Back in January I got to see the mighty mighty Magrudergrind play a killer (but all too short) set at Cakeshop here in NYC; and by “see,” I mean “hear and occasionally get a glance of the tops of their heads.” See, if you’ve never been there, Cakeshop is basically a basement venue, and this show was pretty crowded, and while I don’t think I qualify as “short,” I’m definitely not tall.

But the band sounded pretty good.

Luckily, my man Sean “Spleen Latifa” Gresens from Metal Injection managed to capture the performance on video, and has now posted footage of the song “Pulverizing Hate Mongers,” so now I can see what I previously only got to hear.

You can check out more clips from this gig here, and the rest of Sean’s live shit here. The man is tireless in his quest to get footage of every good underground band that comes through NYC, so it’s definitely worth keeping up with him…

-AR

Not that I trust the opinion of Ben Ratliff more than I do my main man Vince – but while he’s still doing this whole Heavy Metal Road Trip thang, we probably ain’t gonna get a proper review of the show.

So it’s Mr. Ratliff at the New York Times to the rescue! This being the Paper of Record, a lot of the prose is pretty flowery (and by “flowery,” I mean “bordering on pretentious and meaningless”), but it still gives you some sense of how the show went down. Here’s an excerpt:

“What a generation ago would be called hardcore punk is now routinely a part of metal festivals, slotted in as grindcore. Magrudergrind, a trio from Washington, brought a fantastic standard of it: speeding, screaming bullets of songs, squalid and economical two-beat frenzies with quick turns and no bass player. (They don’t need one.) This was at Circus, a smaller club. But over in the smallest of the four — the tiny, dingy basement club Bernie’s Distillery — the Texas black-metal band Absu was going at it with dark eye makeup, horror-house gothic vocals and no letup in its music’s clattery, narrow, obsessive drive. Metal is deep and wide. Between this and Yob lay two miles of college-town strip and an aesthetic galaxy.”

Read the rest here.

-AR

Mr. Awesome! Here’s his winning entry:

I deserve to win the tickets because the first time I had sex, Magrudergrind was playing in the background and I lasted for the full length of one of their songs.

For actually managing to make me laugh, Mr. Awesome wins a pair of tickets to tomorrow’s Misery Index/Magrudergrind/Mutant Supremacy show at Union Pool in Brooklyn. Congrats, Mr. Awesome… and have an awesome time (see what I did there?)!

-AR

It was just about a month ago that I told you how excited I am for Misery Index’s tour with Magrudergrind; well, the trek is now underway, and they’re hitting the insanely intimate Union Pool in Brooklyn this Saturday night. I always have a good time at Union Pool – why just this past Friday night I watched Unsane and Made Out of Babies destroy there (Gary Suarez’s review coming later today!). So if you live in the area and have never seen a show there, well, here’s your chance – and for a gig that promises to sort the pussies from the dicks. (Brooklyn’s own Mutant Supremacy is also on the bill; I don’t really know them, but the stuff on their MySpace page is cool.)

And I have a pair of tickets away! All you have to do to win ‘em is tell me in the comments section below why you should win ‘em. And please remember to register for the comments section with a valid e-mail address, as the winner will be contacted by e-mail on Friday morning. We’ll also announce the winner publicly at that time, so that everyone else can cry.

And if you don’t live in the New York area, get other dates for the tour after the jump!

Click to read more…

Last weekend I finally got to see Magrudergrind play live at Cakeshop. I meant to write a review but didn’t get around to it last week, and now our friend Justina Villaneuva, who made her way through the intense pit of the little basement show to get a closer than I did because I’m a pussy, wrote a pretty detailed review for Noisecreep. If you wanna read about how awesome the show was – and it was awesome – you should read that.

No,  this isn’t a show review – just a long-winded way of bringing up NYC’s own Defeatist, who went on right before Magrudergrind. I wasn’t previously familiar with this band, but both Rich Hallford Brooklyn Vegan‘s Black Bubblegum encouraged me to get to the show early and check ‘em out. And I’m glad I did.

