���Despite their name, the debut EP from Norwegian duo Brutal Blues in fact delivers absolutely zero blues, but rather a whole lot of confounding, nerve-scorching avant-grind. Well, maybe not a whole lot - this disc is only fifteen minutes long - but the six songs featured here are seriously blistering, assaulting the listener non-stop with a maniacal blast of mathy time signatures, crushing hyperspeed grindcore, and some of the most abrasive riffing you're going to find on this week's new arrivals list. Both members of Brutal Blues are involved in a number of other bands and projects that I've been a fan of over the years, drummer/vocalist Anders Hana with Jaga Jazzist, Noxagt and Ultralyd, and guitarist/vocalist Steinar Kittilsen with the psychotic grind outfits Parlamentarisk Sodomi and Psudoku; together, these guys whip up some crazed angular grindcore, somewhere in between the ragged brutality of latter-day Brutal Truth and the cutting edge extremism of Gridlink, the songs filled with hideously spastic blastbeat drumming and jarring stop/start arrangements, and a discordant, weirdly jangly guitar sound. But over this brutal blast-assault the duo splatter all sorts of trippy electronic noise and spacey synth slop, turning this into something strangely psychedelic; the vocals are pretty insane as well, infuriated screams that are run through an echoplex machine cranked all the way to ten, the bellowing aggression swooping and echoing endlessly through the band's progged-out blast-metal; they slash and scrape at the guitars, strafing the songs with abrasive guitar noise that sometimes sounds like they're dragging rusted hunks of metal down the fret board, and the songs lunge wildly through this noise-addled hysteria, surging out of those spastic, stuttering grind assaults into clouds of grainy digital noise and electronic drone. Intensely abrasive and intricate stuff, with a discordant No Wave-esque edginess applied to their precision hyper-violence. A phenomenal fuckin' debut.