Twelve songs. Thirteen minutes. Sheer violence. That’s right: it’s grindcore time! I’m not always in the mood for grindcore, but hey, sometimes it hits the spot. The brevity, the commitment to aggression, and that overcharged punk attitude. It’s a nice change-up from whatever I’m listening to at any given moment, be it drawn-out black metal, old prog, or whatever throwback yacht rock I can dig up. When I saw the ever-reliable Willowtip Records was about to drop the debut from the recently formed Barren Path, it just felt right to switch up the pace and give it a whirl.
In the traditional brevity of grind, Barren Path‘s Grieving is an absolute blast. Now given, the band is not made up of scene newcomers, but is rather a splinter from the recently dissolved Gridlink, legendary in contemporary grind for their chaotic sci-fi approach. Featuring Takafumi Matsubara (guitar) and Bryan Fajardo (drums) and aided by Maruta‘s Mitchell Luna on vocals (snarled and guttural), plus Rory Kobzina and Maura Cordoba on guitar and bass respectively, Barren Path isn’t lacking in any way for grind credentials. Vitally, though, Barren Path takes a different approach to grind than their progenitor project. A more, uh, barren path, if you will.
To wit, Barren Path‘s grind style feels much more naturalistic, eschewing any effects and focusing on down and dirty blastbeats and furious riffs. And friends, they hit hard. From the opening drum fill of “Whimpering Echo”, Grieving is a front to back assault on the senses. At first listen (like all good grindcore), Grieving just feels like a chaotic blast of hyperspeed energy that can be a little tricky to parse despite a great, clear production. But a thirteen-minute album is easy to revisit, and within a couple listens, Barren Path reveals a lot of subtleties that elevate Grieving beyond a pure exercise in violence.
Most obviously, Barren Path‘s chord choices across Grieving aren’t the typical assortment of simple power chords. As would fit any project involving Matsubara, Grieving features numerous chord choices that feel jazzier or more alien and dissonant than the norm, such as the ones in the knotted tremolo leads of “Primordial Black”. As a delightful counterpoint to that, Barren Path also regularly takes time to weave some poignant melodies into their unrelenting charge. The leads that emerge across the album at times veer nearly into melodic death metal territories (think more Dismember than In Flames), making for some truly gripping moments on tracks like “No Geneva” and my own personal favorite, “Relinquish”.
These subtexts add some savory flavor to what could have ended up an overwhelming attack on the senses, and guarantee that Grieving isn’t an album that’s just going to blend into an indecipherable maelstrom. Paired with those moments that just stand out in the mind, like the spoken word break on “Isolation Wound” or the one bit of synthetic flavor on the interlude “Celestial Bleeding”, Barren Path weaves a lot of diversity and variance into what is on the surface a pretty straight-laced, fiery album. It’s not as simple to break down Grieving track by track as one can with albums in other genres, but that’s not really the best way to experience Barren Path anyway. Grieving is definitely a ‘listen front to back’ album, and one that can’t really be broken down to peaks and valleys because it’s pretty much all peaks; the scenery around those peaks is where the album shines brightest. Much like that awesome cover art, you can take time to inspect every detail, and there are plenty of details. Or you can just take it in as being really damn cool as a whole.
The great irony here, of course, is that listeners would be most of the way through the album in the time it would take to read this review, so here’s the short version: if you can appreciate some high-caliber grindcore, I’d be shocked if Grieving didn’t prove an wonderful way to spend not even a quarter of an hour. It’s frenetic and furious, but Barren Path are also genuine craftsmen who hid plenty of little elements within Grieving that reveal themselves over subsequent listens, making it even better the deeper you dive in. It’s exhilarating, efficient, and probably my favorite grindcore I’ve heard all year. If that all sounds good, then what do you have to lose giving it a whirl?
