Duma
Thursday, September 24th, 2020
Duma LP
Nyege Nyege Tapes, 2020
There’s grindcore in Kenya? My ignorance of that fact, which honestly shouldn’t be all that terribly surprising given the reach of extreme metal throughout the world, admittedly piqued my interest in this group. The stunningly brilliant cover image definitely set up some pre-conceived expectations of gnarly metallic hyper chug and gore-centric themes, standard fare for the grindcore genre, but I’m thrilled to report that this not only blasts itself well outside any genre constraints, it’s easily one of the most original forays into extreme music these tinnitus-tainted ears have heard in a long time. This guitar-free grind is rooted in dense, polyrhythmic percussive blasts peppered by washes of noise that make this monster feel more like something from your record store’s industrial/experimental/noise section than the metal bins. In fact, other than the pulse-shredding percussive blasts, the only other recognizable hallmark of grindcore here are visceral vocal growls and wails, which thankfully veer well past cartoonish into crazed. Take some harsh power electronics, mash it up with chopped up gabber beats and bits of William Bennet’s post-Whitehouse project Cut Hands and you’ve got something nearly as terrifying as this monster.