It’s Monday and Mondays suck, so let’s grind it out with Gendo Ikari’s Unit 1.
Holy fucking shit! I mean, good goddamn. I mean, Jesus riding a fucking raptor, this album is off the wall and through the brain. This is an actual aural lobotomy. This is some of the most raging, most insane, most unhinged grindcore I’ve ever heard, and one of the freshest slices this year.
Oh, sorry, I’m building this up too much. This album flew across my Facebook feed on a few occasions and I outright ignored it, like a fool. But after the fifth time I stopped, took the time to listen to it and forty seconds in I’m $12 dollars poorer (send me that sweet, sweet seven-inch).Oh sure, it starts out intense, but harmless enough. The aggressiveness, the blasts, the groove, the vocal shredding screams.
And then it picks up. It gets more aggressive. It gets more rage inducing. It starts to blast harder. It’s like twenty-shots straight to the brain. It’s like every nerve in your body is locking up and turning electric. It is unforgiving, relentless and completely fucking pulverizing.
If you didn’t already know, Gendo Ikari is a character out of the Japanese anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. A series loved and hated by many for its polarizing characters, intensely dark scenarios, Biblically apocalyptic themes, and utterly fucked up alternate ending movie, which is also my personal favorite film of all time. And even for a Japanese anime movie, it’s really, really fucked up. The Gendo Ikari character, I never envisioned as a grind guy. I always hypothesized he had a secret love of Captain Beefheart while actually saying his favorite musician was Johann Sebastian Bach (“Air” rules and you know it). But you know what? It doesn’t matter.
Glasgow's Gendo Ikari as a band are, simply put, ear and head shattering. What makes them so great? What made me lose my mind only a few paragraphs ago? It’s the utter disregard for predictability. Yeah, these guys are, for all purposes, a grindcore band. But it doesn’t sound or feel regurgitated. It doesn’t sound like it took another note from Insect Warfare and ran with it. This band sounds like they’re out for blood.
Or maybe they just want to induce second impact (something that’s long overdue) and move straight to third. Like I said earlier, it doesn’t matter. Gendo Ikari is going to grind down your psyche until it’s a fine pink ooze. This is one of the premier grind releases of 2016 that came out of bloody nowhere. Don’t sleep on this. Put it on repeat and play it as loud as possible.
You can preorder it now from the mighty powerviolence/grindcore U.K. label Mind Ripper Collective (a label whose catalog is well worth exploring) by following the Bandcamp link.
You can find my remains here.
