DVD Review artwork - At War With Inhumate DVD - 15 Years of Soul Grinding 1990-2005

Rating: 8.3

Country: France

Release Date: 2007

Track list:
01. Grind Inc.
02. Blasted (History Of A Dive)
03. Putrefaction
04. The Glance
05. Desperate
06. I Want Tto Kill Some... (Part III)
07. The Fight
08. Sodomy
09. Screams
10. No Answer
11. For Lust
12. Copyright
13. Sickness Is The Law
14. A Trip
15. Trance
16. Therapy For Dogs
17. Art, Sex, Intelligence
18. Satyriasis
19. Blind
20. Mother Fuck Her
21. Labyrinth
22. The Scorpion
23. Grind To The Core
24. Genocide/Rising Of The Ancient Ones
25. Dead (And Lost)/Abstract Suffering
26. Intro/Blood
27. Grind To The Core
28. N.D.S.

Band Website: Inhumate

At War With Inhumate DVD - 15 Years of Soul Grinding 1990-2005

Christophe - Vocals
David - Guitar and Backing Vocals
Fred - Bass
Yannick - Drums

Inhumate happen to be an enjoyable grindcore band from France, one that flirted with death metal back when you flirted with your kindergarten girls, until your male friends started teasing you with them, and then, like Inhumate, you limited your interactions to mere perfunctory greetings since. On a whole, their intense grinding music sounds influenced by Death By Manipulation Napalm Death and the Brutal Truth debut, and is meshed with the catchy crustiness of Inhale/Exhale Nasum and goofy contemporary grindcore of Abortion and the erstwhile Czech band Cerebral Turbulency (now ceremoniously christened Cerebral Turdulency by me after having wasted precious money on Crash Test). Inhumate have been grinding in the scene for 15 years, and yet people like me, the great Prince Kunal of India, hadn't attended any of their ‘brutal as fuck' gigs, so they thought let's record our live shows on DVD for these blissfully ignorant people and prove it to them once and for all how utterly cool they are and how utterly stupid poor bastards we are for not attending any of their gigs. At that, Inhumate succeed rather brutally. My less princely Indian friend felt so humiliated, he set himself on fire and committed suicide.

The video quality on At War with Inhumate looks astonishingly clear, as if you're seeing it through eyeglasses of a higher number or something. The music too is shockingly audible, as though after all these years someone finally cleaned your ear wax for you. Just the presence of these two qualities in a live metal DVD should make you go pillaging in your neighbourhood by default, but a callous bastard that I allegedly am, I shall instigate you further. At War with Inhumate contains live recording of a show they played on 15th October 2005 at this place called La Latrine... sorry, La Laiterie, probably meaning the same thing in French. Please, don't even begin to think of claiming you know that place. So recorded at that hopefully still mysterious place are 23 blistering fast but not-so-short songs (clocking in at just over a quarter of an hour) recreated superbly with vulgar doses of intensity. The show is commendably recorded with five cameras, just so you can later dream about these grind heroes in their actual 3-D entirety without making any of it up using your imagination.

Christophe the vocalist with his great antics and an irrepressible spirit has an amazing stage presence; he's easily the heart as well as the ass of the show. Very often he literally bangs the mic against his forehead as if striving desperately to jolt his dormant brain lying inside. You can tell by the bass drum-like sound that comes of it that he does it rather brutally. In “Screams” he strangely begins sobbing and is hilariously even comforted by some of his fans. Then after the welling of enough frustration and pain in him, he erupts out screaming just as much as the song title demands of him. Yannick the drummer is another inexplicably awesome creature. His ridiculously fast yet precise yet versatile drumming is simply mind-blowing; what bothers me is that he makes it look so… shamelessly easy. The way he drums with his upright, dignified posture and minimal body movements, he could just as well be playing a frigging piano. Bassist Fred and the guitarist cum backing vocalist David, have an attitude that would make even the millionaire spiritual gurus insecure. To play such frantic music in their impossibly cool and composed manner, they have to mentally be in another world entirely, completely oblivious to the crowd that treats the stage like their own backyard. Oh yeah, without any exaggeration, a crowd of about 25 people constantly flock on the stage apparently to give the band members company, though more often than not they end up fully shrouding them. Not the vocalist though; he is such a rockstar that on a couple of occasions he is even lifted up on stage by the members of the Inhumate head-banging troupe, and the truly humble and dedicated fellow that Christophe is, not once does he stop his excruciating growling and screaming to wave at the camera.

A couple of nitpickings – one of them is that the enthusiastic and expressive bantering of the vocalist between songs takes place in French, a language which neither I nor my cow understand. However, outdoing myself, I did make out two words that Christophe repeats at a frequency only a God-fearing person guilty of committing a mortal sin is capable of doing – Merci Beaucoup. Back at you, I kept hollering, almost out of breath. There are times when you do not require my level of perceptiveness, like for instance during the announcement of the song “Sickness Is The Law” where Christophe, making a disgusting face, drops saliva from his mouth in order to signify the sheer sickness of it. Secondly, you are completely enervated by the end of this long grinding DVD, sweating profusely and invariably going topless like the band members. After the end of their feature show, you are treated with enlightening videos of Inhumate's early performances back when they were teenagers and you were yeah, still in kindergarten. The highlight of these bonus videos is when they are playing their celebrated song “Grind To The Core”; at the end of which is a brief, extremely moshable part to which Christophe does what looks like a ROBOT DANCE, replete with grotesque facial expressions and mechanical gesticulations! That just made him immortal in my bespectacled eyes.

Inhumate have put in everything for this electrifying show. My heart and my cow's nipple go out to them. I just wish I was there at the show and not sitting in my bedroom vicariously reliving it. In fact, at one point I got so desperate that I ran into my TV hoping to emerge at the show on the other side but instead ended up breaking my spectacles. Now I wouldn't recommend you to do something like that, I would however strongly insist that you buy this entertaining DVD at once. Given their 15 years (make that 17 now) of soul grinding as they put it, it is obvious they are not going to put out DVDs for your grandchildren to jump about. Act now and you might just die a happy, excited man.

July 16th, 2007