PainKiller - Execution Ground (1994)

Oh man. Say what you will about John Zorn, but there's no denying that he knows his way around the saxophone. Whether it be the klezmer-influenced free jazz of Masada or the surf rock/jazzgrind hybrid that is Naked City, Zorn pushes his lungs to their maximum potential to create the ugliest, and at times loveliest, sounds the alto sax can make. Featuring Mick Harris of Napalm Death on drums and samples, as well as sharing vocal duties with Zorn, this is a dementia-filled record that will abuse and punish you, even in the quiet moments. Although similar to Naked City in that PainKiller blended avant garde jazz with grindcore, this is an altogether different beast. Execution Ground is a double disc with a small tracklist where songs are stretched well past the 10 minute mark. It's certainly not an easy listen, but it's far more manageable than their previous outings, which were more reminescent of traditional grindcore fitted with waling saxophone in short schizophrenic bursts. The fist disc consists of three tracks that are mostly improvised drum, bass and sax madness with minimal vocals that sound more like indecipherable screams of agony than anything else. Eerie samples garnish the quieter spaces to evoke unsettling atmospheres. There's a strong dub influence as well, leaving behind heavily echoed drums and distorted sax wobbling around in low-end bass frequencies that give the impression you're dealing with aliens instead of humans. The second disc features two 20 minute dark ambient dub versions of the first and last track of disc one. It's not recommended that you listen to this disc alone in the dark. Unless you want to. I'm not stopping anyone. While the drums and saxophone are the focal point of the first disc, the bass work should be of note. Extremely psychedelic and liquid, it ebbs and flows with a cosmic rumbling perfectly fitting for the chaos happening around it. Both discs are up for grabs below. -N

Disc 1
Disc 2