Have you ever found yourself catapulted out of a crazy speeding train, hearing the screeching of the rails crumpling onto themselves as the convoy plummets down a slope and everything turns into chaos and devastation in a split second?
I experienced this feeling while listening to "Help" (2022) by Teething, an obscure Spanish band with two other full-length albums under their belt and active for about ten years, having shared the stage with big names like Napalm Death and Magrudergrind.
The chaos expressed in music by this band involves a mad blender of grindcore fragments, metalcore headbanging, and hefty doses of hardcore and power-violence, with vocals that never hold back their anger, instead letting it all explode. Not losing a gram of ferocity or malice.
Thus, 14 tracks emerge over a 37-minute duration, with pieces like "Devouring Friendship" and "Striking Fires" storming ahead at breakneck speed, with adrenaline power-violence injections and lethal doses of grindcore and hardcore that exhaust the listener, so violent is the sound material. But there's no room to catch your breath; indeed, tracks like "Pinoy Justice," "Upside Down Bat," "Beth," and "Your Band Sucks" push the concept of extreme metal to such an extent with their attacks and furious restarts that the idea of "extreme metal" may no longer be sufficient. It veers into pure power-violence for its own sake.
The best track of the bunch is "Roach Apartment," which in its five minutes encapsulates all the wild mix of genres that Teething offers listeners, with frenetic guitar riffs thrown in the listener's face, drums and rhythm on the verge of exploding, and abrasive, uncontrolled vocals. There's only time to catch your breath with an acoustic guitar and vocal ballad lasting a minute and fifteen seconds ("Weissenborn Song I: An Introduction"), while the last track ("Weissenborn Song II: A Farewell Letter To George") only confirms the harshness of this music, difficult to endure even for the most tenacious metalhead or grindster.
All of this is carefully packaged by the astute Selfmadegod Records, though the artwork leaves a bit to be desired.
So, are you ready to punch this ticket and board the crazy train of Teething? I'm sure that once you're on this 37-minute journey, you'll feel the urge to drop everything and pull the emergency brake.
If it even exists.
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