This is filthy, deformed, venomous grind. It almost sounds like some inbred rednecks are taunting a crying baby, except that Defeatist aren’t inbred rednecks, they’re pissed-off New Yorkers, which means they’re smarter and care even less about their fellow members of the human race. The band’s MySpace page describes their sound as “A fucking mess,” and that’s a pretty accurate description. If you have love in your heart, this band is not for you.

Check these dudes out. They’re playing Maryland Deathfest in May; hopefully there will be other opportunities to see them live before then.

-AR

I wouldn’t exactly expect Misery Index and Magrudergrind to tour together – MI is a straight-up, no bullshit death metal band, and Magrudergrind, well, isn’t. I don’t see the two bands as having much in common besides that facts that both their monikers start with a letter “m,” and they both rip off faces, eat those faces, shit out those faces, reattach those faces, and repeat.

But, hey, that’s good enough for me! Lambgoat says the two bands will be hitting the road together starting in February. A simple, two-band bill, where the bands don’t sound at all alike and are both awesome? What’s not to love?

Get a complete list of dates after the jump…

Click to read more…

I barely remember the lost weekend I once spent in Baltimore. Was I bored, or just doing what I do? I dunno. I dunno.

Looks like I might be going back, though: D.R.I. have been added to the already stellar line-up of the 2010 edition of Maryland Deathfest. This is just the latest in a long line of good reasons to attend, not least of which is that it is, at least as far as I’m aware, currently the only scheduled U.S. appearance of Australia’s Portal, whose new album Swarth is currently frightening metalheads across the world. Throw in Converge, Magrudergrind, Entombed, Obituary, Watain, Melechesh, Jucifer, Gridlink, Gorod, 16, and a plethora of other awesome bands, and I think I could have a weekend in Baltimore even more lost than my last.

Get Maryland Deathfest’s complete line-up-to-date after the jump.

Click to read more…

Spoiler alert: the MetalSucks’ staff’s year-end “best of” lists are done and will be published Thursday, and Magrudergrind’s self-titled album made my list. But you can still find suspense in trying to figure out where they are on my list.

Sadly, I’ve yet to get to check these dudes out live, but here’s some pretty cool footage of the band playing three songs that was posted on Metal Injection yesterday. Lookit vocalist Avi Kulawy gettin’ all David Lee Roth n’ shit. Damn.

Magrudergrind’s Magrudergrind is out now on Willowtip.

-AR

Where the hell does the time go? The year is more than half over already! Sheesh.

ANYWAY, here are, in alphabetical order, albums that have really knocked my socks off so far this year…

Click to read more…

I’ve gotten a few e-mails today from people asking me where Vince is. Well, the truth is, Vince can’t write because he’s ill. And he’s quitting the site. No, really, he quit. We didn’t fire him. Swear it. We stand by that statement.

Here’s some other shit that happened in the world of metal this week:

• We’ve heard the new Alice in Chains album, and it is good.
• Gwar’s Oderus Urungus answered some of your questions, and will answer more in the future.
• John Bush is coming back to Anthrax because Dan Nelson quit. Oh, wait, no he didn’t. Yes he did. He probably didn’t, though.
• We spoke with Poison the Well’s Ryan Primack and Sunn O)))’s Greg Anderson.
• We checked out the latest releases from He Is Legend, Magrudergrind, Novembers Doom, and Clutch.
• Unfortunately, the 10th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos really is a real thing.
• Baby-eater Dino Cazares must be stopped!!!

Alright. Time to go buy a vaporizer of my very own. See ya Monday.

