Supposedly, Seattle’s Theories are “bringing something new to the death/grind table”. On the evidence of Regression, however, it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what that ‘something’ is.
But don’t let that necessarily put you off, as while the quartet are hardly bringing anything new to the genre, if you’re the sort of person who does the washing-up to Cattle Decapitation, you’re going to find a few moments throughout Regression to like, it’s just that given the pedigree of the group – featuring current and former members of Skarp, Samothrace and Book Of Black Earth and mixed and mastered by Pig Destroyer six-stringer and grind-guitarist extraordinaire Scott Hull – you’d have perhaps expected something more.
Lofty concepts about social unrest, economic uncertainty, mental anguish and environmental disasters aside, musically the likes of Cycle Of Decay and Landfill grind, blast and occasionally thrash away in a hypersonic yet particularly uniform fashion and it’s only the brief moments of groove – such as at the close of Revenge-Rewild – that separate this from the myriad identikit death/grind acts./o:p
