The guys in Australian band Suppressant look like they’re having fun playing in their promo photo. And their new 7″ EP, Designed Obsolescence, is 11 tracks of extreme music and fun too.
The material draws from a few familiar places in the grindcore sound. The songs are nothing fans of the genre haven’t heard before or heard done better by other bands, although Suppressant gets the job done. I’m guessing that if you’re holding a beer in a plastic cup while watching the band play live, it’ll get knocked out of your hand and all over your shirt at some point during the set.
Suppressant was raw, unpolished, and noisy when it recorded this material, so much so that it sounds like the guitar went out of tune and, presumably, the producer said “fuck it” or “whatever, it’s brutal” and kept the takes. Or we might be able to chalk all this up to a devil-may-care attitude or perhaps a shoestring recording budget or both, especially when it comes to the singer hitting his marks, which he often doesn’t.
The thing is, grindcore bands in this modern age often pride themselves on their tightness and technical skill (while still producing a dirty-sounding recording). Sometimes there’s a backlash against that, against bands sounding too clean in their playing, and that backlash is probably often used by finger-pointers to cover up a lack of precision. Suppressant might not care about any of this, though, and might very well live by the phrase, “grindcore bands just wanna have fun.”
Luckily, in this modern age, one can listen to the record before deciding whether to get it digitally or on vinyl from the two labels that have released it, Australian Grindhead Records and Czech Psychocontrol Records. The EP has been posted to YouTube a few times and here’s one of the posts:
