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It's incredible how even we, connoisseurs of the underground, always ready to praise the new, the strange, the anti-commercial, manage to be inattentive. Often we are so busy admiring the pretty curious shape of a stone that we don't notice a diamond. There are all the grindheads, all waiting for yet another Napalm Death album, the usual repetitive themes from the usual names (and there would be hundreds of them), the gore stamp of the countless newcomers who have everything going for them except personality, the ultra-exciting novelties of the brutal/grind/gore/death amalgamations. And Discordance Axis? And Discordance Axis end up as the Carnaedians on duty, ignored by most and overwhelmed by the tsunami (sorry for the term, really, as a proto-grindhead I also have bad memories regarding tsunamis...) of useless and derivative record releases crowding and still crowding the music market, forced to tour only in Japan because only there were they noticed.
Believe me, I still can't explain their missed boom. More than a power trio, one could talk of a three of aces: Dave Witte on drums (do the Human Remains mean anything to you? if they don't, and you consider yourself a great expert on grindcore, you deserve exile in my opinion. And in any case, our extraordinary drummer also played with other nonentities like Municipal Waste and Burnt by the Sun), Jon Chang's voice, one of the most piercing screamings I've ever had the (dis)pleasure of hearing, now with the promising and in my opinion also fulfilling Gridlink, Rob Marton on guitar, that is, one of the most creative axemen ever born in the grind scene, and that's it. Yes, even Discordance Axis didn't have a bass, and a little before the Pig Destroyer (still very good) of the moment.
Okay, you might say, the premises are okay, but the music? The music is a knockout in the first round. Because Discordance Axis understood what grind was. Many today are used to putting grind, brutal, and death in the same pot, but few remember that grindcore is not -core by chance: it is the most extreme and violent form of punk, and punk, before being a musical style, is a concept. What do Johnny Rotten and Greg Ginn have in common? Musically speaking, little; from the mindset perspective, a lot; they were two men in revolt, and their revolt in music had the same name, punk. The urgency of the message was the priority, musical technique, structure, and songwriting styles were instead accessory, a bonus, something extra. You can make a punk song with guitar feedback, a drum going tu pa tutu pa, and a rowdy voice, that's already enough. You can make a grind song with guitar feedback, a blast beat drum, and a voice spitting the tonsils, that's already enough. Can you do the same with brutal, with death? No. And that's because metal, in general, is not a social phenomenon, but a form of entertainment. Even the gore lyrics are a form of entertainment. It's for this reason that when I see a band classifying itself as grind and has lyrics of that kind, I shake my head, thinking Greg Ginns and Jello Biafras won't be born anymore, and I also think "damn Carcass, rascals, but could you have found something to say in '87!!". That's why the musical aspect in brutal and death is predominant: because there is no message! That's why at grind concerts (of the real kind) you might get into a brawl, and at a brutal concert, you don't.
But I'm digressing too much. The substance of what I want to say is this: in Discordance Axis you won't find metal riffs, you won't find structures, you won't find solos, you won't find clean vocals, you won't find an acoustic piece in the middle to break the pattern (and what if the CD becomes too heavy... after all these deathsters have a heart of gold...). But you will find violence galore, blast beats of murderous speed, guitar work that the majority of technically skilled metal instrumentalists out there can only dream of, a voice that would make even Glenn Benton call for his mommy, introspective and never trivial lyrics, loads of attitude (one episode only, the most important: they decided to stop because the guitarist got a jolt during a concert due to the crazy volumes they were playing at), emotional songs, noise remnants, pieces on the edge of sludge, a cascade of dissonances, musical ideas that could fill Napalm Death's discography; it's a pity that it all lasts twenty-three and a half minutes. But you'll remember them well, those twenty-three and a half minutes, you can bet on it.
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