Annihilate! - "Them" Review

I'm really glad that bands contact me to show me their music sometimes. Sure, some bands are crap, but then there are those diamonds in the rough that I would normally pass right by when scouring Bandcamp, or something. Take Annihilate! from Burgenland, Austria as a perfect example. Given their pretty uninspired name, and the kinda/sorta not very great cover art, I would definitely not have inspected this in my free time. But thank Schwarzenegger that they got in touch with me and showed me their jams, because I'm stuck with my foot in my mouth for having judged this book by it's cover. "Them" is a proper and solid grindcore album. It definitely sounds like a lot of care and effort went into making this album, just from the recording alone. This thing sounds great; excellent modern, heavy guitar tone, well mixed drums and bass, and growled, throaty vocals. In a nutshell, it sounds legit and professional, but not too processed and sterile. I'm also a fan of a lot of the inspired riffs that Annihilate! bring out, there's a good amount of fancy, dissonancy, harmonicy, guitar touches mixed in with the meat and potatoes grindcore. The breakdown to "Sleepwalker" being my personal favorite section. I just wish the drums were as consistently awesome as the rest of the band. They really do bring the momentum of the songs down, pretty often. For one, he loves to hit the cymbal every other snare hit during the blast beats, which are not very fast to begin with. It really keeps the band from going full blast, and really brings the intensity down. The blasts also seem to go decrease in tempo sometimes too, like to the point where it's frustrating to listen too. Maybe(hopefully) this glaring issue will get fixed on future releases, cause I'm very excited to hear what this band comes up with in the future.

Rating: 7.5/10

~VII