Album Review : Wormrot - Hiss (2022)
The greatest thing about extreme music is also its greatest problem: when everyone playing it is hellbent on playing the most extreme stuff they can, it creates a weird conformity. All the music ends up sounding more or less the same : fast, furious and angry. It takes a lot of courage to step away from the formula to explore something new. Not necessarily something different, but a different way of communicating the same feelings. It is what Singaporean grindcore legends Wormrot achieved on their new record Hiss.
Hiss is the fourth album by Wormrot and the last that will feature their elite vocalist Arif Suhaimi, who recently announced his departure for personal and medical reasons. It has twenty-one songs and clocks at a little bit over thirty-two minutes, but it is the most conventional grindcore fact about this record. Hiss is a masterful blend of anger, torment and heartbreak distilled in an eclectic, but cohesive musical approach. It's a couple years since I found a record that nails so accurately how I feel on certain bad days.
Don’t get me wrong. Hiss is very much a grindcore record. It’s still fast, furious and features enough short and microsongs to satisfy any purist of the genre, but it expands the realm of what grindcore can be. Classic crossover guitar riffs collide with slam gurgles after thirty seconds of minimalist noise on the opener The Darkest Burden and give the tone of what his will sound like. On the follow up Broken Maze, blast beats, tremolo picking and Gregorian chants bring you into the realm of what Mayhem could do.
It’s never NOT grindcore, but Wormrot are going for precise moods and emotions rather than trying to be something in particular and it feels so fucking liberating.
The showstopping pieces on Hiss are really those that venture as far as possible from the formula, though. Grieve works more like an intro than a real song with its moody violin, but it introduces melancholy and heartbreak into the record and these are just new feelings in grindcore. Wormrot doesn’t abandon these feelings after introducing them either. Weeping Willow has a shrieking strings transition that will turn your blood cold, only to have it return in a more conventional use on the closer Glass Shards.
All Will Wither veers on noise music with its syncopated drums patterns and croaking vocals. Your Dystopian Hell incorporates some mathcore elements to an otherwise very grind song. Arif’s performance is absolutely spellbinding on this song, channeling the likes of Attila Csihar and the tortured shrills Anaal Nathrakh’s Dave Hunt. You get my point. The guys really explored the four corner of extreme music on their new record and, most important, incorporated it to their sound without hurting its integrity.
Although there are songs on Hiss that feel more conventional and don’t quite live up to Hiss' breakneck adventurousness, like Hatred Transcending or Vicious Circle… it’s really just really life-affirming that this album exists. Listening to Rasyid jumping from very conventional grindcore riffing to black metal and borderline noise music from song to song on guitar and Vijesh Ghariwala pushing his limits on drums really paint a different, more complex emotional picture from the usual speed, anger and politics of grindcore.
While I didn’t catch any great overarching lyrical theme in Hiss (at least not outside of Wormrot’s trademark political existentialism), the appeal is really more in the sophisticated, but uncompromising sonic texture they created. This journey into distress, anger, disgust, melancholy and every other emotion someone compelled to this music can feel. Even songs like Doomsayer and Pale Moonlight who are more grind than anything have these details that blow them up and makes them feel alive like no other Wormrot record.
I know it's a logical fallacy to believe whatever you're experiencing in historical, but I do think Hiss is without precedent. Bands like Anaal Nathrakh and Cattle Decapitation have incorporated grindcore elements into their sounds, but no grindcore band has incorporated elements of other sounds into their music before. At least not without sounding like Merzbow sneezed on a 4 track. Hiss is exciting because it’s a musical paradigm that feels new and unexplored. Ten listens in, it still feels that way.
*
Hiss is a really, really good record. It certainly is the best one in Wormrot's discography. It's a shame Arif left the band, because they were really hitting their stride in terms of identity and artistic development. Maybe they will elaborate on the paradigm they created in the future or maybe Hiss was Wormrot's final, perfected form and it that case, it’s still an album that you can cherish and listen to over and over again to get your blood going. It's one of the very, very good grindcore record I’ve listened to.
