Misery Index - Rituals of Power

As a lot of grindcore has followed in the path of forefathers Napalm Death and given in, since the turn of the century, to the lure of the potential for increased intensity that death metal offers, one of those most successful at boosting their grindcore (at least at the artistic level) has been Misery Index, who, while not the most groundbreaking of bands, have been consistently just dynamic enough to keep themselves at or near the top of their field. The band have done well to vary their approach up among their tracks on each album so as to prevent them from that easy pitfall of running together into one mess. Again, their death-flavored approach to grindcore (which is so evenly balanced that it could be construed as a  grindcore-flavored approach to death metal) isn’t all too far off from what Napalm Death have been doing in the still-vibrant late stages of their career, but Misery Index do it with just such conviction and zeal as the grincore godfathers to justify deserved cooccupation of that hefty niche. I don’t know about everyone else, but I sure as hell am not complaining about more expertly executed, violent, modern grindcore coming this way at the expense of forced originality, because it really is much more about capturing that blunt force in this genre than it is about anything else.

Even if it is (ironically) abiding by the genre’s status quo, when bands like Misery Index do it, it exemplifies the lack of any major need for forced ambitious experimentation. And while Rituals of Power is no exception to the band’s commitment to their style, (like the albums before it, it hits fucking hard) Misery Index show us at the right time that they aren’t simply going through the motions on this one, with some significant improvements over their 2014 effort, The Killing Gods and those before it. Most notably, the compositions here are more groomed than those of perhaps any other Misery Index album, and the production has been notably improved to highlight every aspect, new facets included, of the band’s dangerous punch more fully.

At a tight 36 minutes, Rituals of Power captures that equalized marriage of death metal and grindcore in perhaps one of its most representatively potent forms yet. Like previous Misery Index albums, I would hesitate to call this deathgrind, only because it’s not like most of the deathgrind I hear out there. Unlike the high-speed, high-pressure combining of the two into an inseparable Siamese monster by the likes of Cattle Decapitation and Cephalic Carnage (which I am not at all maligning), Misery index stirs the death metal and grindcore elements together in a manner in which they are both still separately discernable from one another even as they’re mixed so closely together.

But again, this has been Misery Index’s M.O. since day one. What makes Rituals of Power such a step up lies mainly with how well the band has crafted and wrangled these wild-running songs. The band didn’t just hit record and launch into whatever just came to them naturally and call it a day (which is hyperbolic anyway, but the point is they didn’t just go through the motions either when they easily could have made a passable album doing so).

Songs like “Hammering the Nails” and “They Always Come Back” showcase the band’s expert play with slow-fast dynamic and temporal juxtaposition among the never-autopilot instrumental parts, and “The Choir Invisible” particularly shows the band’s capability with integrating down-tuned guitar grooves into their fast, merciless style. Meanwhile, the headbanging slowdown at the bridge and the tasteful application of gang vocals amid the zeroed-in relentlessness on “Decline and Fall” show the band providing infectious accents even among their more straightforward moments. Songs like “New Salem”, “I Disavow”, and the title track find the band channeling kinds of infectious vocal hooks not typically associated with this genre. The song “Naysayer” closes the album in justly fine thrashy, grinding fashion with quick-snarled vocal hooks and similarly fiercely fast guitar passages and drum battery.

Rituals of Power finds Misery Index making use of unexpected but welcome compositional tactics that they work well to their advantage on this new album, which is indeed a significant step up from a band already near the top of the game in their field. The changes the band have made to their compositional approach are probably not changes at all, just more time and maturation of the songs to carve out the subtle details within them that make them stand out from minute to minute, which has clearly produced fruitful results, as Rituals of Poweris quite possibly their best album to date and definitely one of the year’s best.

Musical gymnastics/10