Knelt Rote – “Trespass” – [Nuclear War Now! Product]

Hot on the heels of their hair-whitening live set in the pit last week, here’s these Portland metallers’ newest. It sounds very different from their earlier work, which was more along the lines of experimental grindcore. There’s a bit of that in here, but they also seem to have fallen in love with Blasphemy (who wouldn’t?), so these days they sound most of all like very aggressive black death metal (war metal), somewhere beneath which still lies the original Knelt Rote. Sometimes the crusty riffing of Brutal Truth or Bolt Thrower, the jarring stop/start dissonance of later Deathspell Omega, the occult melodies of Mystifier and the balls-to-the-wall methamphetamine psychosis assault of Revenge are present in the same song. That’s a helluva lot of influences to cram into one sound but they make it work by exploiting the oft-overlooked link between war metal and grindcore i.e., that they are both sped-up, stripped-down offshoots of early death metal. The backbone of the album is provided by the nuanced blasts of drummer C.D. Mumma (also of Sissy Spacek), who is almost as good for this kind of thing as James Read. All the members do vocals, sort of like a black metal Carcass. Some tracks run together via experimental noise segues, and the B-side has moments of doom, but otherwise the furious pace is fairly consistent. VK, founder of tourmates Vassafor, was involved in the engineering of this record, and contributed ‘auxiliary chaos’ to A4 and B3. Even with a lyrics sheet it’s hard to work out what the songs are about, although it seems safe to say Knelt Rote don’t like people very much.