�� Though they've been busy blasting out their bizarre, berserker brand of drug-damaged grindcore all this time, the new LP Manticore is amazingly the first new album to come out from these Californian grind mutants in more than ten years. Yep, the last time that I got a full dose of Fetus Eaters's messy, experimental grindcore was all the way back in 2002 when their last album Mediocore came out, an album that I admittedly haven't heard in years (hell, we sold out of it not all that long after we got it in stock), but I definitely remember that disc being one seriously crazed mash-up of the band's raw, punk-fueled grindcore, whacked-out instrumentation and wild genre hopping nonsense that even back then recalled the crazed experimentation of early Naked City and Mr. Bungle.

�� Back with their latest album Manticore, Fetus Eaters are still freaking out in a very big way, spitting out about a half hour's worth of short locomotive blasts of demented grindcore, the blown-out blasting shaped into weird and sometimes complex arrangements, everything shot up with tons of messed-up noisy chaos. The band's crushing grindcore is as brutal as anything that you'll hear from the likes of bands like Phobia or PLF, and at first glance, the songs sound exactly like what you would expect from titles like "Praise Fetus", "Embryonic Chow", "Sacred Fetology", and "Dysphoria (My Inner Maggot)". Their pummeling grindcore is raw and unpolished, carved out of the same feral noise as early Napalm Death with ferocious thrash riffs, powerful snarling vocals (which occasionally resemble the gruff hateful bark of Infest), sudden detours into crushing Frostian sludge, and loads of bizarre gibberish and tornado-like blast-beats strewn chaotically throughout each of their minute long assaults of grinding violence. But it's not long before Fetus Eater's insanity completely seeps to the surface, as they begin to throw all kinds of sonic weirdness into their songs, everything from robotic vocoder voices and twisted discordant riffing, weird noises being pulled out of broken circuit bent toys, fucked-up lysergic guitar solos smeared across blasting rabid grind, bursts of brass fanfare and spacey 8-bit electronics splattered throughout the album, along with sudden detours into brain-damaged beat-boxing and bizarre non sequitur samples and pilfered horror movie sound-bites. They toss in fucked-up "jazz" parts complete with howling saxophones alongside majestic black metal riffs, and the vocals are all over the place, going from that awesome violent Infest-bark to insane incoherent Yamataka-style gibberish. As you can imagine, this stuff is totally fucked. Even the straight grind parts are pretty insane, especially when the band starts playing something akin to a 5,000 MPH version of Slayerized thrash, and when the album hits those truly ballistic moments of grinding genrefuck, it's like you're hearing a Carl Stalling score being performed by Scum-era Napalm Death. So good to hear a full album of this craziness after all this time. For anyone who spends as much time listening to their Naked City, early Boredoms, Fantomas and Painkiller records as their early Earache LPs, this stuff is an absolute blast.

�� Available on both vinyl and a super-limited cassette tape.