The crust revival may have continued to gain momentum in the two years since the release of God Is War, the visceral, soul-crushing Southern Lord debut from these Massachusetts-based hardcore/crust/death/ brain-fucking, buzzsaw-riff-wielding bastards, who feature members of The Hope Conspiracy (vocalist Kevin Baker) and Converge (drummer Ben Koller), and given the record’s relative success you’d hardly blame the quartet for repeating the formula wholesale for its follow-up – and yet what makes Nothing Violates This Nature such a triumph is the fact that by contrast it, if anything, represents a further refinement of that brutal formula.
At once featuring five-minute-plus, doom-hued dirges like Of Suffering that in spirit calls to mind the slow-death of cult legends Winter, whilst wallowing in the same mire of thunderous desperation as Belgium’s Amenra, as well as barely minute-long grind assaults that take their cues from the skin peeling, sulphuric grind of labelmates Nails.
Elsewhere it’s clear that the band’s drive to expose the horrors of organised religion and human weakness remains in the decidedly death/grind attack of Holy Plague.
