Endless Swarm, Scotland’s finest purveyors of grind-fuelled powerviolence return after five long years with Manifested Forms, the follow up to the brilliant Imprisoned In Skin album, and impressively sounds even more ferocious than before.
There is a renewed and focussed intensity to the songs on Manifested Forms as Endless Swarm storm through the twenty tracks on the album and demonstrate effectively the sheer power and energetic nature of their music.
That intense nature is amped up on this record with some properly unhinged vocal assaults as vocalist Gray Caldwell and co-vocalist/bassist Alex Sharp lead the charge and combine to bring an air of aural insanity to the bands short and razor sharp blasts of focussed noise and the band sound charged up as the songs rave through, barley leaving you a chance to catch your breath.
From the opening charge of ‘Disengaged’ onwards, Manifested Forms doesn’t let up at all and the dizzying grind that emits from the speakers as you listen is an intoxicating feeling indeed, and it sounds amazing.
Manifested Forms shows off the band’s grinding powerviolence in fine style with songs like ‘Sterile’, ‘Death Denied’ and ‘Subjugate’ all sounding joyously berserk and in between these intense blasts, there are more big grooves in there too especially on songs like ‘Matter Split’, ‘Administered’ and ‘Delusions In Chaos’ and they seem to enhance the music of Endless Swarm, resulting in their music sounding even bigger than before.
Manifested Forms is unrelenting in its vision to make massive sounding powerviolence and it is definitely something that Endless Swarm achieve with this album, and without a doubt you’ll struggle to find an album this year as ferociously energetic as this one. It is great to have Endless Swarm back especially when they sound as unrelentingly venomous as they do on all of the twenty songs on this album.
