Review by Carl on November 10, 2024.

Really? More grinding noise from the Czech Republic, you say? No surprise, really, it seems that around the turn of the century, the country had a veritable infestation of death/grind bands going, so let's see what this particular group of ruffians has to shovel onto our plate.

Musically, this isn't exactly easy listening. You can situate Perversist somewhere on the crossroads of brutal death metal and grindcore, borrowing elements of both styles to create a vicious form of death/grind, with an added technical edge to it. Imagine the sounds of bands like Sinister, Defiled, old Cryptopsy, and Deranged, but spliced up with a few handfuls of crude grindcore in the vein of Agathocles, Blood, and Assück. The band goes at it in a pretty rabid fashion, simply bombarding the listener with busy riffing, fortified with that already mentioned technical edge, delivered with intricate execution and a generous helping of tempo changes, served up with heaving amounts of speed and stomp. It's a brutal package indeed, and also one that will take some spins to get to the bottom of it all. Throughout, the band shoves a rough mix of the usuals through our throats, dishing out burping grunts and deliciously heavy guitar work all around, but that's not all. When that 'heard it before' feeling starts creeping up, the band throws in some twangy, undistorted surf guitars into the mixture, and not once or twice, but quite regularly. It's an odd combo that does alleviate the thundering death/grind somewhat, it certainly adds some form of variation to the mix. That towards the end of the album there is a cover of the surf classic "Misirlou" which makes it abundantly clear that those surf influences are no coincidence either. Does this work in the total picture? Let's just say that the jury may still be out on that one. It's original, I'll give them that, but am I really holding my breath for surf-inspired death/grind? Not really.

Something I'm also not holding any breath for but that gets plowed into my ears anyway, is a drummer that sounds like he's recording his parts using plastic buckets for toms and a cookie tin for a snare. This does not only sound shit, the percussion also picks up a very messy and sloppy edge because of it. And to add the final insult, this rubbery-sounding drum mix also pushes the guitars into the background in the more velocitous sections, and there are a lot of those, so it's not difficult to imagine that the production gets pretty chaotic and messy throughout. Damn sure that this is a bloody shame, because some of this album's strongest points are the meaty guitars and roaring vocals, and it is exactly these elements that get undercut most by the half-assed drum sound, so a big chunk of Perversist's power just goes out of the window because of it. Good thing that the music and execution are still very much on point, something that definitely spares the album from becoming a total disaster.

Had the production been more attentive to the percussion and its overall sound, then "Machine Grind Surgery" would've been a total hammer, but because of this huge flaw, it gets severely undercut. More attention to the final mix would've worked wonders here, because Perversist certainly has the chops and the material to pull off this style of technically inclined grinding death metal, even despite the odd surf guitar that pops up during the runtime of this album. Musically, this is no bad effort for the most part, but because the finishing touch is so severely lacking, Perversist's second album gets bogged down in the murk, without much hope for a reprieve from obscurity.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10