Hello and welcome back to the Bandcamp Buried Treasure article series, where I'll be hunting down Buy It Now/Free Download-payment option albums on Bandcamp by the best bands you've never heard! The goal is to introduce you to smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week, all while keeping your cost (potentially) down! This week we'll be listening the stupidly heavy hardcore punk group The Armed!
Spreading Joy by The Armed is no more than 11-or-12-minutes, which is great because you can hit repeat and listen to it a million times in a day (writer, not a mathematician). On a serious note about the record, I love how furious it is without any slower, crustier, sludgier songs to break up the music; there's not enough to really break up here, so why not just go headlong toward annihilation the entire time without anything to slow you down? The record also speaks to my love of grindcore-reated music and simultaneous hatred on grindcore albums. Why the hell do I need 600 tracks on an album? Why are they all four seconds? I'm literally going to remember maybe five of them at most, and even then I'll probably forget about a week later. The Armed, with this idea possibly in mind (but probably not), do the intelligent thing with Spreading Joy and just cut it down to the bare essentials. "What is going to make this album memorably heavy as balls without boring the listener," and the answer is to release something violently digestible that still works really well as a release.
Did I mention Chris Pennie, former drummer of both Coheed and Cambria and Dillinger Escape Plan, totally drums for The Armed? Because he does, and that's pretty important.
Going song by song on Spreading Joy is pretty difficult; not really because "they sound the same" or some stupid bullshit excuse like that, but because the album is so short it just flows like one continuous beating that'll leave you bloodied up and wondering what the hell just hit you a whole lot. It's an extremely fast, extremely distorted affair that doesn't so much grab you with hooks or anything, but pushes you head first into a meat grinder and then stomps on your lifeless body as it's churned into some human debris. There's no mercy with The Armed, and that rules.
