I am too old for this shit. I am too old to yell about social injustice, to call for action against uncaring governments, intolerant people and big business whose only motivation is profit. I have tried it many times. I have marched, sat-in, written letters, voted and fundraised. And it appears nothing has changed.
Thankfully there are people like Grief Ritual to take up the baton. They have a lot of anger. They are angry about inequality, discrimination and the way that capitalism is shortening the lives of the planet and the poor. This anger is expressed in heavy, sludgy, breakdown-heavy metalcore, over which guttural roars and manic rasps are uttered. And they sound young, which is good. Because some may say I am even too old for metalcore.
The thought that I am too long in the tooth for metalcore did cross my mind on the first few listens of Collapse. The dense, compressed production didn’t help, as subsonic beat-drop after clipped riff pummelled my head. But I persevered. Heck, I thought – my only other experience of metalcore had been the “do-you-even-lift-bro” ultra-macho, motivational-speech style of Hatebreed and others of that ilk. There had to be more to this genre.
And there is. Grief Ritual hook you in from the first minute of ‘Spiral’, with its dizzying switches in tempo from a glacial dirge to a double-kick maelstrom, over which the vocalist decries policies of austerity having a devastating effect on the more vulnerable members of society.
The vocalist varies between lower-register, Cookie-Monster frequencies and a more malevolent rasp. The contrast works well. There also is another vocalist on one song – Rachel Aspe of hardcore outfit Cage Fight provides guest vocals on ‘Recursion’. And it is an utter tantrum of a song – as in it begins at a rapid, angry pace, but the music seems to get so furious that it cannot be constrained by a single hardcore beat, so it contorts into a stop-start beatdown.
And we are on this roller coaster for 39 minutes. There is very little subtlety in the message, and some of the lyrics border on inciteful – which is fine as long as phrases such as “destroy them” are taken as metaphors.
Because this is a big problem with the polarisation of society. The further right some groups go, the further left others go in reaction. And history teaches us that the far left can be just as ready to exclude or exterminate their opponents as the far right.
Sorry, back to the music. Everything is played like a percussion instrument. It is intense, even by the standards of metalcore. ‘Bile’ is a case in point. It is about people destroying the planet and its people by ecocide and genocide, and the delivery is unmistakably irked, from its speed-metal levels of velocity in the beginning, to the breakdown, the shuddering guitar-drums combo of which reminded me of an ancient thrash band, whose name slips my mind (told you I am old).
There are a few extremely well-spoken clean-vocal interludes, which grate a little, such as the one in ‘Consumed’: “They drag us into war and of course the climate crisis. They privatise everything they can get their hands on. They’re destroying our future.” Important words, no doubt – but the delivery, in the middle of a pummelling diatribe on, well, consumption, flattens the song. There are others, like the one about being angry that we are bailing out the monarchy and the government, which was slightly confusing.
Three songs towards the end of the album are all highlights. ‘Calcify’, is a churning, sludgy delight (well, as much of a delight as a song that roars “we are born to suffer” can be). ‘Swine’ has a filthy bass intro and enormous rhythmical holes to fall in to. And the wish for a state that holds the beliefs of the vocalist is barked over a minimalist electronic bed. It doesn’t stick around for long and immediately afterwards is ‘Putrefy’, which begins in a frenzy, before slamming into a quite dramatic breakdown.
And by the end of the album – signalled by the clean vocals returning to implore us to “make them [the selfish bastards at the top] collapse” – the listener is exhausted. Having said that, I am glad that people like Grief Ritual are inciting heavy music fans to think beyond their small worlds. I would love to join in – but I am too old for this shit.
