Welcome to the Goat Review where I, the site’s owner and namesake, repeatedly write reviews that sound negative only to begrudgingly hand out a positive score. Beaten To Death shall join in this trend. As much as I like Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis, I don’t like it as much as I think I should, which is why i spiralled into an investigation about what I actually like about the band – out of pure obligation since I claimed the album, of course.
Beaten To Death hold a unique space in grindcore, and were one of the first (but not the only) groups to incorporate brighter textures and a more positive attitude to the genre. The term post grind gets thrown around quite a bit, and as far as genre snobbery goes, you could have landed on a worse term. Where most grind bands using the iconic HM-2 pedal turn the distortion on it all the way (and then some, if possible), Beaten to Death seem to use the pedal for little more than color. The guitar tone is clanky and as inspired by indie bands as a grind band can be. This enables them to explore harmonic territory often inaccessible. You see, the distortion on an HM-2 pedal is so messy that most chords become indistinguishable from one another. In Beaten to Death’s oeuvre, harmony does play a part. Arpeggios are played at rapid speed, indie and emo inspired harmonies are supporting beastly growls, tunnels and pig squeals. The clash is done ironically, to a degree, but it also opens the way for an emotional expression that is hard to find elsewhere – almost as if the beast within yearns for better times. Similarly, the band have often toyed with major scales and explored melodic ways to express the very same emotion. I must admit that I tend to prefer the latter, as the expression of post metal that the chord based approach can lead to sometimes feels both less dynamic and less focused on a direction.
The easy answer I could get to as to why I connect less with this new Beaten To Death album is that they’ve chosen to heavily lean into the post metal by way of chords, an approach that I am less invested in. To a degree, this is true. I had been a defender of Agronomicon, often considered their worst album, for a while and that one is their most melodic by far. On the other hand, there are many things to like about Sunrise over Rigor Mortis that should make up for this. The band’s trademark sense of humor is on display and the creativity that comes with it is stunning. Not often do you hear a scandy folk song transition into grindcore and back and this is only one example of how the band can take an irony and make it work without turning it into a shitpost. Maybe at this point I have heard the band do their thing for a while. At times, Beaten to Death appear to be quoting themselves. This makes sense on a thematic level, as in a way the album is about getting older. Yet as I get older, I don’t develop as big of a nostalgic fondness for the times passed as others seem to do. Now, if this album sounded like a SNES soundtrack, it might be a different story…
