Undead Review: Discordance Axis

Discordance Axis
Our Last Day
Hydra Head, 2005
www.hydrahead.com

If you think your metal’s been getting faster in the past couple of years, you’re not hearing things. Discordance Axis is almost single-handedly responsible for the recent popularity of grindcore, a spinoff of death metal that uses the fastest drumming humanly possible. No, seriously—the fastest. (It’s called “blasting,” and it involves an alternating one-two punch on the kick snare that, at high speeds, sounds like a machine gun.) Grind musicians are basically endurance athletes, and DA led the charge with their phlegmatic growls and dissonant anti-chords. Their songs rarely last more than one minute, but who can blame them when they play so sickeningly fast?

Our Last Day is more a tribute than an actual DA recording—the band broke up shortly after the release of 2000’s opus The Inalienable Dreamless, arguably the pinnacle of the grindcore genre. New fans should start there rather than here; the odds and ends that comprise Our Last Day are more likely to interest those with a more developed interest in the genre.

Two previously unreleased tracks open the album, and the rest is devoted to covers of the more popular songs in the DA catalog. But this is no chintzy tribute album—amazing bands like Melt Banana and Mortalized rewrite the songs entirely, taking bold liberties with the original material. The most unexpected treat on the album are the contributions by Cide Projekt, a rabid fan who programmed covers of DA songs with the synthesizer sounds from a Sega Genesis console. The robotic drums and plucky synth lines are minimalist as fuck. But by stripping away all the vocals and distortion, these particular tracks reveal just how powerful DA’s songwriting is. (Cide Projekt’s songs forced even my metal-hating friends to admit that, with the screaming vocals out of the way, they liked what they heard.) There’s a crackling tension between Dave Witte’s straightforward drums and Rob Marton’s spiraling guitar riffs; the latter seem to swirl around the former at such a dizzying rate that even computerized drums threaten to fall off-tempo at any moment. Unsurprisingly, it’s that same creative tension that eventually drove the band apart.