An impressive second album from Australian grinders Beyond Terror Beyond Grace, who I wasn't familiar with before picking this up. The band serves up a savage brand of industrial/sampler-laced grindcore that balances a sharply focused grindcrust assault with lots of infectious riffing and unpredictable shifts in sound that lead the album into passages of bleak, icy ambience.

I'm a sucker for grind albums that utilize industrial elements like this, but Beyond Terror Beyond Grace are more than just blasters with a sampler; they use a red-hot recording style for Our Ashes... that glazes the music with distortion, and their vicious grindcore is laced with a lot of full-on death metal and crust elements, bits of Godflesh-like pummel, and even hints of atmospheric black metal. The music is somewhat similar to Nasum, Rotten Sound and the more recent stuff from Napalm Death, essentially brutal modern grindcore with killer riffs and an ear for dark melody, and the multiple vocalists blend their hysterical shrieks and roars together into a fierce cacophony. The guitarists employ some really cool guitar textures and processed guitar sounds that give this even more of a cold industrial feel, but what really makes these guys stand out is the way that they augment their blistering grind with the eerie industrial passages. Not just intro pieces, these ambient drones and hellish factory soundscapes emerge at various points, veering the grindmetal into unexpected icy mechanical drones, or clanking rhythms that merge with the grind to create an apocalyptic din that sometimes moves into creepy fields of Wolf Eyes-like squeal and scrape. Some of the other parts include distant wailing strings and evil whispered vocalizations, stretches of shadowy lightless ambience, and abstracted glitch; on a couple of songs, they actually weave some harsh industrial rhythms directly into the grind.

One of the standout songs here is the second-to-last track "Murakami"; the song opens with the far-off tolling of lighthouse bells and chimes, and then a soft melancholy guitar appears amid swells of shimmering cymbals and an almost martial drum beat, for a moment almost resembling something from Mogwai, a dark, somber propulsive rock that grows heavier and heavier, the guitars becoming more distorted, the song ascending into a massive dramatic climb, and finally erupting into a kind of majestic grinding sludge, above smoldering, churning sheets of industrial noise and distorted radio transmissions.

A surprising new fave from Deepsend.