Love it when bands push the "powerviolence" idea into unconventional territories, and man do these three guys deliver. The first full length (I think) from this newer Washington DC-based band, all three main members are staples of the contempo DC hardcore punk/metal underground: the incredibly busy Connor Donegan (vocals / guitar), who also performs with Abuse, Genocide Pact, Innumerable Forms, Witchtrial and a myriad other bands, along with Aiden Tydings-Lynch on skins and Robin Zeijlon (Public Suicide, Protester, Red Death, and the positively ass-kicking Vile Faith ) slithering around on bass. I haven't checked out their prior EP / demo material, but this album kicked my goddamned ass off the planet so fast that I'm going to cram those other recordings into my skull as fast as inhumanly possible. Jesus Christ...

Brutal Swans-esque industrial dirge-hate barrels out of the intro to "Little Children Working ", grinding low-end bass filth and droning, septic feedback smeared and slathered over a barbaric slo-mo riff, the drummer hammering out a simple but block-rocking beat that gradually becomes more complex as the sludge congeals and coalesces around itself into this monstrous blat of bass-driven muck. And then my head is ripped straight off, industrial accident style, as the band starts blasting their way through minute-long hunks of barbed, bass-driven hardcore like "Suicide Gown" and "Desensitized By Bloodshed ", merging old-school West Coast power-violence stop/start tempos and brutal vocal tradeoffs with some wickedly weird riffing style that gives Brain Tourniquet's blastcore this killer unexpected Greg Ginn (later-era Black Flag) / Mike Neider (B'Last) vibe that really mixes this shit up. The breakdowns are constant and lethal, and often doused in corrosive noise as on "The Depths Of Human Suffering (Are Boundless)". "Behind My Eyes" (which features guest vocals and guitar from Kevin Bernsten of Triac and Eye Flys) is a good example of that offbeat riffing style and time signature fuckery, too; these guys can slip into a bulldozer groove as bludgeoning as anything, but the way they switch up those menacing, angular riffs and discordant high-end shredding with the hyperspeed hardcore is something else. Every song has something unusual going on, "Mental Tomb"'s asylum-inmate muttering beneath the Ginn-esque bared-wire guitar, the awesome Infest-gone-techgrind mania of "Empire Of Misery", the way that the bassist pushes his instrument all the way in to your face on " Exit Life" (joined by berserk vocals from Iron Lung's Jensen Ward) while dropping another cement-block groove on your skull, the maniacal crossover of "Deny" (which boasts additional vocals from Mind Eraser's Craig Arms). Ooof.

And that's more or less the first half of ...An Expression In Pain . The second is the nearly eleven-minute title track that just crushes the life out of you, a warped long form blastcore epic that moves from Sabbath-stained tarpit-sludge heaviosity to darkly melodic hardcore delivered at blastbeat speeds, tumbling over itself into raging D-beat style intensity. The gruff, throaty roars from the singer ooze with eschatonic malevolence, but then around four minutes in, the music starts to unravel into a completely unexpected and proggy tangle of jagged melodies and shaky tempos before settling into what I can only describe as a kind of bizarre krautrock-esque hypno-core workout. Talk about instant whiplash, the band now locking into these mid-tempo riffs that circle around and around, sliding into frenzied sludge before dropping back down into even slower caveman dirge. It explodes into sprawls of insanely fast, near grind-speed intensity, but then that'll collapse back down into an Iommi-level doom metal riff (complete with hammer-ons) that the bassist uses to venture out into awesome bluesy territory, while the whole damn thing slowly fades out forever into the terminal black line of the horizon.

It's not quite "Grim Reaper"-style brain fuckery, but this multi-part blast saga is one of the coolest things I've heard off a contemporary "powerviolence" record in awhile. I mean, fanatics for the iconic PV style (Crossed Out, Spazz, Infest, No Comment) are gonna dig this immensely, but if I'm recommending it to anyone, it’s those weirdoes in the corner who are hooked on the adjacent shit like Man Is The Bastard, Pissed Happy Children, Gasp, Ancient Chinese Secret, hell, even No Le$$ and Iron Lung themselves. If those names raise your blood pressure, man, this comes highly recommended.

The LP includes a lyric sheet and a download code.