Artist: GRiMMoRTal
Album: Execrating Normality
Label: Independent
Mastered and Mixed by: Nikhil Singh
Release Date: March 30, 2013
It’s a funny thing how people can mould their voices and yield a certain nonhuman noise that would just blow up your mind with its viciousness and brutality. Harsh vocals have evolved from austere graveness and raspy singing to many different types which involve a lot more technique and skill rather than a heavy voice. Grunts, growls, screeches and pig squeals are few of them and I bet many people don’t even know how to differentiate between them, even I didn’t until I saw the famous video of ‘I am the Infidel’. Death growls are something which today every metalhead is picking up but most of them fail unknowingly, because they just don’t get it right; and Rahul Nair from GRiMMoRTal isn’t one of them.
Hailing from Navi Mumbai, GRiMMoRTal is a Deathcore band that just came out with an album which has been savaged throughout by ferocious growls and mind-blowing pig squeals. The band’s sound carries a variegated essence of genres like Death Metal, Grindcore, Slam Death and Metalcore, all jammed together in a groovy, melodic and a highly technical wireframe and their songs are filled up with a lot of breakdowns; well that you’ll anyways find in most Indian albums, released after Meshuggah took us by its storm back in 2010.
The band was formed in the summer of 2009, attained a steady line-up after a few hitches and has been pretty famous in the country’s gig circuits. Last year, they opened for the Iranian band Arsames and the grindcore legends Napalm Death at the Metal Mayhem IV in Nepal, which is certainly a remarkable achievement. With Rahul Nair on vocals, Prateek Keni on bass and Nikant Sharma and Elvis on guitars, the band released their debut studio album, ‘Execrating Normality’.
The album starts with a melodic track called ‘Resistance’, which kicks in with a heart-wrenching clean intro and moves onto a heavy progression with a bombastic drum line and nice amount of groove. The track has been crafted perfectly and one can straightaway witness the amazing work on vocals that I was talking about earlier. Next comes up ‘Abomination’, a track loaded with infinite breakdown sections (need I say more) and is followed by a pretty energetic track, ‘Tormented’. ‘Tormented’ is one of those mosh prone tracks that consist of heavy and thrashy sections with blastbeats and tremolo picking. The progressions on the song are pretty innovative, often fusing in elements of black metal, which we can witness in the insane chorus and the squeals just make it better. It is surely one of the better tracks of the album.
A very interesting and good track on the album is ‘Why So Emo?’. The song touches the topic of school and college kids getting emotionally depressed unnecessarily and has been titled so nattily and appropriately; I just knew that this song would be the first one I would listen when I checked the tracklist. Musically, the track is pretty brutal and the riffs on the song are downright heavy and we feel the low tuned guitars being pounded on us. It is yet another good track with apt amount of melody and equally pertinent heaviness. The bass progression which appears towards the end is just killer and the work on guitars is insane. The album returns to its melodic nuance with the track ‘Pantomine’. The song is pretty progressive in nature and the work on guitars is just phenomenal; right from the beautiful clean guitar melody in the intro to the ripping solo towards the end, the guitars have been nothing but marvellous. A good thing about this album is that it keeps getting better and better as we proceed towards the end.
‘Fatality’ is a comparatively dark track and goes through many transitions which are connected with perfectly tailored bridges. There are pretty catchy riffs in the choruses which move on to a very murky and doomy kind of section with yet another great vocal performance. And the last track on the album is ‘Refrag’ which starts with a cult death metal riff with an awesome guitar solo played on the harmonic minor. The song is a treat for technical metal lovers as many sections on the song have odd time signatures and pretty complex riffage. Check out the melodic solos on the song; they are really good.
The production of the album is very good, especially for a debutant. The songs have a nice amount of dynamics and the tracks have been aptly. The patches for guitars have been selected very nicely and the tone for clean portions is just splendid.
Summing up, the album is a very great release by the band and we can definitely look forward to more good work from the band in the future.
