Zero-bullshit mach-10 grindcore from a short-lived NYC band that for a moment were one of the best fucking grind bands on the planet! The Way Of All Flesh was the first album from ASRA and came out earlier this year on Black Box, the label run by Mike Hill from Tombs, and grind fans have been giving this disc all kinds of praise over the past few months, only to have the band break up this past October. I'll be kicking myself for awhile for missing out on the show that Asra played in Baltimore with Hayaino Daisuki and Gridlink the month before they broke up.
ASRA, or Alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse (possibly the best name ever?), serve up eleven tracks of scathing hyperspeed violence that takes the best stuff from classic Earache grindcore like Napalm Death and early Brutal Truth, the gnarly West Coast hardcore/powerviolence of bands like Crossed Out, Man Is The Bastard, and Spazz, and the razor-sharp assembly of Discordance Axis and puts it all together into short, punishing blasts of intricate death/grind. Like Pig Destroyer and Discordance Axis, these guys forego a bass player, but you'd never know it from listening to this disc - the bottom end is HUGE, with massive sludgy riffs sharing sonic space with whirlwind thrash parts and downtuned death metal riffing, seared by staccato blastbeats and jarring stop-start drumming. The vocals? Sufficiently brutal, and that's one of the places where you can hear that West Coast hardcore influence creep in - the deeper, gutteral grunts are pure death metal, but whenever the high pitched, maniacal shrieks break in, the vocals remind me of Siege. Nothing wrong with that! The whole thing is so tight and so expertly executed that The Way Of All Flesh clocks in at barely 20 minutes and you still feel like you were just sucked into a jet engine head-first. This definitely ranks as one of the best grind releases of the past few years, and if you have been fiending for a fix of the kind of contorted, prescision grindcore that Discordance Axis delivered, you could a whole lot worse than hear ASRA.