AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THEORIES — “BURNT CONCRETE”

 

On March 24 Metal Blade Records will release the debut album of Seattle’s Theories. It’s an event that makes me very happy, in part for reasons that may not mean much to most people who hear the album. For one, I know all of the people in the band, some better than others, and they’re the kind of people who make you happy for their success (getting signed by a label like Metal Blade would certainly qualify as success in most people’s books). For another, I’ve seen the band perform live, everywhere from Seattle to Maryland Deathfest XII to Denver Black Sky II, and they seem to be even more perfectly destructive each time I see them.

So, with that said, you can imagine how fucking delighted I am that we’re premiering the lyric video for a song called “Burnt Concrete” off Theories’ debut album Regression. It’s the opening track and it starts off the festivities with a full-bore blast of grindcore fury.

 

 

Vocalist Rick Powell shrieks his incitements to violent revolution with the scalding vehemence of someone who sounds like he’s turning himself inside-out. Lee McGlothlen’s riffs blaze like a conflagration, while he and bassist Kusha Karimi also hammer out some earth-splitting grooves to punctuate the savagery. And Joe Grindo’s drumming is inhumanly fast and dextrous but machine-precise. You put all that together and you get a megawatt jolt of energy delivered straight to your brainstem.

If you’re not pissed off, you shouldn’t be playing grind, and “Burnt Concrete” is very pissed-off metal. But at the same time it’s got some melodic hooks and punishing rhythms that give the song character, beyond the pure adrenaline rush that it delivers.

The whole album is as good as “Burnt Concrete”, incorporating elements of crust and death metal into Theories‘ core grind attack to create songs that don’t all sound alike and that will keep you hooked all the way through. Highly recommended — and not just because I expect the dudes to buy me a shot the next time I see them.

Regression will be released by Metal Blade on March 24 and can be ordered here:

http://www.metalblade.com/theories/

Theories can be found on Facebook via this link:

https://www.facebook.com/theoriesgrind

For the hell of it, right below our premiere of “Burnt Concrete” I’m including a stream of the first two advance tracks from the album (“Cycle of Decay” and “Shame”), as well as a video filmed by Frank Huang of Theories‘ performance at the Denver Black Sky festival last summer.