The debut album from the one-man electrogrind band Body Hammer delivers some intensely wacked out blastchaos that's pretty indefinable. There's lots of brutal programmed blasting and ultrafast riffing here, it's definitely got that drum machine/electronic grind sound going on, but these elements are combined with tons of dark ambience and weird electronic soundscaping which give Jigoku a strange industrial soundtrack feel. It's really unique, and definitely recommended to fans of extreme experimental grindcore.
The first track "Severe Durol Torture" starts off slow and creepy, an alien creepscape with an eerie minor key piano drifting into grinding detuned guitar sludge, gasping vocals and weird electronic noises, and then rips into the hypergrind chaos of "The Bystander Effect", all spastic grind riffage and mach 10 blastbeats, reminding me of both Noism and Discordance Axis quite a bit. "Blue Eyed Assassin" follows with a mere fourteen seconds of insane harmonized guitar squiggle and abstract grindnoize, then "Digital Direct Drive" returns to atmospheric horrific ambience, huge slabs of crushing metallic drone, screaming tortured vokills, and eerie synths cloaked in darkness and reverb, a terrifying industrial doom dirge crawling through Body Hammer's shadowy futuristic soundworld. More short, spastic blasts of angular processed grind follow, "MPD Psycho", "No Fucking Way", "The Principles And Practices Of Nihilism", all of them microbursts of dissonant grindcore, insanely fast programmed blastbeats, blackened industrial murk and digital FX, sometimes as short as four seconds long.
On the last third of Jigoku, though, Body Hammer's sound shifts into a slower, more ambient direction, almost like Abruptum crossed with spacey industrial noise. There's low-fi, heavily distorted industrial blackdirge with blown-out vokills and plodding riffage that melts down into slabs of caustic white noise, putrid guitar mangle and pounding metallic percussion, and then "Deeper Into The Abyss" introduces blackened tremolo riffing that writhes around monstrous blackdoom ambience, a thick fog of cavernous reverb, delicate piano and scraping noise thundering across a bleak, evil ambient metal wasteland. The title track is next, a disturbing soundtracky dronescape with more murderous raspy vokills, a simply creepy piano melody and clean shimmery guitars mixed in with blasts of rotten black dirge riffage, trippy effects, huge uncoiling ropes of black bass, sounding like an 80's horror movie theme filtered through some alien blacknoize nightmare. After that, the sound gets more spacious as insanely detuned bass chugs through an underworld of whining siren like tones and weeping feedback, and then the last track appears, total silence for a good five minutes, and then it suddenly erupts into about a minute of blistering choppy white noise and strange disembodied voices.
Some seriously crazed, surrealistic hypergrind going on here, like Infidel Castro mixed with Abruptum and Discordance Axis maybe, a strange, otherworldly chaos that's both brutal and incredibly detailed. The disc comes in a dvd case with full color packaging, and for a limited time we have a limited edition version that's also packaged in a patterned cloth wrapper with extra buttons and stickers.