-AR

Magrudergrind derive their name from a D.C. housing project where they used to practice, and large swaths of their required-to-get-your-grind-card audio samples suggest that they are a true product of their enviornment. They’re not culled from fashionable (or fashionably hip) movies, and they in no way, shape, or form celebrate escapism – hell, I’d barely even call them “funny.” Topics up for discussion here include deliberate destruction of property values for profit, lying Washington bigwigs, and the retrieval of confiscated turn tables (okay, that last one is kinda funny). And the clips are either authentic, or astoundingly authentic sounding. Whatever the case, in contrast to what most grind bands are doing these days, it suggests a wide swath of experience. These dudes are relatively young, but they haven’t lived their whole life under an umbrella.

And, hey, guess what? The music on their new, self-titled Willowtip release reflects this breadth of interest, too.

Click to read more…

“bear wizard,” who definitely wins tipster of the day, has alerted us to the fact that Magrudergrind’s entier Willowtip debut is currently streaming on their MySpace page.

I haven’t had a chance to listen yet ’cause I’m up to my eyeballs in bullshit right now, but if I were a bettin’ man, I’d wager that the album slays moms.

Check it out here.

-AR

Holy frozen poop stick, I feel like we’ve been waiting for Magrudergrind’s Willowtip debut, like, for-ever. It’s been two years since the D.C. outfit’s last full-length, and the tracks they contributed to Scott Hull’s grind/powerviolence collection, 2008′s This Comp Kills Fascists, were fuckin’ face-melters.

Well, the wait is almost over: the band’s self-titled album will be out June 30. And if you can’t wait another two weeks – and really, who could blame you? – there’s now an e-card with samples of a few songs.

Now, there’s something kinda funny about having samples of songs that, in all likelihood, are only one to two minutes long to begin with, but, hey, I dig this band too much to poke fun.

Check out the e-card here.

-AR

P.S. All this year’s best album covers belong to grind releases. Shame on you, death metal.

When I read that Repulsion, Pig Destroyer and Brutal Truth are all playing a show together at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on July 31, my head literally exploded. I don’t mean “literally” the way some people misuse that word; I mean I am actually typing this right now sans melon. Pretty crazy, I know.

Click to read more…

If you woke up on the really, really, way wrong side of the bed today (as I did), here’s something that’ll make you feel even better than Irishing up your coffee: Magrudergrind have posted two new tracks, “Lyrical Ammunition for Scene Warfare” and “Excommunicated,” on their MySpace page. The first song, especially, will make you wanna club a baby seal to death with your dick. I mean that as a compliment.

The tracks will appear on the band’s self-titled album, which Willowtip will release this summer. I have no friggin’ clue what’s going on in that cover art, but I’m diggin’ it.

-AR

If you’re not familiar with Magrudergrind, it’s because media outlets (including this one) don’t give them enough coverage. But they have to be one of the best grind bands on the scene right now; 2007′s Rehashed was pretty fuckin’ good, but the three songs they contributed to Scott Hull’s This Comp Kills Fascists were even better.

The band has now signed with Willow Tip and are entering the studio to make a new album which will be engineered by Converge’s Kurt Ballou and mastered by The Inimitable Mr. Hull himself. Which means that along with the new Napalm Death album (and some new Pig Destroyer, pretty pretty please?), grind fans have least two albums in ’09 that they know will be good.

-AR

Just yesterday I was complaining about a lack of decent grindcore thus far in ’08, and now here comes the reunited Brutal Truth to tell me to sop my bellyachin’, punch me in the teeth, and spit on me when I’m down.

“Turmoil,” currently streaming on the band’s MySpace page, is one of four new songs the band recorded late last year, and will appear on This Comp Kills Fascists, an upcoming compilation (duh) that will be released on Relapse later this year. The album is being put together by Scott Hull of Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed fame, and will feature some of our other favorite grind acts, including Total Fucking Destruction, the soon to be broken up Insect Warfare, and Deciblog faves Magrudergrind (If you don’t know Magrudergrind check out their contribution to the comp, “Burden,” here. Seriously. So fucking worth your time).

And now that I’ve been writing about it for a minute and listening to the new Brutal Truth and Magrudergrind tracks, I am suddenly very, very excited about this album. Yowza.

-AR