Disciples Of Christ – Decomposition Fantasy (Rorschach Records)
There’s something to be said for musical comfort food; the sort of thing that, regardless of what it might signify to anybody else, can instantly transport a listener to some bygone halcyon era.
Disciples Of Christ – Decomposition Fantasy (Rorschach Records)
There’s something to be said for musical comfort food; the sort of thing that, regardless of what it might signify to anybody else, can instantly transport a listener to some bygone halcyon era. Though it may seem strange to think of grindcore as something that could initiate nostalgic reverie, a particular strain of the genre can immediately blast me back twenty years to a time when I was first buying records, digging into dollar bins and piercing the veils of obscurity with all the Agathocles and Excruciating Terror 7”s my lawnmowing dollars could procure for me (or really, anything with an indecipherable metal logo and grainy stock photos of war casualties on the cover). In the ensuing years, despite the expansion of my musical taste, that sort of material – the type that’s neither too blown out and noisy nor too slickly produced – has held a special place in my heart, as have the few bands who can execute it artfully.
Disciples Of Christ have proven themselves as the sort of band who can do exactly that. Though no surprises present themselves, either in terms of the overall aesthetic or in the high standard of quality (especially unsurprising given their pedigree – members also have done time in Magrudergrind, Coke Bust, and Sick Fix), the album’s brisk, brutal take on powerviolence-infused grind ends up as one of the best things the genre has offered since In Disgust’s Reality Choke. The album gnashes through a half-dozen songs in under ten minutes, starting with a howl of feedback that bleeds into a hardcore stomp, which in turn gives way to frantic blastbeats that sustain the album until the last track. At that point, the band indulges in the time-honored fastcore tradition of ending an album with a slow, relatively long song, in this instance concluding Decomposition Fantasy with a plodding five-minute take on Wire’s “Pink Flag.” This choice of cover might at first seem odd, except that Wire’s deliberate minimalism offered the blueprint for the reductionist tendencies of the earliest hardcore bands, from whom grind initially took much of its inspiration (that D.O.C.’s extended version of the song inverts the original’s aforementioned minimalism lends an interesting conceptual element).
Though the music is consistently excellent, the quality of the recording provides a bit of a quandry for anybody who has witnessed the band live. On one hand, the mix of deliberate rawness and clear balance between instruments stands in stark contrast to both the self-conscious noise tendencies and slick professionalism that have come to permeate grindcore. In this sense, it succeeds. On the other hand, anybody who has seen D.O.C. live can attest to their ability to remain ungodly heavy despite playing extremely fast, a trait that’s more of a rarity than it might at first sound. In this sense, the production quality of Decomposition Fantasy can be a little disappointing – which isn’t to suggest that the recording is at all bad, only that the live experience is a whole different beast.
As something of a side note not specifically related to the music itself, the packaging represents everything that a label can do right. It’s an amazing looking record with well-crafted art screened on both the cover and the album’s b-side, along with a booklet featuring a collage for each song. In a world where many labels seem happy to overcharge for uninspired presentation (so that they can attach an even heftier pricetag when they do put in a little effort), seeing something so well executed for such a reasonable price is refreshing.
Overall, Decomposition Fantasy operates in fairly familiar territory, but however mean, ugly, and harsh the songs contained therein may be, each propels itself forward with an undeniable verve that should appeal to anyone interested in the rougher permutations of an already difficult genre. Just as any newcomers dipping a tentative toe into these waters could find much to cling to on the album’s brief run, so could any longtime devotee of this sort of thing. The holistic level of quality in the presentation prevents any element thereof from coming off contrived or forced, just as the overall attitude hearkens back to a time before the genre had settled into convention. That time may exist only in memory, but its rays of influence shine softly through the fog of subsequent decades, briefly making themselves known before becoming cloaked once again.
