likes of even Black Flag about it as well as Fugazi when the guitar solo whips in. This is certainly no one trick pony.
At the halfway mark are two tracks ‘Destruct’ and ‘Construct’ whose titles should be pretty self evident. These are the shortest and longest tracks on the album, the first a blaze of hate filled, tantrum laden distemper and the second a much looser and groove laden affair with some heavyweight bass riffs reminiscent of Godflesh even. Although it’s considerably more than ‘one’ loud noise before this is done at shortly over the half hour mark this is a great energetic feast that is guaranteed to have you jumping around. In fact as I write it just after Xmas day some of you tubby bastards should think about picking it up and using it for a work out!
http://www.myspace.com/nolentia
