Wow, I never expected to see a full-blown, professionally filmed live concert DVD from those mutant Aussie grinders Fuck...I'm Dead, but here it is, the awesome looking Gore Grind Thrash Attack Live , which not only contains a DVD with multiple performances from the band, but like that Botch DVD/CD set that came out late last year also has an additional CD that has the entire Arthouse performance for yer listening pleasure. Now, since this is an Australian release, the DVD is in the PAL format, which means that it won't play on standard NTSC format DVD players; however, it is all-region, which means that you can play it on any computer that has an all-region DVD player.

If your not familiar with the awesomely-named Fuck...I'm Dead, they're a trio from Melbourne, Australia made up of bass player Tom Raetz, guitarist/drum programmer Dave Hill (also of groove-grinders The Day Everything Became Nothing), and gut-grunter Jay Jones, and their awesome, over-the-top digitally enhanced grindcore is mixed with ridiculously sick comedic song titles like "Anal Abattoir", "Barefoot And Shitfaced", and "Army of Hermaphrodites". They remind me of the Meatmen, if the Meatmen had actually been an insanely complex, epic splattergrind outfit dressed up in dress shirts, black ties, and blood-smeared smocks when they perform live, powered by inhumanly fast, brainmelting drum machine programming and with a thoroughly charnel sense of humor. As silly as their song titles and lyrics can be though, the music is vicious, sort of like the thrash-metal inflected grind of Pig Destroyer crossed with Carcass' dissonant riffs, technical melodic death metal and confounding angular sludge breakdowns. And the drum programming is some of the best ever, ultra fast and brutal and machinelike, and sometimes fucked up with glitchy programming tricks and lightspeed blastbeats tempos. Seriously awesome.

What surprised me so much about Gore Grind Thrash Attack Live is how No Escape went all-out with the presentation for this set. Now, we're big fans of No Escape, they have a killer roster of some of the best splatterific death/grind/sludge outfits in the world, coupled with what are easily the highest quality design sensibilities in the underground gore/grind scene, but I'm still really impressed with how they put this set together. The DVD's centerpiece is the 26-song set filmed at the Arthouse in Melbourne in 2005 - the performance is tight, the crowd is completely berzerk, and the sound quality is amazing, as is the film quality; the performance was captured using 4 cameras and professionally edited together. As high quality a live concert DVD as you'd find on any of the big metal labels. In addition, they've included their set from the Australian "Metal For The Brain" Festival from 2003, a crazed set from Perth in 2005, and footage of the band performing on a boat in Sydney Harbor in 2005! And as stated previously, there's the entire Arthouse set included as a bonus audio CD to be relived in all of it's gory glory as a live album. Needless to say, this is pretty essential for Fuck...I'm Dead fans.