Brutal Truth - End Time (Relapse)

Venerable elder statesmen of grind Brutal Truth have been holding firm to their “Still not loud enough, still not fast enough!” ethos – first uttered in sample form on 1997's Sounds Of The Animal Kingdom – throughout their entire career, and with their latest platter of audio-violence, End Time, give zero indication of turning OR slowing down. If anything, End Time is more wilful and abrasive than ever.

Front throat Kevin Sharp growls and howls like a venomous ape, bass legend Danny Lilker grinds away like the trooper he is, guitarist Erik Burke smashes angular skronk, blistering hardcore punk riffage and squealing harmonics into shape and caveman blast-machine Richard Hoak smashes seven bells out of his kit, blasting and pummelling as though his very life depended upon it. Business as usual, sure, but knocked up several notches in intensity.

Opening number 'Malice' is a crawling discordant behemoth – cut from a similar cloth to the similarly positioned 'Collapse' from their seminal Need to Control opus – but from second track 'Simple Math' onward, things are full-throttle. Blisteringly so. The vast majority of the tracks on End Time are state of the art bestial grind with curveball angularities and stop-and-turn-on-a-dime precision, but a handful take aim at 'total-batshit-crazy' and let rip – the title track itself, 'End Time' is a particularly rabid sounding number, seguing from guttural blasting to angular, spidery riffs, and from blurred punk rock riffage into harmonised near-jazz skronk in a little over two minutes, '.58 Caliber' is an under-one-minute assemblage of spoken vocals, backwards reverbed-drums and a frenzied guitar pile-up, 'Warm Embrace Of Poverty' lumbers along like prime Botch, and epic fifteen-minute-plus closer 'Control Room' is a wall of piercing, howling feedback, tumbling pulsing drums and muffled, cut-up vocal sounds. Painful.

Twenty-three tracks fly past at inhuman velocities in just under an hour, blasting, grinding, shrieking and throwing angular riffage off like arcing electrical discharge. Brutal Truth rampage across the disc like snarling rabid beasts and prove conclusively that they cannot be touched, even after all these years and line-up changes.
However, for the band themselves, End Time may STILL not be loud enough, or fast enough.