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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Their Grinding Achievement, 21 May 2007
I have all of Mistress' albums; just to get that straight. They began as a sludge act akin to Eyehategod and Iron Monkey, however with their own orginal twist, inserting ferocious grinding passages into some of the songs that would make Napalm Death proud. Their second album raised the bar for ferocity and added more grind to the mix (the production put less emphasis on the downtuning this time around), with classic songs as "Rat P***" and "P***for Blood, Sh*t for Brains", it was an album to be reckoned with. After two years they released their highly acclaimed "In Disgust we Trust", which was more along the lines beer swilling heavy metal (still with their trademark grind and occaisional sludgy moments).
After poor record sales (surprising due to the amount of critical acclaim this album recieved, and the fact that they appeared on Never Mind the Buzzcocks on the 2005 Christmas special!) they were dropped from the Earache roster the week they went into the studio to record this album, they were at something of a loss in terms of what to do. Regardless, they churned on, playing live shows with a reinvigorated rage, and as the year went on, more new songs began to surface until they announced the release date for their new album (after a year and a half of waiting on my part).
So here I am, listening to their new album, and what can I say, the score adequately shows what I think of this album. What I can say is, that this is brutal and serverely so. They have pretty much dropped the early sludge sound in favour of making the grindcore element the most prominant (of course some sludge passages appear, most noticably in "The Grimdown", but even so most of the slower sections sound more like down tempo grindcore). There is an incredible amount of depth to this album, which is surprising to hear, when told that this is a grind album. There are some all out, balls-to-the-wall moments ("Cheyne Stoking" and "K*nt" amongst others!), but it never seems to be extremity for the sake of it, everything seems thought out; there's even semblances of melody in a lot of the songs and a relaxing clean guitar tune "Sleep", which will jump out and shock you more than their violent songs! This is like the much needed morphine to the open wound caused by the first half of the album, giving you a breather before the ferocity picks up again!
The instruments are well played and nothing is ever seemingly done for the sake of it; the blastbeats are all well placed, the melody blends perfectly with the song and even enhances the extreme nature of the music, rather than taking away from it as with a lot of melodic death bands! The Guitar tone is absolutely perfect for this kind of music, and the riffs sound like well tuned chainsaws, cutting at you from the speakers. Production wise, this has Mick Kenney written all over it, and although many people may find flaws in it, no one could deny that it works with the music perfectly!
This is by far Mistress' best album, their grinding achievement you could say...that is if you wanted to start describing everything with stupid plays on words. This is an amazing album, and has a balance that many other extreme acts could do with to keep their music from becoming boring and stale.
Go on, give them a listen...it's worth the pain!
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