Total Fucking Destruction - Hater

“Good evening.  I’m your host Glen Moderator.  Welcome to Point / Counterpoint, a show featuring informative debates on hot-button topics.  Today’s program is a little different than normal.  Our regular contributor Penfold is here of course, but unfortunately I have to report that tonight’s scheduled guest was forced to cancel due to an unforeseen emergency.  The show must go on however, so we found a willing replacement to assist us on such short notice.  Ladies and gentlemen help me welcome Richard Hoak, drummer and lead vocalist of the band Total Fucking Destruction.  Thank you for being here sir.  Penfold, are you ready?
“Yes Glen, I am.”
“All right, let’s begin.  Due to the nature of our guest’s vocation, we’re going to be asking after some music related issues.  Here’s an easy one to get us started.  Do you believe that the current state of music is getting better or worse?  Mr. Hoak, you can go first.”
“I long for and listen for a deathlike silence to engulf the planet. Otherwise, I listen to 24 hour news radio for the up to the moment information on the slow motion apocalypse that is unfolding around us.”*
“Ha, very good!  And you Penfold?”
“I’m afraid my answer won’t be as interesting as Mr. Hoak’s.  I’ve been listening to a wide variety of music lately, and I’m confident that music is better than it has ever been.  Unfortunately, the albums I’m most excited about I can’t talk about thanks to a non-disclosure agreement.”
“That’s too bad.  We’ll just have to move on then.  Mr. Hoak, when I think of what it means to be an underground act, and I mean this in a complimentary manner, your band registers in my mind immediately.  Do you feel an underground band will break through to massive popularity this year?”
“The only reason such obscure artistic concepts like the underground scenes of grind and death metal exist is because of the privilege and power provided to selected citizens by the global corporate economy that allows the leisure time and extra income to make such noise. No guitar riff is brutal when compared with watching your children slowly starving to death or dying an early, violent death in a religious war of hate. The underground scene is a state of mind, an artificial construct based on collective ego stroking by members of the ‘in’ crowd. I refuse to be defined by others, so my state of mind is unaffected.”*
“Okay…I guess.  Penfold, what say you?”
“While I think it is more difficult than ever to really ‘break through’ to the mainstream consciousness, yes I do believe there will be some artist or band who has been toiling for a few years that will make that transition.  It seems to happen once every year or two, so I’d say we’re due.”
“I’m inclined to agree with your reasoning Penfold.  Mr. Hoak, assuming Penfold is correct, what can you do to increase the marketability of Total Fucking Destruction?”
“Total Fucking Destruction is driven to create temporary autonomous zones where we can celebrate the end of times in the style of Babylon together with other like-minded individuals. We encourage all individuals to get in touch.”^^
“What does that even mea…?”
“Penfold, hold on a moment.  I’m going to give Mr. Hoak a chance to further explain that statement.  How exactly do you go about creating these temporary autonomous zones?”
“Maintaining localized anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic atmosphere. Forgetting about unknown motherfuckers. Grind 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Some days I don't eat or sleep, only grind. Time is running out, the future is now and we are participating in the end of history. It's fucking awesome.”^^
Glen and I sit in stunned silence.  After a few moments, Glen collects himself.
“Ladies and gentlemen we’re going to take a short commercial break, but we’ll be back with more after these words from our corporate sponsors.”

Cards on the table time waveriders.  I know next to nothing about grindcore metal.  Honest.  I don’t yet own any grindcore albums, I’ve never seen a true grindcore band live, there are no stickers on anything I own advertising a grindcore band, and there is no chance that I would be able to differentiate a song by Napalm Death from a song by Carcass if my life depended on it.  With all that being said I do know what I like, and I like Total Fucking Destruction!

The name of the album that has managed to hold my attention for a good little while now is Hater.  It is the latest full length release from TFD, and it is composed of twenty seven ear-blasting songs.  The uninitiated (like me) might make the mistake of looking at the quantity of songs on offer and assume that this was a monstrous two disc affair.  Not so, as I quickly learned.  These twenty seven songs lay waste to your eardrums in a little under twenty eight minutes.  What I find most impressive is that I listened to this album multiple times before noticing the short running time.  Hater is such a complete listening experience, I feel fulfilled with every run through.  It was truly shocking to find out that some of my favorite songs had such short running times.

What should you expect to get from this album waveriders?  Well, you should definitely expect a blitzkrieg assault upon your senses accomplished with lightning-quick guitar and bass lines coupled with mind-bogglingly manic drumming.  You know…grindcore music.  Now if that last statement produces concerns over whether these songs might become monotonous, fear not, for this band throws quite a bit of variety at the listener.  Seriously, it is not difficult at all to tell these songs apart.  Most are quite memorable thanks to huge riffs, crazy lyrics, interesting breakdowns, or unique song structures.

