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MALVEILLANCE  Insignificance  CASSETTE   (Tour De Garde)   5.98


There are few bands that have been ripped off as blatantly and as frequently as the mighty UK hardcore troop Discharge, whose early 80's albums basically gave birth to an entire subgenre of punk/metal. You could turn over a rock in just about any city and find at least half a dozen metal-studded bands that are copping Discharge's timeless two-chord riffs and that thunderous gallop known as the "D-beat". The "Dis" sound has been beaten pretty firmly into the ground over the past two decades, but lucklily every once in a while you'll come across a band that takes that sound and does something interesting with it. Like Malveillance, whose music is a nasty, charred-black crustcore rampage from a one-man Quebecois outfit that effectively combines crushing D-beat driven punk with the primitive, noise-pocked filth mantra of Bone Awl. This is a cassette version of Malveillance's Insignificance album, and from what I know, this is the only format that the album has been released in so far. Thirteen tracks of blackened, misanthropic, human hating crust, a scuzzfucked Discharge hardcore throb that reeks of sewage and gobs of "down with people" observations. Each one of these songs is a blast of stampeding D-beat drumming and minimalistic punk riffing, simple one-or-two chord thrash riffs hammered out over and over against the blasting drumming that bores full speed ahead, the howling hateful vocals and music equally drenched in feedback and fuzz and white noise. I immediately think of Bone Awl when listening to Malveillance, but Malveillance is more punk, more D-beat, more thrashing hardcore violence, taking a similiar route to punk-infected black metal aggression but leaning way more towards the crusty, hardcore part of that sound, kinda like Akitsa in a way, but nowhere near as catchy. But Malveillance also locks in on hypnotic, drool-inducing Stoogian repetition in the same way that Bone Awl does, and mixes the album up a little with a couple of tracks of harsh, swirling noise walls, which is something you probably wouldn't expect on a crustcore album. But theres a couple of 'em, brutal, dense tracks of wall noise, swirling maelstroms of distortion and white noise, in the vein The Rita, Cherry Point, etc. So where I might expect a band that is this influenced by Discharge-style hardcore punk to be generic and another D-beat knockoff, I'm actually assaulted by one hell of a ferocious blackened hypno crust attack that's one of the more ferocious bands I've heard so far from the Tour De Garde, Montreal-based black metal/blackened punk underground.