����� An obscure blast of brain-shredding grindjazz that came out years ago, we just got the Death's Head Quartet's sole album back in for the first time in a decade. This thing is exhilarating, one of those album's that's so cathartically violent that you're out of breath by the end of it. Basically an extrapolation on the sorts of extreme, cacophonic improv grindcore outbursts that littered the early Painkiller catalog, the Boston-area band Death's Head Quartet drug themselves out of the muck in the early oughts to release this eponymous album, an outburst of nuclear-strength improvised grindjazz that's still one of the heaviest and most deafening albums of its kind. No joke.

����� They were also one of the many side-projects that Anal Cunt frontman Seth Putnam was involved with; here, he's teamed up with legendary Siege drummer Rob Williams (who also played with Putnam in Full Blown AIDS before Putnam's death, along with playing with sludge rock weirdos Nightstick), guitarist Chris Joyce and jazz saxophonist Jim Hobbs of Fully Celebrated Orchestra. And Putnam and crew lay waste to seven tracks of longform free-improv madness, blasting out skull-shredding walls of noise that are formed from Williams' muscular drumming that often erupts into blastbeating chaos, Hobb's whipping up vicious squalls of shrieking sax, the group laying down heavy layers of rumbling amplifier noise and howling feedback, with Putnam going full-on bestial meltdown over the disgusting stomach-churning grind of his bass guitar. This is insanely violent stuff that would send most free-jazz enthusiasts running for their lives. The energy level is through the roof; I can only imagine how wiped out the Quartet must have been after this assault, especially after the epic closing track, a brutally intense freak-out that stretches out for nearly half an hour.

����� The noise that these guys create is amazing. Joyce transforms his guitar into a wall of industrial rumble, and Hobbs gives an intensely expressive performance, his sax bringing traces of musicality to the cacophonic roar. But moments of restraint are scarce, sometimes slipping into a sinister melody, but even these moments are terrorized by that monstrous distorted bass grinding in the background.

����� This stuff is fantastic. Imagine hearing Napalm Death's Scum mashed together with Peter Brotzmann and Borbetomagus and the constant background roar of heavy machinery, and featuring the Tasmanian Devil on vocals, and you'll have a vague idea of the madness and violence captured on this disc. While the Quartet were nowhere near as articulate as Painkiller, they totally trumped 'em in terms of sheer barbarity.