BEYOND TERROR BEYOND GRACE: Extinction|Salvation

Released: 2007

With no song over two and a half minutes long, the debut album from teenage grind quartet Beyond Terror Beyond Grace doesn't let its listeners up for breath for very long. Apparently recorded in one take, ExtinctionSalvation is a 25-minute relentless onslaught of death and grind.

After the short ambient piece that serves as an intro, BTBG blaze through the next six tracks with an unassailable grind intensity that offers little respite and little variation from a full-on volume overload. It's only with track 8, "Surveillance", that the band shifts down a few pegs, crawling through a two and a half minute instrumental of slow-chugging death metal.

This death metal influence then continues into the next track. "Defeated" begins with an ominously churning riff that suddenly erupts into flat-out grind once again at the 41-second mark. "Erosion" and "Divinity Collapse" continue in the same fashion before the definite punk inflection of the very obviously Napalm Death-like "Democracy" and its ridiculously appropriate lyric "Choice equates with the lesser of two evils" spewing forth from 40 seconds of pure sonic hatred.

So it goes for the duration, as BTBG combine the dynamics of grinding death metal riffs with punk drumming and grindcore's frantic, incomprehensible vocal onslaught. For a bunch of guys who just finished high school it's a spectacularly old-school approach that eschews all sense of melody and technicality while focusing on blatant tear-your-head-off overkill. They've learned well from their masters and with its deliberately understated packaging and decent production ExtinctionSalvation has set Beyond Terror Beyond Grace up for what could be a bright future on the grind circuit.

1. 002618
2. Fading Light
3. Smiling in the Face of Despair
4. Reinvention Ghost
5. Recycled Carnage
6. Shards
7. Ultimatum
8. Surveillance
9. Defeated
10. Erosion
11. Divinity Collapse
12. Democracy
13. Machine
14. Born and Raised
15. Unattainable
16. Empty
17. Apathy and Acceptance
18. Gaze of Finality
19. 022617

Rating: 85%