“Weaponization of the Mega-Self” opens the proceedings with the aforementioned blitzkrieg assault, functioning as a righteous call to arms for the rest of the album.  Highlights abound.  “Everything you Need but Nothing you Want” begins frenetically before transforming into this heavy groove monster.  “It’s Only Attitude” brandishes it’s message of self-empowerment like a bludgeoning instrument.  “Repeat Repeatedly” refuses to leave my conscious thoughts.  “Green Fire” is thrashtastic and features a fantastic guitar solo!  “Time Theft”, a virtual marathon run clocking in at two minutes and twenty seven seconds, bowls me over every time with this wickedly repeated upward-scaling guitar riff.  Look waveriders, I could go on but I think your time would be better served by listening to this album for yourself.  Do it!  Do it now!  With that, we now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

“All right, we’re back.  I’d like to thank our two esteemed guests this evening.  Penfold, great job as always.”
“Why thank you Glen.”
“And Mr. Richard Hoak, I’m not sure that we have ever had anyone on the program quite like you sir.  Thanks for filling in on such short notice.  Are there any last words you wish to express before the show ends?”
“Nihilism, nothingness, emptiness and nonsense is the agenda of Total Fucking Destruction. Our songs are true stories of life in the modern day world. Our interest is in both the music and the message; our art is our only possible response to the complicated questions that post-modern society asks of the individual human.”*
“Right!  There is no way I can compete with that statement.  Good night everybody.”

--Penfold

Buy here: Haters


*- Actual interview responses from Richard Hoak on Chronicles of Chaos  http://www.chroniclesofchaos.com/articles/chats/1-744_total_fucking_destruction.aspx
^^- Actual interview responses from Richard Hoak on The Sleeping Shaman  http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/interviews/totalfuckingdestruction/totalfuckingdestruction.php

The Bros. Grindcore: Featuring Total Fucking Destruction, Rotten Sound, Cephalic Carnage & Phobia

Who's killing Comrade Music*? Which of his four sons?

And how do I, your utterly-reliable narrator, the Grand Inquisitor, I, Torquemada and his band, the Howlin' Inquisitors, fit into these proceedings?

"Grindcore" might be defined as... pretty much any other extreme genre, compressed to its maximum energy and its dominant characteristic: beit anger, aggression, anxiety, etc. (and usually in microsong form).

"Grindcore" (this is me saying this after nearly 4 hours listening to it), is almost so far beyond "music," as it's usually defined anyway, that it becomes sonic massage, like sound waves blasted at your sore bones and muscles. It's actually relaxing me a little, like one of those vibrating chairs.

Speaking Karamazovly (yay for new adverbs!), as the title suggested, Total Fucking Destruction (and their newest, Hater), would be closest here to being the sensualist oldest Karamazov brother, Dmitri: joking, multi-faceted, with the most ideas, but also maybe too jokey, and sometimes off-topic-- the coked up religious exhortations of a confined psychotic? [Note to self: why isn't Psychotic Mantra a band name?] The whole album is very cool, and articulate by grindcore standards, particularly "Human Is The Bastard." There's an obvious sense of humor usually absent from extreme music.

Ivan (or Vanya) then, the very serious, brooding, seething next-in-line brother, is black metal taken to an even more distant extreme, as Rotten Sound and their album Cursed have managed to do (I didn't actually think that could happen....)

[Sidenote: Jazz fans have been looking for the "next thing" for decades now and wondered why there's no new Coltrane or Miles Davis to innovate the genre: this is because Coltrane broke genres; the new innovator wouldn't be in jazz at all--  s/he'd show up in something like grindcore,or at the very least extreme music, just as bebop jazz was "extreme" 50 years ago; it makes you wonder what could possibly happen to music in the next 50 years to make grindcore seem tame. Actually, it makes one shudder....]

AND we're back. So-- brother Aleksey (Alyosha), the youngest, most earnest brother might equate to Cephalic Carnage, who, with their newest album Mislead by Certainty, are in their way progressive metal taken to its logical endpoint; there's a more obvious breadth of musicianship, there's more ideas than the previous bands, more color (like the cover, even) overall. They manage to play what can be readily classified as grindcore, and yet simultaneously ignore its conventions: they have, for instance, a 12-minute song ("Repangaea") that's almost ambient, and they also occasionally use alto saxophones, managing to sound in spots like a furious Glenn Frey. "Power and Force" hits back to traditional grindcore, and is as fast and rageful as anything else here. "A King and a Thief" goes all Watchtower on you for about a minute, lest you pigeonhole CC.

Who then, is Smerdyakov, the illegitimate son of music, the young psychopath, the killer of cats...? Who's left? Phobia. I'm thinking their album Unrelenting. Dark, like maxed out death metal (complete with heavily distorted bass guitar), Phobia are as black and white as their cover suggests: pure, punishing speed and rage, like Nails played even faster and more aggressively. Highlights-- "Killing Time," Strive Conception," "Life's Animosity," specifically the brief breakdown at 1:00, "Tradition of Power," and "Enemy Within"-- though if you like one, you'll like all.

James Joyce famously said, of Dostoyevski:  "Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius... I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact, all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing."

Grindcore is distinctly mad.

Is it genius...?

Sometimes. For a minute.

But maybe that's enough.


--Horn

[As a sidenote on the whole "violent music leads to violence" issue: speaking for myself at least-- utter crap. You ever listen to four straight hours of goddamned grindcore? At the end I wanted to groove on Celine Dion and rub bunny's fur. True story.]

*Shut up. I'm not overreaching with this analogy. And I'm using this goddamned English degree somehow.

http://www.myspace.com/totalfuckingdestruction

http://www.myspace.com/rottensound

http://www.myspace.com/cephaliccarnage

http://www.myspace.com/phobiagrindcore