Eighteen Minutes. Usually the length of either one longtrack (“Altars of Nothingness” by Rorcal & Earthflesh) or the length of a classic hardcore punk record (18 minutes = 2/3 Suffer by Bad Religion) or as in this case somewhere in between. The Imminent Slaughter is very straightforward in its attitude, but also very gritty in its sound.
This record is as much Unsane as it is Million Dead Cops and that should give you a first impression at what they are about. When listening to The Imminent Slaughter one might envision an army of brutally emotionally-depraved zombies trying to attack you and the few other survivors who just try to scream out your anger at everybody in every government that didn’t do anything to prevent the events that preceded this nightmare of a life – maybe something somewhere between Green Room and 28 Days Later.
The noisy soundscapes really set this band apart from your regular hardcore punk bands, and even more interesting is that no synths or other electronic noise modulators seem to have been involved in the making of this record. Some amps must have felt really bad and misused after the recording of this record.
To give you an idea of what it sounds like, let’s have a look at one song in detail: As the songs flow into each other, this always sounds like one ongoing attack wave after wave, the same here with “Unbridled Lunacy”. After “Hacked Pieces” has already shaken one’s core for 99 seconds, “Unbridled lunacy” starts with a swirling riff that leaps forward from the fold and showcases its own strength without trying to be masculine or something. This is not to show off, but to conquer. The constant rush of blastbeats underneath it then slows down and the whole thing marches into your brain with singer CLT screaming his lungs out once more. If Rick Ta Life had been any good, he might have sounded like this guy. After a bit more than a minute the song gets a little break for a few seconds, slowing down just a bit, before the whole thing goes up in flames again. Guitarists Matt Black and Cox do a really good job at complementing each other with riffs and riffs, it’s like using a tornado to add to a hurricane. There is even a little “stomper part” after roughly 90 seconds in with the drums giving the song a punk-like quality and focusing more on the cymbals and hi-hats than on the snares and toms. Then the song seemingly fades out after about 1:50 minute but the high-frequency feedback is used to wash up into a last heroic upheaval against the hordes. And then the whole thing blurs out with the final noise being punished by the grindcore attack that is the final track “Propaganda Bleeds”. And that track actually really has some nice flanger-sounding like guitar parts that bleep out and down for the last 30 seconds or so; like the dying heartbeat of a dying society. This is pure criticism of our way of life. The track titles like “Propaganda Bleeds” or “Vile Egotistical Conduct (Demented Ego Pt. II)” also show said criticism by going against toxic people and toxic media which will lead us to the final hours of this planet and this society.
Last Agony want to spit into the face of those who think we are not on the brink of collapse, who still want to live their “old” life without thinking about the consequences. But this is not only capitalism criticism, this is more. This is like a last-moment wake-up-call before the Doomsday Clock hits midnight. When listening to The Imminent Slaughter you might think, it’s eighteen minutes past. And the world has sunk into chaos and agony. Well, maybe we have but we just haven’t noticed…?
