Gutted With Broken Glass - Beaten To A Bloody Pulp

Rating: 3.8

Country: USA

Release Date: 2007

Track list:
01. Headfuck
02. Under The Black Flag
03. GWBG
04. Public Execution
05. Meat Wagon
06. Drawn and Quartered
07. Ramrod
08. Body in the Woods
09. Pillage Plunder Grindcore
10. Gutted Like A Pig
11. No Te Rajes
12. Walk the Plank
13. Bloodstained Minds
14. Unmarked Grave

Band Website: Gutted With Broken Glass

Gutted With Broken Glass - Beaten To A Bloody Pulp

Gosh. The band name and album title suggests that the recorded work was composed by a group of lank-haired, pustule beclustered adolescents who decided to start a band after hearing their first Cannibal Corpse album. However, after a quick scan at the inlay, it turns out that these Californian musicians play 'Original Pirategrind'! So, this had me expectin' Beaten to a Bloody Pulp to be an audio treasure chest full o' Brootal booty, with plenty of rum soaked, swashbucklin' Grindcore sea shanties to sing along with! This isn't the case however, 'cos this is chuggy, muggy, uninspired drum machine Grind.

Gutted with Broken Glass have a prominent Grind/Gore viciousness, combined with typical Brootal Death routines. Profferin' a total of two main textures, the guitars drill away at your cranium via high-speed strumshred with pinched harmonics, afore batterin' it joyless with some extremely chumpish chugment. The drum-prog is quag-standard rattle 'n' click with excessive snare clatter that often smothers everything and the vox, whilst solid, are of the highly predictable porcine variety. To help attest and emphasize the 'Grind' segment of their self-made genre classification, the bulk of their tunes are under a minute in length, which gives them more than enough time to jog back and forth between high-speed blast-cascade and sluggish chugment a few times in each before bringin' it to an abrupt close. There are one or two vaguely noddable riffs here and there, and 'cos it's such a short release they're not far around the corner during your spin, but there are nowhere near enough to make it an enjoyable listen. Granted, it's vicious, in yer face and over the top, but it quickly descends into rather toneless, unappetizin' whirlyblast twiddle splattered with vapid chuggle. To be honest, I can't pick out many elements of piracy amongst the clattery, run o' the mill grindheap on this record, other than in the inlay images with the Jolly Roger and stuff, otherwise this entire review would be riddled with piratical puns and metaphors and whatnot.

Stylistically, this jams steamin' handfuls of laudable drum-machine driven Grind like Fuck...I'm Dead, XXX Maniac and perhaps a bit of ol' Agoraphobic Nosebleed into a dull steel blender but then puree it into a yucky, monochromatic greyish colour. After that, it's time to swill the lot into an oxidized cocktail shaker, along with some rubbish Brootal Death chunks that sound akin to Phalogore, Inhuman Dissiliency and the least imaginative bits of Gouging Out Eyes of Mutilated Infants by fellow Cali scamps Artery Eruption, afore agitatin' it thoroughly then pourin' it into a plastic cup.

The production is fairly good; the guitars have plenty of heavily overdriven roar and the drums, bein' programmed, sound forceful and clear, but often suffocate the rest of the sound, with the vox tryin' to squeeze in somewhere around the middle.

So that's it really. Short blasts of bugger all. I feel like I should go into further detail, but bein' a tea-quaffin' twat, I'm due for another. I can't really recommend this, unless you've got a very, very spare fifteen minutes.

May 27th, 2008