G.M.B.C (an acronym standing for the cheery sentiment Good Morning Bleeding City) are a French hardcore band on a mission to destroy everything in their path. To this end they have crafted ‘Complete Omnivore’, an album which rattles through eight intense tracks in just under fifteen intense minutes, drawing upon the generally intense influences of Converge, Botch and Dillinger Escape Plan with a view to decimating conventional rock music with a sadistic grin and a glare that could melt steel at a thousand paces. It’s fast, frenetic and as violent as a knife fight in a Glaswegian pub, and liable to leave you just as bloody at the conclusion. And, yes, it is intense. Very. Furrowed of brow and possessed of a fiery temper, this is one band with whom you would not wish to bandy insults.
Opening with ‘Baldwin’s case’, G.M.B.C set the pace from the off with a briefly boxy production sound giving way to huge jazzy guitars, angular riffs and vocals screamed with a vein-snapping propensity for violence that all but shatters the speakers. G.M.B.C’s speciality is a sense of furious dynamic interplay rooted in jazz that sees the band able to stop on a dime, even though the overall feel is that of being caught in a cement mixer. Having set the brutal mood, ‘evil sex machine’ comes as no surprise, its furious riffs set to a demented percussive assault but offset by the remarkably nimble fingered bass runs which permeate the disc. There also seems to be a hint of the Beatles’ ‘come together’ thrown into the mix, albeit dragged into an alleyway, beaten to within an inch of its life and left gasping on a sea of broken glass and chipped teeth. ‘Platini beach’ has a sweet groove lying at its blackened heart, although the cacophonous riffs are so utterly demented if it wasn’t for the rock solid rhythmic backbone the band lay down you’d be hard-pressed to accept them as music at all! ‘Ras Ras Rasputin’ (not a Boney M cover I am pleased to report) segues straight out of the previous track and employs a cyclical riff of such violence you imagine Meshuggah rejected it for fear of injuring their audience – try and head bang to this and you’ll be in hospital faster than you can say ‘fat on dry’ (which is incidentally the title of the next song!) Refusing to let up for even a second, although that’s understandable as with an album this short literally every second counts, the band steamroller over your finer sensibilities and throw in some Sonic Youth-esque guitar mangling just for fun. As if you didn’t have enough to deal with.
A few moments later and we roll onto ‘Moto Salad’ which sounds like a cross between a phone ring tone, Botch played at the wrong speed and the wailing of the lost souls forever doomed to wander Dante’s Inferno. ‘Ze do caixo’ does nothing to alleviate the mood, vicious harmonics overlapping brutal drum tattoos and the ever-present throbbing bass doing nothing to diminish the furious atmosphere of pent-up aggression. ‘Rice Poney’ ends the disc very much as it began – searing, ear-violating noise that leaves you breathless and shattered: if this album was any longer it would be an endurance test, as it is it leaves you physically shattered, super-charged on adrenalin and ready to take on the world – a remarkable achievement in just under fifteen minutes.
G.M.B.C are by no means an easy proposition. This is the sudden, unexpected music of bloody violence and it carries with it the same sense of threat and menace. As it stands this album is the perfect length for the material, although if G.M.B.C are planning a full-length release they’d be well-advised to vary the pace and style a touch – a hint of experimentation and they would be truly unstoppable as a force in hardcore music, they certainly have the musical skill and a sense of ambition hanging over them. Overall this is a top-quality brutal feast that will certainly appeal to fans of botch, converge and their ilk and I expect big things of them in the future. A short, violent triumph, ‘complete omnivore’ is a punishing experience indeed.
Don’t take our word for it – see for yourself:
