Yet more grindcore weirdness from the Czech Republic! For a brief moment a few years ago, it seemed like the Czech grind scene was poised to blow up and be this hot new phenomenon based on how people were going apeshit over the mutant genre-bending grind of bands like Contrastic and !T.O.O.H.!. The Polish Assault compilation that Relapse put out spurred a lot of interest in this scene, and then we heard that Contrastic were getting signed to Relapse, but nothing panned out with that, and the hype seemed to dissipate. But fans of extreme, left of center grind have always known that Czech grind community has been cooking up some killer odddball grind, with tons of bands that each have their own unique style of brutal deathgrind that is almost always infested with some unexpected sonic elements that elevate their metal to new levels of insanity. Albums from !T.O.O.H.!, Alienation Mental, Cerebral Turbulency, and others all get alot of play around here, and I'm always keeping my eyes peeled for new n' old stuff from the Czech scene that I haven't heard yet. Which brought me to Purplesoil, a cool Czech noise label that I was in touch with recently to pick up some of their recent Napalmed and Lasse Marhaug albums; while we were arranging to pick up their noise releases, they also informed us that they happened to have some hard-to-find Czech grind releases from a couple of bands that I hadn't even heard of before, which they could hook us up with. I checked 'em out, and the stuff was killer! We ended up grabbing some copies of the Chirurgia album (listed elsewhere in this week's update) and this mini-album from the bizarrely named Four Seats for Invalides that came out on the elusive Plazzma label, which also released that amazing !T.O.O.H.! album a few years ago. Defy is the fourth CD from Four Seats For Invalides, and it features sixteen tracks of short, blasting death/grind with a definite industrial edge; the band is made up of two singers, a bassist and guitarist, and use drum machine programming to craft their onslaught of blastbeats, grinding Godflesh grooves, and goofy dub/techno beats. The singers swap off between hoarse, distorted screams and brutal pig-grunts, the guitar riffs are ultra detuned and toss out all kinds of sludgy rock grooves, slippery noise riffs and crushing thrash, and there's all the fucked up bits that you'd expect from a band that features a couple of members of Contrastic in it's ranks: looped breakbeats and funk guitars, snake-charmer melodies, weird vocal samples, sudden breaks into EMF's "Unbelievable", industral metal grooves, squelchy pulses and trumpet samples, rockin' use of cowbell, and electronic noise will all just show up out of nowhere in the midst of Four Seats' goresoaked blast assaults. They've got the weirdness of bands like !T.O.O.H.! and Contrastic combined with the grooving splatter metal of Blood Duster, Cock And Ball Torture, and Mortician.