The sleeve quote Samuel Beckett and contains pictures of deformed individuals and appalling horror. The album’s first song is entitled ‘ocean of shit’ and the whole, horrific mess is just 24 minutes long. Welcome, my friends, to the dark, unforgiving world of ‘cut to fit’, a crushing grindcore album recorded in just two takes and delivered like a power-drill to the cranium. It. Is. Awesome.
The aptly named ‘ocean of shit’ opens proceedings and after a short prelude which features a vaguely threatening sample played over screeching feedback, the song explodes into ferocious, bass-led life, tearing at the listener with a savage ferocity that recalls the unmitigated horror of Napalm Death’s still unassailable debut ‘scum’. It takes but a moment for the track to leap, unfettered into ‘being greedy is a full-time job’, a track on which the guitars take on the aspect of Godzilla, simply smashing everything in their path to pieces as the vocals sneer and spit underneath it all. There’s a full-bodied, lived-in feel to the album, so different from the endlessly re-tracked music so often unleashed in the name of metal these days. There’s not a hint of pro-tools skulduggery here, just the raw tang of sweat as the musicians tear into ‘pahoinvoinnin spiraalissa’, a track so short it took me longer to spell out the title than it did to listen to. Similarly short and vital is ‘obedience is the death of self’ which burns with a white hot fury. Interestingly, despite the unholy levels of speed in evidence, and the brevity of the tracks, the music never feels cluttered or disordered like, say, Fantomas’ ‘suspended animation’ and ‘weight’ even crams in a cartoon sample, further cementing the comparisons between the two bands. ‘Waiting for the dinosaurs to die’ is weightier than the comment that produced exactly that effect, with its scarifying screams and monumental riffs whilst the lengthy (1:30) ‘blistered’ is a comparative epic, delivered with an icy fury that is palpable.
As you might expect from a twenty-five minute grindcore album there is no let up from start to finish. The only brief respite comes from the samples that occasionally appear to start a track, but even these are imbued with a malevolent aspect that is hard to ignore. By the time you reach ‘master of disgust’ (almost an album on its own at 2:30!) you’ll start to think you need a shower as the grime and filth continues to spew forth and by the time the band slam into the bizarrely titled ;a man who mistook his hat for his life’ you’ll be sure of it. You’ll also be sure that Cut to fit may have one of the best drummers in the business, so unutterably proficient are the devastating percussive blasts that make up the album. Deeply misanthropic, ‘the hermit’ features a brief sample before heading down the sort of dark tunnel that Obituary like to inhabit (albeit with cut to fit taking a radical departure into grind territory once more just when you think they’ve slowed the pace). ‘Stains’ is, as its name implies, a vile repudiation of endless explanations whilst both ‘Kaikki Kaikkia Vastaan’ and ‘uusi aamu’ are sung in Suomi giving the music an even more alien feel to English speaking audiences. ‘Combust’ is a track played by a band on the verge of doing exactly that whilst ‘choke’ takes slightly longer to beat its audience over the head. The final track, ‘black mouth’ (which is also the title track, although the band neglect to actually tell you this anywhere on the sleeve) closes things in a suitably cataclysmic manner.
There’s a good chance you won’t like Cut to fit. It’s loud, abrasive and potently obnoxious. It is the aural embodiment of fury and, like Napalm Death, it is also the sound of an intelligent and aware group of artists venting their spleen in the only way they know how. You may not like them because their songs are short, the production is raw and the energy is enough to raise the pulse to dangerous levels. However, you may be one of the few to whom this music is actually aimed, in which case it will become your new favourite album. Unutterably brutal, brilliantly honest and passionate and insanely driven, ‘Black mouth’ rules. Find it, listen to it, destroy your brain forever… repeat.
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