What a name for a band. Slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails. Well if the gender biased nursery rhyme is to be believed I should dig this or have it imprinted on my DNA at least. Well god and also damn I’m a real boy coz I gig this like a shovel through, well, Slugcrust.
These South Carolina grind merchants, featuring members of WVRM, have only been around in 2022 and have already released 2 E.P.s a single and this album Ecocide. Now the Grey Field Slug has a life expectancy of 6 – 12 months so that could have caused their rapid recording. I bloody hope not as this is the sort of delicious slimy noise I want to hear more of.
The twelve tracks here are a furious protest at the atrocity man does to the environment and nature as well as ourselves. There is plenty of breakneck blastbeat grinding, spiky Crust Punk grunts and groove and more than a hint of dirty doom throughout the 20 summat minutes. Vocalist Jesse Cole mixes up rasped barks and low John Tardy style DM growls whilst Derick Caperton chops gnarly riffs and the rhythm section of drummer Brett Terrapin and bassist Stacey Williams segue effortlessly between crushingly heavy and frenetic speed and chaos. Caperton produced the record whilst the much revered Sanguisagabog’s Cody Davidson finished things in the studio.
This album has a punk rock spine running the whole way through it. This is Grind a la Venomous Concept. Angry, thrashy, crusty, bile spitting and raw packed with hate and hope in equal measure. There is more than a garden trug full of sludgy doom as well. Just listen to the intro of Arachno – Marticicide which drops like a JCB load of sharp sand onto the chest before erupting into a whirling dervish. This is the way of Slugcrust. Short sharp blasts that are interspersed with crushing nastiness. Listening to Ecocide is the aural equivalent of documentary on tiger sharks with all the dull nature bits edited out. This is just the sniff, stalk and bite followed by the blood lust of a feeding frenzy. In fact the vocals on Juris Domina at one point take on a sub aquatic almost alien quality that bring to mind Cock and Ball Torture before returning to the surface to scope for survivors.
The title track begins with a Discordance Axis flurry before settling into a filthy death metal groove and a rumble like that big ball in Raiders. Things get a spiky with a Deicide style riff that got my neck snapping before a rapid-fire grind section that then switched time signatures several times to keep my head reeling. Before I know it the crushing sludge riff of finisher Event Horizon has entered the game before unleashing the whipping gnashing grindcore blastathon that lurked within it.
Ecocide takes all that makes Grind, Death and Sludge and superglues them together like some warped scientific experiment before letting the resultant beast run amok. Great stuff.
(8.5/10 Matt Mason)
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