Results

After something like a decade spent in suspended animation (or perhaps, more appropriately, a state resembling the living dead) due to the more lucrative parallel musical concerns of all those involved, Los Angeles-based death grinders Murder Construct finally unleashed their debut album, the pragmatically named Results, through Relapse Records, in 2012. For the sake of references, said bandmembers comprise vocalist Travis Ryan (Cattle Decapitation), guitarist Leon del Muerte (Exhumed, Phobia, Intronaut, Impaled), guitarist Kevin Fetus (Watch Me Burn, Fetus Eaters), bassist Caleb Schneider (Bad Acid Trip), and drummer Danny Walker (Intronaut, Exhumed, Jesu, Uphill Battle), and their résumés clearly qualify them for the supremely challenging job at hand. That being to regale dedicated followers of the extreme metal arts with both their individual and collective instrumental chops via these 11 action-packed tracks, which are filled to the brim with brain-twisting arrangements and death-defying technical stunts, and fueled by contrastingly wanton musical and vocal savagery. It's kind of like witnessing some kind of apocalyptic death match for nerds…oh, the carnage! There are dueling bestial shrieks, dueling six-strings, and dueling polyrhythms (heck, there are probably dueling banjos buried in there somewhere), all of them joined in battle ‘til the bitter end. So forget melodic breaks, scintillating shred solos, or even change-of-pace mellow passages; there's virtually no let-up from start to finish here, except for the all-too-brief "here comes the pain" lead-in of opener "Red All Over" and the dying minutes of "Resultados," which bid your desiccated corpse adieu via a spate of Eastern-flavored guitar, violin, sitar (at least it sounds like a sitar), and piano. So you know the drill: spend a month patiently digesting all of the manifold nuances of this hyper-complex death grind and you'll inevitably see God — so long as your central nervous system doesn't collapse along the way. But that hardly makes Results some kind of landmark — just another expertly rendered example of this form, and kudos to the band for finally seeing it through, after all this time.