Phobia
Unrelenting
Relapse Records

No album will be as aptly titled all year. Because there’s fast and there’s loud and there’s going all out, and then there’s the raw and ruthless ferocity of Unrelenting. Seriously, these dudes might have been grinding for 20 years but this thing slathers and snarls like a brand new outfit doing their damndest to break some sort of riff speed record. Apart from being dizzyingly fast and in-your-face though, there’s very little here to merit multiple listens.

Ok, so fast and furious is kind of the entire point of grindcore and no one can turn their nose up at 17 tracks in 15 minutes but where the best bits here sound wickedly smart and genuinely dangerous, the rest feels boring and, despite the spiky speed of it, bloated too. So Rehashed is actually an original blast of noise that crams sandblasting shred, headbanging riffs and a tidy solo into 60 seconds and makes Napalm Death sound like rank amateurs in the process, Revolt Your Life moves so fast you might only hear the echo of its brilliant bass line, and Soon is seven chilling seconds that most metal bands could learn a lesson in honest anger from. But elsewhere the grind crunches gears, the punk rock rattles and the hardcore huffs and puffs without pulling any major weight.

Unrelenting isn’t a mess. The brevity means it neatly sidesteps (or at least outruns) the trap of going on too long and becoming indistinguishable, and there are several spaces to properly to bang your head as it plays, but it never threatens to contend for a spot as a genre classic and can barely muster two reasons to hit play a second time. Hard and fast then, but not necessarily going anywhere.

Buy this album from AMAZON

Review by Simon T.Diplock