Liberteer - Better To Die On Your Feet Than Live On Your Knees

Band: Liberteer
Album: Better To Die On Your Feet Than Live On Your Knees
Label: Relapse
Year: 2012

Grindcore works best in short bursts. The relentless blast beats and sickening morass of detuned bass rumble underneath a vicious stabbing guitar is exhilarating at first. One good grindcore song is like driving a drag-racer into a brick wall. But our ears aren't meant to be exposed to such frenzy for long. After a while it becomes similar to working in a metal shop. Loud, but indistinguishable. Our ears tune it out, and all excitement is lost. This kind directionless sonic punishment has its place, but as far as I'm concerned, grindcore starts and ends with the first 2 Napalm Death albums.

At least, I thought so until I heard this. There is real depth to this album. But unlike any protest era folk song, nothing about this sounds utopian. It's urgent, brutal and deadly serious. Song titles like "99 to 1" and "Class War Never Meant More Than It Does Now" make it pretty clear what these guys are on about. Even the title of the record alludes to early 20th Century Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Salazar Zapata. The record is uncompromising and complex, but it never avoids a populist streak. Nothing here is too dense to follow, in fact the bone-simple catchiness of the riffs and the red-blooded conviction of the performances force the listener to sit up and pay attention. It's anthemic and populist, music made for filling mosh pits, shaking rafters and inciting riots. Liberteer's opus has a human heart, and it beats red hot with class rage. This isn't political. This is a revolution.

There is a real streak of rurality that expresses itself through the addition of traditionally redneck type instruments to the standard metal band format. Perhaps Liberteer use the gritty, unrefined instruments of the American heartland and eschew any attempts at commercial airplay as a way of expressing their solidarity with the proletariat. In any case, some metal heads may balk at the abundance of non-metal sounds here even while the band brandishes soaring guitars, tuneful death growls and a pristine but ultra-heavy mix. By introducing dynamics and actual musicality into the grindcore palette, Liberteer have up the intensity considerably over any comparable acts.

Intro "The Falcon Cannot Hear The Falconer" begins as a rousing call to arms reminiscent of Aaron Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" before exploding into a firestorm of jackhammer blastbeats and ultra distorted death riffs. But the skull-scraping double bass assaults are used judiciously. Half way through, the song explodes into a triumphant trumpet figure, then suddenly shifts into a brief civil war march complete with jaunty piccolo, and finally explodes back into tumbling sludge monster. To say that the album is adventurous would be like saying that David Lee Roth liked to do cocaine. "Rise Like Lions After Slumber" rides a banjo rhythm figure and Gothenberg death metal riffs into a briar of strobbing snare hits. "Usurious Epitaph" rides a circus melody into cacophonous oblivion, while "Sweat for Blood" rides bubbling synths, feedback palls, brass swells and a cowbell into a grand heavy metal crescendo. With such a jumble of sounds, the album should be a fucking mess. Instead, it's an intricately crafted work of art.

This album is immaculately produced, and the standard of musicianship here is excellent. Some of the most extreme metal that has been produced in the past decade has sounded too polished, and tends to take on a machine-tooled precision that is inferior aesthetically to the ragged, human performances of death metal's early '90s golden age. But Liberteer sound natural. This album was no doubt meticulously assembled in studio, but the instruments sound like they are being played by humans. This is as finely crafted a statement as you will hear all year, and the whole thing will only take 27 minutes of your time. The album moves as one cohesive whole anyways, so even if the songs seem to run together, it makes sense to think of the album as one, unified manifesto from the underground. From the sound of it, they're pissed, and they 'aint finished yet.