Today Is the Day
Supernova

Strange creature, that of Today Is The Day if we talk about extreme metal.

"Supernova," the debut album of the band (released in 1993), is a damn concentration of grindcore bastardized with noise and post-hardcore. See tracks like the opening "Black Dahlia" or the subsequent "6 Dementia Satyr," where you notice the genius and the foundations for an unusual genre of music that has its own suit, a unique band in my opinion. "Silver Tongue" flexes its muscles right from the start, being a filthy grindcore piece but with its own peculiar twisted reinterpretation and, in some ways, at times melodic, but take melody for what it can mean in the broad sense. Here we talk about real, chronic disease. A visceral and profound hatred towards the mainstream, considered commercial and out of place; see the fourth track of the platter, "Blind Man At The Mystic Lake," with its really mind-bending and hallucinatory introduction in its being noise.

With "Adult World," we start hammering again with unhealthy, twisted, and gloomy grindcore-death with touches of truly sick and pestilent melody. It's like listening to the devil's music. Halfway through, a distorted bass line summons the singer/guitarist Steve Austin's lacerating screams before ending. This music is for crazy people and unbelievers. "The Begging" is an ambient-noise instrumental while "The Kick Inside" is a post-hardcore track, always tinged with grind that makes the right racket, but an orderly and thoughtful racket over its almost 6 minutes duration. The finale is pure noise with bleating sheep, infernal music boxes playing, and all sorts of mad amenities. "Goose is Cooked" (6'27'' in length) starts with Austin's screams, begins slowly only to slow down even more, as if in some sort of contest to see who resists the madness of this man and his fellow sufferers the longest. "Timeless" is a 40-second noise, an interlude that introduces "Rise," one of the most exciting tracks of the bunch with its emotional ebb and flow dictated by the instrumental part and the singer’s screamed vocals, a true gem of sonic intransigence.

"The Guilt Barber" is a 2-minute noise piece that serves as an interlude to "Self Portrait," a nearly 10-minute instrumental that neither adds nor takes away from the total madness of the album, a track with noise traits with its continuous drum rolls, until the middle of the track when a strange heavy metal riff starts, driven by bass and drums, noise galore, no doubt about it. And after a minute of silence, "Bonus Track" is a four-second prank where there’s a scream from Austin. Here ends 53 minutes that will go down in history as the first cry of the creature Today Is The Day, a mad creature in its yet unrefined misogyny, and masterpieces like "Temple Of The Morning Star" or "In The Eyes Of God" are still far away.

Still, this remains a damn good album and if you listen to it in its entirety, it even has its sick logic. That of making a whole lot of noise.