The first album on Tumult, from back in 2000. This is where I first fell in love with the bone-shattering power of Burmese, at the time a mere trio of
two bass players and a drummer, recently relocated to the Bay Area from Iowa City of all fucking places. I remember hearing about them when my old band
toured through Iowa in the late '90s, but it wasn't until Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds made it's way into my mitts that I finally caught whiff of the
unbridled violence of Burmese. This album is like the heaviest noisecore record ever, opening with the tumbling free-jazz percussion avalanche and tangled
bass guitar noise of the title track, and proceeding to tear and gnash it's way through minute long assaults of heavyweight improvised violence like
"WWWIII", "Dragged Through The Streets", and "Corpses Sealed In Concrete Floors". Massive feedback drones collide with vicious grindcore, chaotic, deformed
death metal, and impossibly dense, sludgy free-noise-jazz, which had Tumult comparing 'em to a cross between Earth and Drop Dead, a descriptor that
admittedly had me drooling when I first read it. And this album definitely lived up to my expectations - it's still one of my favorite albums ever, and it
led to me eventually doing that split CD between Burmese and Fistula that we put out on Crucial Blast in 2004. It all ends with the twenty minute long "Man
Never Forgives Ape, Man Destroys Environment", a monstrous dronescape a la Earth 2 that sends out huge ripples of malevolent subsonic filth, twisted
smoking electronics, and screeching garbled vocal noise, and then drifts off into an icy glacier wind of fuzzy turntable noise and feedback. Highly
recommended!