Grindcore isn’t even my favorite genre, but for some reason, bands seem to have an easier time making good grind records than many other genres. Maybe it’s the fact that not caring whether you become the next big “thing”, or playing so much to your limit that everything has such an intense and dangerous feeling of falling apart at any moment. I always love that, when a band plays so hard that their teetering on the brink of uncontrolled chaos.
A SECOND FROM THE SURFACE play a style of old-school grind derived from playing simple chords up and down the guitar neck really fast, then supporting it with blast beats, and a high shriek that’s sounds kind of punky. Yet somehow on “The Streets Have Eyes”, the band manages to make those simple chords sound a slight bit more modern. It’s probably due to the odd riff thrown into the mix, and fairly decent production.
This album was incredibly fun to listen to, but when I got to the end, I felt I had to dock the band a point. Why? Like most grind albums, the songs are short, almost all under two minutes. The short time makes it very difficult for individual songs to gain any personality, and the fact that they’re all so fast makes them blur together. Unlike most grind full-lengths, the track count is short, at only ten songs, bring the whole running time up to exactly twenty minutes! Surely the band could’ve made five more songs to come up to most acceptable full-length standards. I think many of us can agree that half an hour is a good starting length for a length album. Of course, A SECOND FROM THE SURFACE creates a loophole to get around the short running time, which brings me back to the fact that all the songs blur together. If you had “The Streets Have Eyes”, you could start the album on any track, and once you get back to the opener, you wouldn’t even know the difference. If you don’t mind hearing the same songs a lot, or if you simply don’t pay close enough attention to what’s going on with “The Streets Have Eyes”, you can actually get away with having it on repeat.
7/10
A Second From The Surface at MySpace
This Dark Reign Recordings at MySpace
