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Wormrot - Abuse [Album]

Earache Records

by RachelMann, December 5th, 2010 and has been Read 1136 times.
Last Edited by: Chris MUG5 Maguire December 9th, 2010.

What the hell do you know about Singapore? Maybe that, in bad old colonial days, it was the kind of place that led the Brits to invent a drink called the Singapore Sling’ to get off their stiff-upper lipped heads? Maybe that it’s a wealthy Asian island-state famed for streets so clean they’ll arrest you if you litter? Maybe that it’s a melting-pot of a hundred different cultures? Maybe that it’s a humid stopping off point for millions of tourists heading for the Antipodes? You probably didn’t know that it's the home to some very promising Grindcore in the form of Wormrot.

Wormrot’s story is an intriguing one: formed after the trio’s mandatory military service in 2007, they managed a limited release of Abuse via Mediafire in 2009; the same year, the head of Earache records managed to hear a mixtape of them...the rest, shall we say, is history.

Abuse has got all the markers of classic Grindcore: punkish guitars, blastbeat drums, screamed/growled vocals, political lyrics, intense energy, aggression and short, brutally direct songs. Opener 'Lost Swines' sets out its agenda immediately with a tape of someone resisting George W Bush's 'Patriot Act' before blasting into a slow dark metal riff covered by agonised vocals. This itself is just as suddenly swept away by ‘Exterminates,’ a punkish workout with beastly vocals and heart-attack inducing drums. You will rarely hear such a well-conceived politically shaped pair of openers to a Grindcore album. Indeed the opening five or six tracks – which add up to no more than four minutes of run time – are exhilarating, direct and full of immense purpose. Grindcore has always been about distilling the essence of rock’s aggression and, fuck me, do these guys get there. Indeed, it’s tempting to put this unity of purpose and direction up there with classic Grindcore débuts like old masters Napalm Death's Scum.

There are some irresistible tracks on Abuse: tracks like 'Born Stupid' which showcase that Wormrot are more than mere aggression/attitude mongers. Here they play with customary speed, but bring in sharp stops and groove a riff as well as anyone from the metal mainstream. Hey, 'Born Stupid' is almost conventionally danceable. When you have songs that are as short as eight seconds it’s easy to take the piss, saying 'this is just a bunch of blokes bashing the fuck out of their instruments' (not that there's ever been much wrong with that!) But this ‘emperor’s new clothes’ argument won't bite here. Take a track like ‘So Fierce for Fuck!?’ – eight seconds of insane riffing culminated in 'So Fierce For Fuck' being screamed into the microphone. In the hands of lazy musicians this could be nothing more than a joke, but it is believable, precisely because Wormrot give it all and understand what this genre is all about. They drive these eight seconds through with the intensity of a cyclone ripping up houses.

If I’m going to push the critical button – and everyone wants to push the critical button, don't they? – I wondered just how distinctively 'Singaporean' Abuse is. At one level this doesn’t matter. Who gives a shit where something comes from? But location and story matters in Grindcore as in all proper punked up stuff- because otherwise the attitude hangs idle like a cog in a monstrous machine. When I first heard this work I asked, couldn't this album have come from anywhere? What became clear very quickly, however, was that this wasn’t mock punk floating in space, but something grounded in something – reacting against something. Tracks like 'Indonesia' and, especially, 'Blasphemy My Ass!' reveal just how grounded Wormrot’s efforts are in reacting against Singapore’s social conservatism. It’s this political context which gives Abuse its remarkable energy.