I first heard about Wormrot a few years ago, this really great grindcore band from Singapore that hardly ever plays here, who were signed to Earache Records. And then it turns out that they record in the same studio we do – Ar Boy’s TNT Productions in Dhoby Ghaut! Nice!!
I got a chance to see them live in March 2013 when they were part of a big thrash and grindcore festival with Nagoya’s Hell And Hell (another great band, although a very different sound and show from Wormrot’s). Wormrot came out, tore up the stage, the drummer hitting the drums faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, the guitarist grinding away quickly and efficiently, the vocalist just tearing it up. Cool, funny, crunchy – that’s Wormrot.
Wormrot at Home Club March 2nd 2013
I wanted to buy some of the band’s CDs, because everyone knows that gigs are the best places to buy CDs in Singapore (availability, price, money getting back to the band – it’s all good). Hell and Hell were selling their Volume Zero CD, but no Wormrot! Too bad, I would have bought one for sure.
Then a month later, I was in Toronto on a business trip, and I came across Abuse and Dirge, their Earache Records releases from 2010 and 2011. Great! That was an easy sale for HMV (who had properly labelled their slot “grindcore from Singapore” – cool rhyme!!). I hope Wormrot someday write a song called “what rhymes with Singapore?”).
The songs are very fast, have both cookie monster and screamed lyrics, with some relatively slow metallic and thrashy bits, with plenty of pace and rhythm changes – the band stops on a dime. These songs are really strangely beautiful!
WA
Wormrot, Abuse – With songs ranging from 0:08 to 2:16 (and more than half of them under one minute in length), this 20 minute-long album really covers a lot of territory in its 23 songs!! “Lost Swines” starts off the album, with a round of screaming that’s probably sampled from some actual incident, and then some great thrash sounds, before ripping into the lightning sounds of grindcore. It’s a long one, at 1:19, with plenty of cool-sounding screams and lots of heavy change-ups in timing and beat. The drum is going much faster than a piledriver, with laser precision. Wow! Studio magic, maybe, but these guys do pull it off live – that’s what makes them so great. Love this stuff – it’s beautiful in its own way.
There are no gaps between songs, so it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins, but that’s cool. Great titles like “Born Stupid”, “So Fierce For Fuck!?” (the shortest song on the album – the follow-up Dirge has the similarly-titled “Fucking Fierce So What”) “Shitlack”, “Fuck…I’m Drunk”, “Operation Grindcore”, “Overgrown Asshole”, “Blasphemy My Ass”, “Scum Infestation And Last Song” (the only song on the disc that’s over two minutes in length). It is the last song. “Good Times” is probably the most accessible song on the album, with a crunchy Rage Against The Machine sound at the start before it gets really nutty and fast. Love it!
WD
Wormrot, Dirge – The songs on Dirge are even shorter than the ones on Abuse, ranging from 0:04 to 1:49. “Principle Of Puppet Warfare” is one of the very cool one, with a groovy funk riff starting it out before it blasts right into the sonic atmosphere. Love it dearly! “A Dead Issue” is also sorta funky and groovy and it sort of gloms on and on… slowly… kind of like “Mandatory Suicide” or something slow-thrashy, before zooming into the stratosphere of speed!! Love it!!
Great song titles like “All Go No Emo”, “Public Display Of Infection”, “Fucking Fierce So What” (0:05), “Stench Of Ignorance”, “Meteor To The Face”, “Addicts Of Misery”, “You Suffer Buy Why Is It My Problem” (0:04), “Erased Existence”, and “The Final Insult” (last song).